PHASING OUT GOVERNMENT HUBRIS. LIBIN,

NO OTHER MAJOR PETRO-POWER IS MAKING PLANS TO KILL OFF A CRITICAL INDUSTRY.

Which Canadian leader will finally lay out a national plan to phase out Ontario’s auto industry?

Obviously, the auto sector accounting for half-a-million jobs in Canada, at least 1,200 Ontario parts and equipment suppliers, and about 20 per cent of Ontario’s GDP and 12 per cent of Canada’s, it’s not something we can phase out tomorrow, naturally. But the more than two-million vehicles produced in Ontario annually burn billions of litres of carbon-heavy gasoline every year, emitting tens of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. This cannot go on.

Even if we could make the entire sector switch, against sensible economics, to hybrids and electric vehicles (Ontario’s factories currently only produce one of each of those), the sheer volume of carbon emissions connected to mining the metals and producing the steel, rubber and plastics for these alternate vehicles would often equal the CO2 levels spewed by the gasoline vehicles over their lifetime. This industry has no place in Canada’s carbonless future. Any forward-thinking government would be prudent to at least begin preparing for a post-auto-sector Ontario.

So, what’s with the announcement earlier this month of the federal and Ontario governments offering Honda $84 million to expand its factory in Alliston, Ont.? Was it a massive bureaucratic error? Days later, the prime minister was unambiguous at his listening tour stop in Calgary: “I have talked repeatedly about the fact we need to get off of fossil fuels.” Surely he hastily cancelled the cheque before Honda cashed it.

Trudeau was telling that Calgary audience about our need to phase ourselves off oil in explaining how he “misspoke” when he told an Ontario audience that we need to phase off Alberta oil. At a Peterborough, Ont. listening stop a week earlier he had remarked “We can’t shut down the oilsands tomorrow (but we) need to phase them out” to “transition off our dependence on fossil fuels.”

That ignited outraged controversy in Alberta, where oil and the oilsands make up a huge part of the economy and account for a huge number of jobs. “I misspoke. I said something the way I shouldn’t have said it,” said Trudeau, confronted in Calgary. What he meant to say, he clarified, was that we need to end our dependence on and phase out fossil fuels, including the oilsands, but that would take time: “100 years from now we probably are not going to be using it for our fuel and energy sources.” Not tomorrow. See the difference?

Maybe not. But here’s something you might notice: While the Liberal government is clear it eventually wants Alberta out of the oil business, it says nothing about plans to shut down other provinces’ carbon-intensive industries, whether it’s Ontario’s auto and steel factories, Quebec’s airplane makers, or Saskatchewan’s farmers. More often, as with the Honda factory or bailouts for Bombardier, politicians keep paying fortunes to keep those carbon-unfriendly businesses growing. Yet Alberta’s been put on notice that its primary industry — one that catapulted the province out of the agrarian era and is now responsible for at least one-fifth of its economy and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs — is being planned out of existence.

And it isn’t by market forces: The most recent International Energy Agency outlook projects demand for oil growing for decades yet, while “investment in oil and gas remains essential to meet demand and replace declining production.” It’s entirely by government design. The last time Ottawa shut down a province’s key industry, it was in Newfoundland, where closing the northern cod fishery left the province in economic collapse, crushed in spirit, and with an unemployment rate over 20 per cent. Its fortunes finally improved when luck put it alongside Alberta as a major oil-producing province. Ottawa would now phase that industry out, too.

Is it an overstatement to solely blame Ottawa for dooming the oilsands? Is there another nation, anywhere, with vast oil reserves it plans to obsolesce? No other major petropower has announced such plans. Quite the opposite: energy superpowers, specifically the U.S. and Russia, are aggressively amassing even larger oil and gas holdings.

Nor have the Trudeau Liberals announced how they expect to replace a resource now powering almost one-tenth of Canada’s economy. They have nothing to replace the tens of billions of dollars fossil fuel producers and their service companies put into our economy each year, and the $30 billion that they annually send to various levels of governments literally from coast to coast to coast.

Never before, once, in the history of all mankind, has a committee of politicians correctly predicted the state of technology, the economy or the environment a century in advance. We can barely guess them a year in advance. Trudeau still thinks of oil one-dimensionally, as a “fuel and energy source,” but it has already been adapted for countless applications, from pharmaceuticals to clothing. What it will be used decades hence, how it will be used, or what innovations will mitigate its environmental impacts, is something of no government planner can even have the remotest inkling about.

So there’s great danger in a government talking of gradually “phasing out” a key industry, however that’s phrased. When governments begin to believe something is doomed, they deprioritize it. Their policies might treat that industry less fairly. They will tacitly, or perhaps overtly, discourage investment in it, diverting it elsewhere. They hatch a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s trite to point out that no one could have foreseen in 1917 the technologies of today, but that lesson somehow eludes Canada’s policy-makers. Other oil-producing countries are navigating the global energy economy as it actually is. Only Canada’s politicians are so arrogant to believe themselves capable of deciding exactly what to phase out, and what not to, in centrally planning the economy of the 22nd century.