William Watson: Albertans should be steaming mad over EV tariffs
If I were an Albertan, I’d be steaming mad about the tariffs that are obviously coming on inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles — steaming more than fresh cowpie on a prairie winter morning.
Cowpie, now that I’ve mentioned it, is what Albertans are being asked to eat.
For almost a decade now a federal government that takes its cues from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish Joan of Arc, has been counting down the final days to the existential climate cataclysm, warning us all that if we don’t dump fossil fuels and get to Net Zero pronto, life as we know it on Planet Earth will end and millions of species, very likely including our own, will face extinction. So self-righteous are they in this cause they’ve been teaching it to children, all the way down to pre-school.
A global emergency so dire, we’ve been told, requires that we renounce our resource birthright — several hundred years worth of proved reserves of oil and gas that customers around the world would love to buy — and accelerate the transition to non-fossil fuels, however unreliable they may be.
If that emergency means many oil and gas workers must lose well-paid, secure, unsubsidized jobs, well, so be it, that’s a sad, unfortunate side effect of rescuing the globe. But never fear, Ottawa will “have their backs” (it’s already taken everything else) and be there to help them transition from jobs in which they have years, even decades of experience and expertise to other jobs that likely will pay much less and be much less secure. But, hey, haven’t you always wanted to know the difference between Java and Mocha?
Speaking of backs, however, it now turns out there are some Canadian workers whose backs are more precious to Ottawa than those of oil and gas workers — even when
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