There are days when it is easy to wonder if anyone is actually in charge of this country, such are the bizarre and contradictory messages that constantly emanate out of Ottawa.
One night, we have the House of Commons steadfastly declaring a dire national emergency because of climate change due to rising carbon emissions and then, less than a mere 24 hours later, Ottawa is giving its approval to a major pipeline project.
Now certainly I’m not going to quibble over the second time around go-ahead for the much needed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion but a stranger to these shores would be hard pressed to figure out what the heck we are up to as a nation, perhaps justifiably wondering if everything we now do is simply based upon that day’s expediency.
But then it dawns: this is just one more chapter being written on the fly into the same old Grit playbook that’s been so successful in securing power for more than a century in Canada.
Promise one lot something over here and then another bunch something contradictory over there and figure that they’ll all move onto some other issue before anyone actually has to square this impossible circle. One month they are spending like drunken sailors while the next they’re axing health-care funding to every part of Canada. We’ve sat and watched it for years — it’s just business as usual for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Except this time it is different. This time there’s far too much at stake. The schism between those who see the urgent need for a sound and stable economic policy based in reality and not on vague hopes and dreams and those other Canadians who believe we are facing an existential human crisis because of a warming planet that breeds a need for immediate and drastic action is so wide as to be virtually unbridgeable.
And that’s why this pipeline project to ship more Alberta crude to the West Coast is now the battleground for a set-to that hasn’t been seen on these shores since the dark days of the 1970 October Crisis in Quebec.
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See Also:
(1) Economic benefits of carbon taxes overstated, says Fraser report
(2) Trans Mountain approval a high wire act on which Trudeau is staking his future
(3) An environmental plan that takes people at their wallet, not their word
(4) The Scheer climate plan: whatever
(5) B.C. tanker-ban bill squeaks through final vote in Senate
(6) Alberta starts legal action against federal carbon tax, challenges constitutionality
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