Chris Selley: The Liberal climate-change grift is finally over

The shockwave of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to get behind a new pipeline connecting Alberta’s oil sands to the sweet, whale-infested West Coast tidewater continues to reverberate among several dozen people in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. One of them is now-former heritage minister Steven Guilbeault, who resigned from cabinet over it. He alleged the pipeline would have “major environmental impacts,” that there had been “no consultation” with the First Nations affected, and that Carney’s willingness to exempt Alberta from clean-energy regulations was a “serious mistake.”

And then on Thursday, Canadians learned two things: One, that we have something called a Net-Zero Advisory Body; and two, that two members of said body had also resigned in protest over Alberta’s ghastly designs on continued resource-extraction.

“At no point have we been consulted, and I am reading stories every day about Indigenous communities who have not been consulted on any of the decisions that have been made regarding Canadian climate policy,” Net-Zero Advisory Board member Catherine Abreu, who apparently thinks she needs to be consulted on such matters, told the National Observer, explaining her resignation. “I just can’t conscientiously continue in (this) role.”

Say what you will about Guilbeault; he has had a quite fascinating run in public life. This is a man who was once arrested for “installing” solar panels on Ralph Klein’s roof, causing the then-Alberta premier’s wife Colleen to fear for her life. That alone would normally have been disqualifying from electoral politics. Simply protesting outside a politician’s house gives many Canadian pundits the vapours. And you wouldn’t think such a person would want to sell his soul in the first place, least of all to the proudly amoral Liberals. Greenpeace, whose Quebec arm Guilbeault headed for a decade, pays just as well as the House of Commons. Maybe better. And he could live in Amsterdam as opposed to Ottawa.

As if further proof were needed of how screwed up the federal New Democrats are, they went out of their way to indicate they wouldn’t be remotely interested in having Guilbeault join their tribe. Why on earth not? Are they happy having a single Quebec MP? Guilbeault’s obvious preference for command-and-control climate-change measures over carbon taxes is right up the NDP’s anti-corporate alley. He’s as perfect a potential NDP environment minister as he was a terrible Liberal one.

But what really boggles my mind is, well, did Guilbeault and the Net-Zeroers actually think the Liberals were serious about climate change? I mean, really? There’s being earnest and taking people at their word, and then there’s being hopelessly naïve and being taken for a total chump.

Canada has committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. In 2023, we emitted 91 per cent of what we did in 2005, and 15 per cent more than we did in 1990 (which was the benchmark year for the Kyoto protocol). So there’s no compelling reason to believe we can or will hit those 2030 targets. And that will have nothing to do with this beastly pipeline that Guilbeault and the Net-Zeroers can’t abide, for the simple reason that it almost certainly won’t yet be in operation. Unfortunately, it might not even be under construction.

“We will never allow oil tankers on our coast … and this pipeline project will never happen,” vowed Marilyn Slett, elected chief of the Heiltsuk Nation on Campbell Island, B.C. At the very least, as we saw with local and nationwide protests ostensibly in support of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation over the Coastal GasLink pipeline, Indigenous leaders (elected or otherwise) are very good at throwing wrenches into the gears when they want to.

As I say, Canada’s record on cutting emissions is not the least bit impressive. I imagine former prime minister Jean Chrétien chuckled himself to sleep at night thinking about people who cared about all this climate nonsense. (“When I want da good weather I go to Vero Beach, arf arf.” That’s not an actual quote.) He signed Kyoto on Canada’s behalf, did sweet bugger-all to live up to it, but successfully demonized Conservative leaders for not caring enough about climate change. He probably chuckles himself to sleep about that, too.

His successor, Paul Martin expended the square root of zero political capital on the issue.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau saw a branding opportunity in climate change, then insisted on long weekends surfing on Vancouver Island, Christmas vacations in the Bahamas and skiing in Montana, all at enormous public expense, not least on jet fuel. (With all due respect to the Aga Khan debacle, the Montana spring-skiing trip boggles my mind the most. It would be like U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer taking a golfing holiday in Japan.) He didn’t give a crap about climate change, or else he wouldn’t have done that. Fact.

And now, if anything, Carney is spending more time on the government jets even than Trudeau did. In Carney’s case, at least, it’s nominally in service of the country. He should be meeting President Donald Trump wherever he is, whether it’s Washington or Egypt. When a malign influence inhabits the White House, we’re in trouble, and that’s not really anyone’s fault: A nation of 40 million will always be beholden to a next-door nation of 340 million. Carney’s mission, and what seemed to propel him into office, was to make the best of this current situation, and then somehow to make us richer, more productive and happier.

And when lack of wealth, low productivity and unhappiness are daily concerns, longer-term concerns like climate change take a back seat. Rightly or wrongly, they just do. Can Canadian politics, and the police forces they oversee, successfully manage that reality? I have no idea.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com