Rex Murphy: Alberta needs to learn to say ‘no’ to the Trudeau Liberals

 
If a national government determines that as its preferred policy it will shut down the central industry of a particular province, and therefore inevitably the various industries and jobs related to the central one, does it not have a duty to engage in the most serious and detailed negotiations with that province?
For example, were the federal government to decide to shut down Quebec’s aerospace industry, would this not inevitably involve detailed and sensitive negotiations with the government of Quebec?Or were it to determine to transition Ontario’s auto industry, so primary a contributor to Canada’s carbon emissions, to renewables-based personal transportation would it not inevitably engage the government of Ontario before a “transition” policy was enacted? Would it not talk to the auto unions?  It would not dare to do so otherwise.

Now it cannot be argued that were the aerospace and auto industries shut down, it would have a much greater impact than shutting down the industry that provides both with their essential fuel. The burning of fossil fuels, not the production of gas and oil, is the actual agent of the carbon emissions of which current “net-zero” commitments are the target.Kill the auto and jet plane industries, and oil and gas would be no more. So under a government whose priority of all priorities is the “fight” against global warming, those industries should be a first target.Would then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exercise the same rigours to the central industries of Quebec and Ontario with such nonchalance and fervour as he is applying to non-Liberal-voting Alberta? Not a chance in the fabled inferno awaiting the damned in the afterlife. That would be (for you atheists) Hell.

 And would he do so without a major national discussion and negotiations with the most powerful two provinces? Not a chance in the same inferno.
Shutting down Alberta’s economic lifeline is, well, something far less. Alberta hasn’t the leverage, the centrality in Confederation, that Ontario, and especially Quebec, do. The negotiations, were the federal Liberals even thinking of such a move, would be endless and televised. Also the federal Liberals would never think of such a move.

This is what puzzles me about what I will call the fake consensus — the assumed universal agreement that Alberta must shut down its energy base, while Ontario and Quebec can maintain industries more dependent on oil and gas, and industries that are more immediately involved in actually producing “carbon emissions,” than the Western province?
Is it not passing strange, and then some, that such a huge, historical upheaval in the province of Alberta as the eventual shutdown of the energy industry came by what I will call slow-motion fiat?Was there a specific meeting, a specific moment, when Alberta said Yes to “net zero,” said Yes to “transitioning its workers out of oil and gas,” said Yes to declarations made in Paris and Glasgow?When was that moment? Where are the documents that recorded such a monumental agreement between Alberta and the federal government, yielding the province’s economic well-being to Trudeau’s personal cause of all causes, the wish to be a hero on the global stage in the holiest of crusades, the fight against climate change.

To purchase Alberta’s economic viability to be as one with Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, Bill Gates, Elizabeth May, the Guardian intellects, David Suzuki and CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, is a pathetic ambition for a prime minister.

Was there a specific meeting, a specific moment, when Alberta said Yes to ‘net zero’?

In the pursuit of that dubious ambition Alberta has been sidelined, maligned by the vast environmental lobby and scapegoated. We will not see equal decisions made that have equal impact on other provinces. And we will never see such high-handed and unilateral determinations made that would have a proportionate impact on Quebec or Ontario.In the woke world of regnant political correctness it is probably impolite to point this out. I hope so.I will draw a conclusion at this point, or a couple.

The Alberta government should declare it does not accept “climate policy” that will impoverish Alberta. It will not agree to this “transitioning” edict. It will poll all its oil and gas workers and those workers in allied industries to get their views on this unprecedented invasion of their right to work in the industry they chose. It will inaugurate something like a referendum to determine the degree of support, in Alberta, for the federal government’s climate ambitions.

And it will decline global-warming policies, and insist that Ottawa hold full discussions and negotiations on any and all net-zero policies. And it will tell Ottawa that no incursion into Alberta’s economic well-being on the scale now being contemplated will be accepted.It really is time to bring a little democracy into play, most emphatically when climate policy seems to have been given such vast and unchallenged a remit.Global warming is not scripture. And the federal government, this federal government in particular, is emphatically not an all wise, all-seeing, Deity.

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