The Election's Over: The GTA Fits Alberta For The Climate Black Hat

It was a cheap joke on election night, so naturally I was happy to tweet it: “Hillary Clinton has just declared the @cpc winners of the Canadian election as they move ahead of the Liberal Party in percentage of the vote.”

Hey, bitter jokes were about the only jokes to tell as Canadians voted on a race to the bottom that made Chitty Chitty Bang Bang look like the Epsom Derby. Yes, Clinton’s deranged claim to the White House based on the popular vote— not the Electoral College— was accurate north of the border, too. The Conservatives garnered more votes and a higher percentage outhouse votes than did the returning Liberal government.

But the Twitter jibe drew no complaint from CPC leader Andrew Scheer nor mirth from Canadians. In one sense it was the election Canada deserved. Paraphrasing Yeats’ well-worn prophecy of trouble ahead in WW II. “The best lack all conviction while the Worst are full of passionate intensity”. While many cared to criticize, few were willing to offer themselves up for slaughter in the charnel house of social media. 

And so we were rewarded with a quintet of caricatures, led by M. Trudeau, the frustrated thespian. Here’s how enervated the leaders were: Jagmeet Singh was anointed as the most popular leader by the media, because he seemed like the kind of guy you’d invite over for dinner. Not to run an economy, mind you. But think of the dinner-table conversation!

It was an election night of shadows and apprehension, haunted by the unrelenting  GroupThink of the Left on climate. My old friend Ian Hanomansing on CBC articulated the new value template being applied. The recent floods in New Brunswick could not be scientifically proven to be caused by climate change, he noted,  “but people know how they feel”. 

How they feel. Seems like a fungible barometer of what’s just and proper from the august broadcaster. But that Magna Carta stuff is so so old. Hour after hour the chattering class lectured Conservatives on RightSpeak about climate change. “The most significant strategic decision that the Scheer campaign made to cost them this election,” intoned David Herle, “was their decision not to even pretend to care about climate change. Their decision to not even offer a fig leaf of a climate-change policy.“

Got that? The most important point being that Scheer lost because his inept campaign declined to hitch Canada to the IPCC plough like all the cool kids. You know, Neil Young, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Debra Messing.  Sending 400 people to Paris to talk about too much air travel.

The scorn could be summed up by the native comedian on a @CBC panel who said white oppressors have no sensitivity to his people on climate policy. He then used a phrase— deniers— that compares his enemies to the Nazis who massacred 6 million Jews. Naturally it passed without comment on @CBC.

One could point out to these SameThink troopers that 99 percent of those they were vilifying agree with them; they, too, believe the climate is changing. They just don’t have confidence that computer models being pursued by Trudeau and promoted by the media will or can make a difference to whether we boil or freeze. So they’re compared to Nazis on the nation broadcaster as a result. 

Once again the electoral die was cast by southern Ontario— specifically the Greater Toronto Area. It returned Trudeau 47 of its 53 seats— and his new mandate. The region that regularly signals the ROC on virtue put aside its chaste cloak to vote for a man who said a woman who accused him of sexual assault “had experienced the (event) differently” and who’d gone brownface/blackface while piously proclaiming his own racial rectitude.

But the GTA is like a high school party. The driving preoccupation is to define the social in-group. Get on board with the hip and give the patriarchy the slip. That’s why the Ferris Bueller Climate Day was so reassuring. Your place in the clique was tangible— plus you got a day off school. What an irony— people who rail about the evils of bullying now bully anyone with a contrary opinion.

In case the GTA Fun Bunch needed marching orders post-election it came via socialist scold Linda McQuaig, whose Toronto Star column mocked Alberta’s distress. McQuaig stated that the province had wasted its energy legacy— as opposed to Norway which squirrelled away a bundle on oil. Lacking from McQuaig’s incisive analysis was any mention that Alberta surrenders an estimated $20 B a year to its deadbeat partners such as Quebec before it get to save a dime. Norway kept all their revenues.

“As the Conservative leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan ramp up their war against the Liberal minority government,” McQuaig dramatically intoned, “we can’t allow Trudeau to cave in to their threats. Let’s remember that Western alienation is a brew carefully stirred by Alberta politicians eager to ensure that, when Albertans feel they’ve been fleeced, they look outside the province for culprits.”

Because only Alberta’s to blame. Right. Even as America achieved energy independence and tripled its oil revenues, Boy Scout Canada under Trudeau squashed its energy sector, allowed foreign elements to isolate the industry culturally and politically abroad , refused to gurantee shipments across provincial borders and kissed off tens of billions in revenues to pay for the Liberals’ fiscal fantasies.

While there is talk of secession or independence, Albertans only want to stay within Canada in a square deal: That is, what Quebec gets, they can get. If that’s considered a threat, as Linda McQuaig suggests, then maybe it might be time to find new partners.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of Cap In Hand available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca