Conrad Black: Canada's stark choice

 Canada is teetering on the verge of plunging headlong into a state of political anomaly unique among large and sophisticated countries. 

We appear to be about to elevate to the de facto position of interim prime minister someone who would then be one of the last government leaders of serious countries still urging backbreaking public sacrifices to eliminate fossil fuel use and thus strangle into painful extinction our greatest industry (petroleum) and the key to the economic prosperity of Canadians over the next 50 years. 

Everybody in the world is opposed to the pollution of the world’s air and water, and to that extent, everyone in the world is a conservationist. But the advocates of the abolition of the oil and gas industry, even though natural gas is a relatively clean fuel (as is nuclear energy), are not seeking a realistic balance between the economic welfare of the population and the security of the environment. 

They take no account of the fact that the leading offenders of their perfectionist standards of avoidance of carbon use — China, India and Russia, in particular — consider all of these climate change warnings to be unmitigated rubbish and make virtually no concessions to them whatever.

Many activists still cherish the Kyoto Protocol, which obligated the developed world not only to bring terrible economic hardship on itself by shutting down our best and cheapest energy sources, but required us to pay immense amounts of reparations to economically underdeveloped countries because of the supposed damage that we, the advanced world, in lifting almost all of our populations out of poverty, had inflicted on the underdeveloped world, which it implicitly stated had been victimized by our progress. 

As I have written here before, what essentially happened was that with the victory of democracy and the free market over communism at the end of the Cold War and the bloodless dissolution of the Soviet Union while the so-called communist People’s Republic of China became in many respects the most atavistic capitalist state of all major countries, the old left, though bruised, fallen and rejected, clambered aboard the environmental bandwagon, which had been operated by authentic naturalists, birdwatchers, lepidopterists and conservationists, and torqued up environmental concerns into a new battering ram against capitalism, in the name of saving the planet.

As political improvisation, it was a masterstroke. But as public policy, it was self-defeating. Fortunately, democracy has again, in its ineluctable way that should enable us all to sleep soundly at night and wake up every day with optimism, come to our rescue. Everyone wants the best environment we can have, but no sane person is prepared to plunge into comparative poverty in order to act on the basis of a campaign of fear. 

Even the greatest alarmist only claims a 1.1 C rise in  temperature in the last 145 years. The electorates of the United States, Italy and most recently Germany have imposed a course correction on the public policy of their countries. Historians will eventually unearth how it happened that the Canadian Liberal party, starting with Stéphane Dion, fastened on to the green terror as a method of frightening and uplifting the Canadian electorate into supporting them, put the country into an economic straight jacket. The media and corporate Canada, terminally afflicted with faddishness and docility, became parrots, agents and denunciators, promoting all forms of wokeism, but above all, the self-punitive pursuit of an immaculate environment.

Mark Carney, the favoured candidate to gain the federal liberal leadership this weekend, wants to spend another $80 billion a year in hot pursuit of climate perfectionism; he is a messiah of climate alarm and touts this not only as the path to safety, but as ”a huge opportunity.” So, in its worrisome way, is suicide. 

Canada is to be transformed into the Light Brigade at Balaclava. If readers will indulge a bowdlerization of Lord Tennyson, “Forward, climate brigade! Is there a man dismayed? Not though the people know someone has blundered. Ours not to make reply, ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” Most of us who have tried to reason why are not climate deniers but merely verifiers, people who want to look before we leap, and who would have said of the charge of the Light Brigade as the French general Pierre Bosquet, future marshal of France, did say as he watched it: ”It is magnificent (but) it is madness.”

I have written here many times of my personal liking for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but his government has been a catastrophe. We have had a net capital outflow of more than $225 billion, have been passed by numerous other countries in measurement of per capita national income, we have managed to designate ourselves as a genocidal nation in a colossal self-addressed blood libel over Canada’s admittedly frequently mistaken but never criminally intended treatment of Indigenous people and the federal government has sat like a giant suet putting while the government of Quebec has set out to abolish the English language in that province. 

If the concept of cultural genocide, which we have officially accused ourselves of committing against the Indigenous peoples, actually existed, the government of Quebec would be guilty of it. (It is actually assimilation and it is not always a bad thing and attempting to abolish the English language anywhere in North America is not a winning ticket.) All of this has been perpetrated in an orgy of woke foolishness.

If the federal Liberal party returns to the people this year defending and promising to continue with Justin Trudeau’s record and crowning it with a full monty of climate change hysteria, it will be the clearest choice the Canadian electorate has ever faced: economic self-destruction or the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Faites vos jeux.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/politics/government/conrad-black-canada-s-stark-choice/ar-AA1AvhRa?ocid=socialshare