If you think the fight for the Toronto-Centre by-election on November 25 is between two outstanding candidates—Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland—you are wrong. The real battle is between their party leaders. Liberal Justin Trudeau is in a rough and tumble fight with New Democrat Thomas Mulcair. And it looks like they have chosen to squabble over an issue that neither side can win. They are fighting over a pipeline that will have its future decided in Washington.
It has always been easy for Tommy Mulcair to oppose the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline. There are no Canadian jobs involved in building or maintaining it in the American Midwest. President Obama is under constant pressure from American environmental groups to shut it down but, as yet, he has announced no decision.
Justin Trudeau thought he could take a pass on commenting on the pipeline and even in a meeting recently with a major American environmental lobby, he tried to skate on the issue. Like a kid caught raiding the cookie jar, his solution was to talk fast and hope for the best. His penance for that is going to have to be at least a lot of skating lessons.
The basic problem is that the high level of investment and activity in Alberta’s tar sands region has to find an outlet for product or the economy of Canada will take a hit that will make 2008 seem like a walk in the park. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has deliberately put Canadians in the box of a tar sands based economy. Whoever takes over from Stephen Harper in two years will be caught in the same box. If we kill all the pipelines, Canadians will end up getting care packages from the Greeks!
But you do not confuse a good political fight with common sense. What some stupid Liberal organizers in Bob Rae’s former Liberal seat of Toronto-Centre, failed to understand was that Torontonians are now sensitized to the pipeline issue. And this is not an issue with a lot of middle ground. When you consider the massive destruction possible down Yonge Street from a bitumen slurry leak into the Toronto subway terminus at Finch, the issue is frightening.
While some of us were fighting against the Enbridge pipeline through Toronto over the last few months, Mulcair and Trudeau had business elsewhere. Why should they take a stand if they do not have to?
And now Mulcair has brought it all up, thinking he only has to deal with the American pipeline. Sorry Tommy, you have opened a can of worms.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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