Canada leads the way in ignoring reality
“On Tuesday, Justin Trudeau announced a new climate plan in Vancouver. I do surely hope he included Newfoundland in that announcement because we have been waiting for a new climate since that wretched John Cabot stopped where he did.” — A note from a kind reader.
Amazing as it is, as inflation insidiously crawls across the land, skyrocketing gasoline prices freeze the blood (with a federal carbon tax increase set to hit on April Fool’s Day), as the economy is stifled by debt, supply chains rattle or crumble, and the country crawls out of the devastation of the COVID clampdowns, the Trudeau-singh coalition government has announced its most determined climate agenda for Canada ever.
In Vancouver on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, back-stopped by his non-present partner, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the Liberal-merged NDP, announced the new, improved, let-us-save-the-world-by-killing-alberta-and-the-oil-industry climate plan.
Lord, I wish I had been there. This was a Plains of Abraham moment in front of some of the finest shops in the whole country.
The good news. Now that Singh, and I presume the entire NDP party, has effectively merged with Trudeau’s Liberals, the PM has regained his stride.
He is fully back on his climate change kick.
The world can spin whichever way it wants, but under the Singh-reinforced Trudeau government, Canada has one purpose only, one duty as a country: to save this great globe of our common earth from inexorable climate doom.
Trudeau went Tuesday to that beautiful and great coal-exporting city — Vancouver ships more coal to the world than any other North American city — to announce new targets for Canada’s carbon-dioxide emissions, and declare new promises to remake the chemical constitution of the global atmosphere. It had to be a rapturous moment for the Green Party’s Elizabeth May.
That achieved, the only other business was a little cash gathering. Save the planet and then hold a $1,675-a-plate Liberal fundraiser at a carbon-neutral hotel. The old saying is true. Virtue is its own well-financed reward.
As was posted in the PM’S Twitter feed on Tuesday: “In the global fight against climate change, Canada is leading the way.”
But how? Leading the way, I mean?
Does Canada nullify China’s massive indifference to this whole hysteria? A massive country with a massive population is determined to have its place in modern life. Windmills will not take it there. It will use every energy resource, as long as it thinks it needs to, to get there. It will mine coal. It will build dams. It will seek gas and oil in every strip of land under its sovereignty, and import however much it wants. And so it is entitled to do.
Is there some thought in the PMO that the autocrats of China are checking into Trudeau’s Twitter feed? And calling “Halt” when they read of Canada’s “leadership” in the spurious fight against global warming? Can the delusion be that deep?
There is another great country, of massive population, and not yet by any measurement a full participant in the modern world’s comforts, security, health protections, or standard of living. It is glorious India.
Is India following Canada’s “lead” in the fight against global warming? It is an insult to think that such could be the case. India, this can be no surprise, will follow India’s imperatives, and will seek to bring its people to some material equivalence with the citizens of countries — like Canada — whose leaders and billionaires preach from lush pulpits in Davos and Vancouver about what lesser countries should do.
How are we leading the fight against global warming? We are a leaf on a river, nothing more. Our standing internationally is feeble or negligent; where do we stand out? On every question of crisis we are on the sidelines. There is a theory that we have an “unsurpassed convening power.” Well, you just wait till the other conveners hear about this.
“Canada is leading the way in the fight against climate change?” It is puzzling to hear the prime minister make the claim because no other country seems to echo it.
Name those following us, Mr. Trudeau. Name the councils and assemblies of the world summoning the Canadian example as they cripple their energy sources, generate carbon taxes, and swear off oil and gas forever. Name one single country that has billboarded Canada as the reason they have gone net-zero. (You have several weeks to answer.)
Let us turn now to one country where the boast is a pure joke. Did the walls of the Kremlin shake when Trudeau pointed to Canada’s leadership?
Vladimir Putin is currently, and violently, demonstrating what control and supply over real and proven energy resources means. There are dead in the streets of Ukraine because Putin owns energy supply for parts of Europe.
Europe went green. It tossed away energy it had, which was both secure and reliable, and signed on to the fantasy of “let’s get to net-zero.”
The cold man in the Kremlin was pleased. How could he not be? He is cruel; he is not stupid. He knew that as long as his oligarchic Russia held the rescue line for Europe’s most basic requirement — real, reliable, carbon-emitting energy — he could invade where he wished and stare back, a grin on his face, at energy-dependent, global-warming virtuous, Europe.
Putin knew another truth. The only “energy” that comes out of the current green fascination is an energy that enables posture and show. We do not like Putin. But he is teaching the world an old fact. Real politics always blast show politics. We have an epidemic of show politics in the West, and hardly anywhere more pervasive than in Canada under Coalition.
We are not leaders in the fight against global climate change. We are stooges in a mock show of virtue signalling.