A funny thing happened on the way to Net Zero
After Donald Trump made various disagreeable noises about Canada, including threats of tariffs if we didn’t start taking border security seriously (and maybe even if we did).
Canadian politicians who’d been running the place down as colonial, even genocidal, and invoking martial law against truckers and their horrible Canadian flags, suddenly wrapped themselves in the same flag. What’s more, they decided they loved the energy sector they’d been running into the ground, and nuclear power that they shunned. Strange how a man they deride as an idiot can make them so much smarter so fast, but they couldn’t do it themselves.
For instance Chrystia Freeland, long Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s loyal Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister until she discovered loyalty was a one-way street for him, suddenly promised to:
“seize the opportunity to make Canada an energy superpower, from powering our grids with hydro to exporting liquefied natural gas to our allies.”
Say, would that be the same LNG Trudeau told Europeans who were waving cash at him for it that there was no business case? As the Canadian Press commented:
“That line is part of a package of proposals Freeland made to diversify Canada’s exports in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to impose steep tariffs on those exports. But critics – even those who agree with her ideas for LNG – found it to be a tough line to swallow.”
Indeed. One, former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay who once herself ran fruitlessly for the Liberal leadership, asked ““Should I just laugh?” because”
“Hall Findlay said Freeland was a central figure in the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for nearly a decade, as it ‘did everything it could possibly do to limit our ability to export energy.’”
As CP also newsitorialized:
“The Trudeau government shelved the Northern Gateway pipeline project in 2016. It also passed Bill C-48 in 2019, which prohibited tankers off the northwest coast of British Columbia.”
So it did. But that was then. Back when Freeland vehemently supported the carbon tax she now insists she will repeal, as does her rival Mark Carney. Who also said it made sense to hammer things like steel with carbon levies because normal people don’t buy steel. But as Steve Ambler wrote in the Financial Post:
“It is inconceivable that Carney, who has a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, is unacquainted with the theory of tax incidence. He surely understands that taxes imposed on ‘big polluters’ will ultimately be paid by consumers.”
He just thinks we’re so dumb that we don’t realize steel is vital to the production of so many things we do buy or pay to use even if we don’t take home a bundle of rods from Costco regularly. But he too suddenly likes the energy he spent years as an international man of green finance trying to rub out, claiming that:
“What we must do as Canadians is to be masters in our own home, to invest in Canada, to work as one country, as one team, to have one Canadian economy, not 13.”
Oh, so now you’re against interprovincial trade barriers too? Which your party has done nothing to dismantle while dominating politics since 1896? Yes. And we must use one another’s resources, particularly energy, to shape our “economic destiny.” Including, what’s this? Yes. New pipelines. Oh, that energy. (He also evidently abruptly discovered defence spending.)
It’s suddenly become crowded on the road to Damascus. As Heather Exner-Pirot of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute noted dryly:
“That economic angst has now collided with the threat of 25 percent tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump. This has caused the zeitgeist to shift. What seemed for years to be fiercely held views on climate and energy are now evolving from day to day.”
Or being taken out behind the barn, throttled, and buried inconspicuously. For instance the deep green socialist Premier of British Columbia, David Eby, suddenly promised to shun American hooch and accelerate energy projects because “If you’re not buying oil and gas from Canada and British Columbia, the alternative is Venezuelan.”
What happened to setting a pious example and renouncing the sinful stuff and the filthy lucre it brings? (The oil and gas not the booze.) Uh was that me?
Likewise, Canada’s Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, formerly Minister of Environment and Climate Change and a warming-dogmatist foe of oil and gas the whole way, stammered:
“We’re all aware now that perhaps there are some vulnerabilities we did not actually believe existed. We should be reflecting on the vulnerabilities and deciding collectively, including with our First Nation partners, whether there are some things we should do to address these vulnerabilities.”
The Gettysburg address it ain’t. How they didn’t know those vulnerabilities existed is almost beyond imagining, and how we should be deciding whether to address them and not how is entirely so.
But you talk this way long enough, you start to think this way. (Incidentally the “Baltic states” of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania just disconnected from the Russian electricity system to join the increasingly rickety Europe one, not because they weren’t aware of the vulnerability, having been forcibly connected to the Russian everything after Stalin invaded and annexed them into the Soviet Union following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but because politicians rarely seem to act until cornered.)
Wilkinson’s frenetic colleague, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, in response to a possible pipeline from the West through Quebec, famously willing to burn hydrocarbon energy but not transport or produce it, also claimed:
“The rules of the game have changed over the last few days. And that may mean that we need to be able to have transmission lines that could bring electricity east-west; that may mean that you need pipelines that would go west-east.”
May. Could. Bold leadership there. But again, the rules didn’t suddenly change. You just woke up. And you weren’t alone.
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