It hardly matters at what age young men have their first camping experience. The most common first lesson is to never pee into the campfire. Not only is that a part of your body that should never get singed but urine on an open fire smells terrible. This lesson occurred to us when reading the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom’s take on Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s announcement on a Liberal environmental policy. He should not have panned young Trudeau’s first steps in such uncharted waters.
In fact, that speech by the Liberal leader was pretty damn good for baby steps! Give the guy a break Tom. Two years ago Justin could not even spell ‘environment.’ Back then Babel-on-the-Bay was dissing Trudeau for his juggling of approved and unapproved pipelines. All he knew was that his friends in British Columbia would lynch him if he supported Enbridge’s twin pipelines to Kitimat while they left Keystone XL for President Obama to squash.
And the good news is that Trudeau now knows that no matter where you ship that tar sands bitumen, you are still responsible for the global warming caused by the excessive amount of pollution converting it to synthetic oil.
But Tom Walkom wants definitive answers to how Trudeau is going to deal with climate change. Nobody wants to take the world back two centuries in technology to solve the problem. We have a lot to learn and some serious steps to take in even trying to curtail global warming and nobody is going to solve those concerns overnight. The world will be gathering later this year to address this and the small steps from there will have to become bigger steps in years to come.
What Trudeau is saying in that first speech on the subject of the environment is that where we understand the steps needed, we can do something concrete. It is a no-brainer to keep oil tankers away from B.C.’s environmentally sensitive north coast. And the Kitimat area already has enough environmental problems to worry about.
Yet, Tom Walkom is not satisfied that Trudeau wants to show leadership on the issues instead of just trying to do everything at the federal level. The Liberal leader wants the premiers involved in the Paris climate change meeting as well as holding a full-blown federal-provincial meeting on the subject next year.
Frankly, it looks like Tom Walkom is so busy supporting the Pollyanna stance of the New Democrats that he has no time to listen to reason. There is no question but even the NDP B.S. is better than the ‘do nothing-deny everything’ approach of the Conservatives.
We seem to have a convert to environmentalism in Justin Trudeau. Let’s encourage him.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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