OTTAWA —
Halfway by means of the 2008 federal election marketing campaign, a mischievous reporter determined he’d had sufficient of boring information conferences and requested Conservative Chief Stephen Harper if he liked Canada.
It was extra about getting an increase out of the notoriously unflappable Harper and, if reminiscence serves, the chief’s glare of a solution didn’t precisely show he had a pulse.
However on two fronts – one symbolic, one substantive – it wouldn’t be fairly so outlandish to ask Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that very same query at present.
First the symbolism: The prime minister’s half-masted flag-flap has gone from empathetic gesture reflecting widespread sympathy for younger Indigenous victims who didn’t survive residential college horrors to inducing fed-up antagonism in some quarters and triggering a polarized political debate.
The remainder of the democratic world should be slack-jawed to see a Canada the place the raging debate of the political second is whether or not to briefly elevate the nation’s flag after six months at half-mast solely to decrease it once more for Remembrance Day. All this whereas we look forward to everlasting flag-raising approval from Indigenous leaders who don’t appear to have a transparent place on how and when to finish this unprecedented show of Canadian self-shaming.
However, now that I’ve bought that vent out of my system, this isn’t the one purple flag sign of Trudeau dividing Canada towards itself.
His trade of velvet gloves for brass knuckles by imposing a tough cap on Alberta oil emissions makes one marvel if essentially the most correct headline could be “Canada Declares Conflict In opposition to Canada.”
No person can declare with a straight face that the oilsands are something however blight on Canada’s environmental file and in want of a continued clean-up.
However Trudeau’s single-minded takedown of oilsands manufacturing is like banning Christmas tree gross sales so he can begin delivering on his three-year-old pledge to increase our forests by two billion timber, a promise that has but to take root.
Canada’s oil emissions drawback isn’t home manufacturing as a lot as inner combustion.
If we might scale back emissions to zero by shutting down the oilsands, 80 per cent of Canada’s emissions would nonetheless be belched out by burning imported oil in automobiles and vehicles. The one tangible consequence could be the lack of nearly half one million direct or oblique Canadian jobs and about $10 billion in authorities income.
It’s tempted to counsel Trudeau additionally impose a manufacturing cap on automobiles and vehicles being in-built Ontario, however that might produce an equally-futile net-zero change in our behaviour past driving solely imported automobiles.
So we’re left with a Trudeau assault on home oil that’s counterbalanced by an equal and reverse profit for international oil exporters like Saudi Arabia.
Once more, there’s no disputing that the oilsands want political arm-twisting to throttle down its smokestacks.
However no lesser authority than the federal authorities’s personal web site provides the oilsands a nod for getting emissions per barrel down nearly a 3rd from its peak.
That’s the place Trudeau’s financial re-engineering thrust ought to be focussed, be it actively supporting small modular nuclear reactors to energy the oilsands or ramping up the huge potential of hydrogen, which bought a multi-billion-dollar Edmonton funding from Air Merchandise Canada final summer season.
Trudeau certainly is aware of it’s pointless within the grand world scheme of issues to dam the tailpipe of a Canadian financial engine just like the oilsands, which generates 0.1 of world emissions, when China belches out extra greenhouse gases than the remainder of the developed world mixed and doesn’t even present up for the COP 26 convention.
However he did it anyway, a Jean Chretien repeat of Kyoto in 1997 when the previous prime minister caught provinces without warning with a tough pledge to chop emissions which, his high adviser later admitted to understanding, was simply signing-symbolism and never an achievable objective.
To see Trudeau, now “dean” of the G7, delivering one other hot-air promise for just-watch-me consideration from different world leaders has all the weather of Chretien historical past repeating itself.
For conserving our proud flag half-masted lengthy after an vital level has been made and for vowing to smother Alberta oil manufacturing which shall be wanted for many years to come back, the query is now price asking: Does Justin Trudeau love all of Canada?
That’s the underside line.
