Joe Oliver: Liberals need to ditch Steven Guilbeault’s radical activism
Asked how he went bankrupt, a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises answers, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” He was talking about how financial collapse happens but he was also foretelling Canada’s economic future if Steven Guilbeault, minister of environment and climate change, continues to foist his destructive lunacy on Canadians. Not only does his environmental extremism impoverish us, it undermines our democratic freedoms.
The federal government flogs Guilbeault’s autocratic socialist vision — “I am a Liberal and proud socialist,” he told the House of Commons last fall — with persistent fear-mongering about a supposedly looming calamity of extreme weather and unendurable heat if Canadians do not repent from their sinful, carbon-spewing ways.
But all is not lost, we are told. There is the redemptive promise of a carbon-free environment, which we must urgently pursue or civilization is doomed (as we have been warned for the past 40 years is about to happen, though somehow it hasn’t). Guilbeault, who says he entered politics to continue his activism, does not dwell on the crushing costs of his radical policies, although he occasionally opens up about how they will transform our lives. Recently, he gave poor mortals a peak into a bleak future.
In Montreal, he proclaimed that existing road infrastructure “is perfectly adequate to respond to the needs we have” — “perfectly adequate” not being a phrase Montrealers customarily use to describe their potholed streets, which are chronically under repair. Reasonable people can debate whether Ottawa should continue to finance major road projects. But to pretend our roads are adequate demonstrates an appalling indifference to Canadians’ daily challenges, the
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