Maybe it’s just poetic justice that for decades we’ve struggled with how to reconcile Canada’s history with indigenous peoples. Some think we’ve done not enough, some think too much, and most agree it doesn’t work very well.
Maybe it’s a reflection of reality that Canada caters to the protest movement, we’re too nice to deal with them in any meaningful way, and we let them dictate national agendas.
Maybe the two, along with Canada’s inability to deal with either, are a marriage made in heaven and an unstoppable force. Because it seems evident that Canada has chosen to hand power to the unelected who scream the loudest. Congratulations on your victory then.
However, it would be great if you would spell out for us how you plan to deal with a few, to put it mildly, pertinent items.
First, let’s deal with your fundamental issue head on: what are you going to do about the environment? Blocking pipelines has zero, zero, zero impact on climate change. As long as every citizen of the world continues to consume as they do, as long as you all consume as you continue to do, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise. The three billion people of China and India, burning all the coal they can get their hands on and growing rapidly, will determine the fate of global CO2 levels. The oil sands have nothing to do with it. As the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol put it, if oil sands production increased by 3 million barrels per day as the IEA expects, a year’s worth of emissions would equal China’s for 23 hours.
Stopping a few more tankers from plying the coastal waters hardly makes it safer, when one considers that over 50 million barrels per day are moved globally on water, in a safe manner. There are countless loading/unloading points, narrow shipping channels, and other marine hazards like weather to deal with, and the whole world seems to be able to do it effectively enough. But I guess Canada is simply too incompetent to do what the Nigerians/Vietnamese/Australians/Russians/Chinese/Brazilians/etc. can, eh?
So we eagerly await your plans for how Canada will become the world’s environmental leader. Oh wait – Canada, like the rest of the world, continues to buy SUVs at an accelerating pace, and our governments will go bankrupt if they keep handing out $10,000 rebates for electric vehicles.
Oh, you don’t like that word at all, do you, bankrupt. But we’d like to hear about that too. It’s kind of important to a lot of the rest of us Canadians, the ones that will be responsible for implementing your mandates.
How do you propose to address the capital flight from Canada? A few of our main economic engines are not doing very well. The natural resource industry is one, and we totally understand why it’s suffering, because you are trying to kill it, and are succeeding. Others, like the Ontario manufacturing powerhouse, are at the mercy of a single and presently unfriendly market, and it’s going to take some tap-dancing to keep that world functioning properly.
I know you’d like to say it, but don’t even try to imply that green energy will be the backbone of this (or any other) country. Wind and solar energy are peripheral at best, and any analysis of any magnitude will tell you that fossil fuels are beyond indispensable for decades at least. You may not believe that, but if you don’t, please send me your alternate version of reality come January.
Well, I wish you good luck. Managing a country is not an easy task. There are innumerable forces pulling you in every direction. Sometimes pragmatism trumps idealism. Oh wait, that’s for elected officials. You have other powers.
At the very least, now that you’ve assumed control, hopefully the collective protest industry will be able to make right the native rights issues that have been unresolved for far too long. If it can’t be done now, it never will.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here. To reach Terry, click here