Canada’s new environmental watch dog and global warming minister, Steven Guilbeault is described by Wikipedia as a former radical. There will be many Canadians anxiously waiting to see what he has become. If Canada ever needed a radical approach to the environment, it needs it now.
With Trudeau posing as the Savior of all things environmental at the meeting in Glasgow this week, you wonder how Guilbeault is going to handle the hypocrisy. After all, our prime minister cannot complete twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline on our west coast and save the world at the same time.
Trudeau’s pipeline is designed to more than double the amount of Alberta tar sands pollution to be piped from Edmonton, over the Rockies, beside rivers and over aquifers that provide water to British Columbia, to the Burrard Inlet at Vancouver, loaded onto ocean tankers in the Burrard Inlet and to sail them out through the Salish Sea and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to spread the blame for the most polluting form of ersatz oil around the world.
At a time when the world is trying to reduce its use of carbon producing products, Canada wants to export more of the worst.
This writer would prefer not to attack Guilbeault at this time considering that the conservatives in Ottawa are doing as much of that as they can. Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner was the latest critic when she said to the media the other day that the country needs policies that help spur economic growth and lowers greenhouse gas emissions in a way that “leaves no one behind.” Ms. Rempel Garner does not tell us what those policies are.
Truthfully, it is very hard not to want to leave the greedy and those who do not believe in global warming behind. It would be a shame to leave the folks at the Calgary Petroleum Club behind but they are already very much out of date. More than a decade ago, former prime minister Harper was promising us that the oil industry would find ways to curtail the excessive amount of environmental damage done in just bringing Alberta’s tar sands products to market. This was not even considering the pollution caused by the end use of the petroleum-based products produced from the tar sands synthetic oil.
I guess we will have to wait for Mr. Guilbeault to get back from Glasgow to see if he is still a radical and still smiling.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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