WE WILL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH IF CLIMATE IS CHANGING.

and prosperity in the ’50s, Lester Pearson was a wide-ranging reformer. The only reason Pierre Trudeau entered pubic life was to defeat the Quebec separatists, and he did it when no one else could. Brian Mulroney tried unsuccessfully to complete the constitutional process but did succeed in putting through free trade and in moving the basis of federal income from taxes on income to taxes on goods and services, both vital achievements. Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin eliminated the federal deficit and passed the Clarity Act, making provincial secession more complicated after almost losing the 1995 Quebec independence referendum. Stephen Harper tried to shrink the public sector durably by reducing HST. Other leaders governed too briefly to leave much of a mark.

For two-and-a-half years, the Justin Trudeau government has been preoccupied with full-body immersion in politically correct pandering to native people, gender warriors, and eco-alarmists, in fiscal extravagance, collective apologies, and Peter Pan posturing in the world. In strategic terms, Canada is a mockery for importing 700,000 barrels of oil a day in eastern Canada while being unable to move oil from Alberta to eastern markets. The accomplished financier and philanthropist Seymour Schulich last week sent round a letter to a Vancouver newspaper from a man in Seattle thanking Canada for the gift of “$100 million a day” because of the low oil price forced on Alberta by British Columbia, by preventing Alberta from exporting oil to world markets. The failure to supply our eastern provinces and to access fully the trans-Pacific markets, squabbling and envious provinces, and the lack of any effective federal leadership are a disgrace that makes Canada appear completely dysfunctional; a chump among the world’s nations we so tiresomely lecture on their moral duties.

I like Justin Trudeau personally and urged readers to vote for him in 2015, because of the Harper autocracy and sclerosis (after a generally successful period as prime minister). While the financially and oratorically extravagant political correctness of the government is grating, there have not been disasters until recently. Failure to get some movement on pipelines will sink this government. The stalling of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which would almost triple the flow of Alberta crude oil to the West Coast, to 890,000 barrels daily, and the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline in October of last year, which would have brought more than a million barrels a day east from Alberta and Saskatchewan for refinement and sale or export, are both traceable to the absence of federal leadership.

Underlying the travails of both projects is the moral incapacity to face down the nativist and ecological scaremongers. The natives are ambiguously divided on the Trans Mountain pipeline and do not play an important role in the eastern project. And the climatic debate is nonsense: alleged (completely implausible) danger to 76 orca whales on the southern British Columbia coast, and esoteric discussion about the impact on ability to meet the insane carbon-emission targets we foolishly committed to in the Paris climate agreement. (It doesn’t matter much because the entire fairy tale evaporated with the withdrawal of the United States, while the chief offenders, China and India, charge ahead making no commitment to do anything.) We will find out soon enough if climate is changing, if the world is warming, and if the conduct of man has anything to do with any of it. We need not amuse the world by pre-emptively punishing ourselves as we are.

What is required is a federal enunciation of a right of eminent domain that enables the federal government to fulfill its mandate to provide peace, order and good government. This could require the patient appointment of high court judges who will not be as easily gulled as they have been recently by woeful tales of the ubiquity and fragility of native religion and the susceptibility of nature to the safest of all energy transmission methods. And above all, it will require leadership. It’s showtime for Justin Trudeau; to take a phrase from the Quebec of Pierre Trudeau’s politically formative years: “Un chef ou pas un chef ?” (a leader or no leader?).