National Post (National Edition)
Western ‘populism’ was inevitable
Here it is, just a couple of days from the Nativity, and there’s another surge of populist outrageousness, this time in the sunny uplands of British Columbia.
Offered a choice of choosing their elected representatives by the tried-and-true method of First Past the Post, where the candidate’s name, face, address and party are known to all who vote — or by various more serpentine methods that called for solving a Sudoku puzzle, reading the flight of migratory birds and writing a short essay (with equations) on quantum entanglement, all prior to voting for an anonymized candidate to be chosen later by the leader of a fringe party promising to ban indoor heating and to subsidize all urban hen farms by the imposition of a nationalized cluck tax — B.C. voters chose — and this is astonishing — FPTP, the system that fashioned the democratic government of Canada, has worked for over a century and a half, is straightforward and which they understood.
Populist ingrates. There’s just no telling what citizens will vote for, if you let them. Now if is this were China …
In Alberta, populism took to the 18-wheelers, in what could have been the largest convoy protest this country has even seen, a thousand and more big rigs stretched over 22 kilometres. It got about as much coverage outside Alberta as some trendy school board opting for confusing bathroom signage — one for males, one for females, and one for if you have time to change your mind on the way in.
Some political figures and media vocalists are a bit down on populism, which they like to interpret as pure demagogy, a vile appeal to the very worst instincts of people. Essentially however, what they so deride in these terms is almost any result that diverges from the superior, non-populist opinions they hold. What such call populist when speaking in public, they call stupid when no microphones are in sight. Brexit would be a good example.
If B.C. had gone 100 per cent for the Byzantine contortions of Proportional Representation, it would have been “democracy at its finest and most mature.” Likewise, if in some inconceivable universe, Albertans to a man and a woman voted to plug every oil well in the province, and henceforth to live under a giant dome fashioned of solar panels, there would be very many to applaud the wisdom of the common man and the beauty of Canadian democracy.
An energized citizenry is called populist when it challenges status quo politicians. A citizenry becomes energized when status quo politicians have abandoned listening to basic messages from the people they represent. Take Alberta’s only cabinet minister, Amarjeet Sohi, for example. In the week of the mass convoy and protests, he offered this muddle:
“It’s not the activists that are stopping pipelines from happening. It is the flawed process that we have now that is broken, the way governments and companies tried to make shortcuts.”
That first sentence is a phoenix of rarest flight. It would be amazing if it came from the lips of a politician in Barbados or some backpacker stranded in the Galapagos Islands. But from an Albertan federal cabinet minister within driving distance of the oilsands?
It’s not the activists that are stopping the pipelines from happening?
What in the names of every deity have the Borg hive of environmental NGOs — Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defence, The Rockefeller Foundation, 350.org, Rainforest Alliance, Pembina Institute, Tides, Deep Green Resistance and the Earth Day Network — plus every Green party on the planet, to say nothing of Neil Young, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Nye, Al Gore and his trained Gorelings, and every sad 18-yearold vegetarian performance artist … what have all these and the legions of their ilk been doing these past two decades? Knitting shawls for denuded yaks?
They have had one concerted goal — to shut down and kill the oilsands — and stopping pipelines has been their dream of a last tactic. And they have been winning because this government in particular, with its global-warming obsession, but others before it as well, have not answered or stood up to them.
And then there is Minister Sohi’s second sentence, which tells us that the pipelines have been stopped because “governments and companies tried to make shortcuts.” Shortcuts? Like say Keystone, which Obama “shortcutted” for eight whole years? Like TMX, which Kinder Morgan spent seven years and more than a billion dollars on before giving up in the face of activist protests, courts and government non-support? Like Energy East, which ran terrified from yet more regulations and updates? Like banning tankers in B.C. waters, which killed Northern Gateway? And what kind of “shortcut” does he see in Bill C-69, which is “populistically” being opposed by every sentient Albertan and yet which is still on the parliamentary agenda of his Green-Liberal government?
His leader, Justin Trudeau, doesn’t go farther out to sea only because there is no ocean wide enough on which to try that experiment. But when Mr. Trudeau talks of politicians “exploiting” Western sentiment on this issue, a not-so-oblique rebuke of the “populist” mood in the West right now, the tactic is so obvious as to be insulting. There is no need to “stir up” or “exploit” the political mood on the energy file. The collapse of oil prices, the imposition of the absurd so-called carbon tax in the middle of an oil-price depression in Alberta, and pandering to B.C. and Quebec while running past Alberta and Manitoba, offers more than enough explanation for that mood.
The populism, if that is indeed the term, out West is not demagogy. It is the inevitable upsurge of citizen emotion when fairness is blatantly abandoned, common sense is outraged by political leaders, and when representatives of the people are so far out of touch that ordinary workers have to organize massive truck rallies just to catch their attention.
POPULISM ... OUT WEST IS NOT DEMAGOGY.