Last Gasps?

Some days, writing this blog is quite easy, as I only have to turn to the letters page of my newspaper to aggregate the well-considered thoughts of my fellow Canadians. Today is such a day.

To believe our Prime Minister, we can have our economic and environmental cake served upon the same plate. His fatuous assertions that pumping out more bitumen by twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline goes hand in hand with his climate change 'policy' is the stuff that will satisfy the untutored and the ideologues, but offers not even thin gruel to those prepared to open their eyes to our increasingly fraught world and engage in some critical thinking.

Today's Star letters are ample testament to the fact that some refuse to don the blinders that the federal government is so keen for the electorate to wear.

While I encourage you to read all of the letters online, here is but a sample:

Tim Harper has it right. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in a cul-de-sac of his own making. The social-permission requirement made sense when campaigning for office. So when Trudeau talked of “consultation,” it made sense.

To alter that promise in order to sell oil makes sense, except that it does not make environmental promises believable. Development doesn’t happen without side effects. So to invoke constitutional authority and say the federal government rules makes a mockery of “consultation.” Trudeau’s government is caught not in a cul-de-sac, but between a rock and a hard place. Or is it a political dead end?

The Liberals will lose seats in B.C. whatever they decide. If they go ahead and put coastal waters at risk, they will lose seats. When there is an almost inevitable oil spill, Liberals could be friendless in B.C. for a long, long time. They don’t have many real friends in Alberta and the phaseout of oilsands extraction is inevitable.

So why not create an environmentally friendly Liberal legacy now and say farewell to Texas pipeline companies?

To invoke the heavy hand of federal authority now will make a lot of enemies. Think of British Columbia and Quebec for starters and Canadians who care about global warming, too.

Bruce Rogers, Lindsay, Ont.

Dear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notely, what about your children? When they’re suffering from the effects of climate change, what will you say? “I’m sorry but, like John Turner, I had no choice?”

Canadians want investors for a sustainable country, not an oil-stained, disfigured landscape. It’s 2018. Isn’t it time for sustainable political leadership?

Barry Healey, Scarborough

In 25 years or so, if people in Canada and around the world are facing unstoppable species extinction, extreme weather events and flooding, widespread ocean acidification, mass displacement of people, epidemics of illness and disease, and an expanding civil war, we may have a hard time explaining to our children and grandchildren why we used taxpayer money to “rescue” an American company’s oilsands pipeline, despite wide opposition from Indigenous leaders, scientists and other citizens, and the fact that its construction undermined Canada’s international commitments to reduce greenhouse gases when it was still possible to avert catastrophe.

Perhaps we’ll just have to tell them that it was in the national interest, and leave it at that.

Michael Polanyi, Toronto

Thomas Walkom explains the Trans Mountain pipeline controversy very clearly. The hysteria around this project proves it is a last gasp of a dying industry. Unfortunately, the last gasp would involve more huge, expensive, damaging infrastructure, causing enormous environmental harm that Canadians would have to pay for, now and into the future. We have many difficult choices ahead as we change to a sustainable economy, but this choice is obvious: no new pipeline.

Martha Gould, North Bay, Ont.

If these engaged citizens are correct, perhaps the gasping you hear is not just those of a dying planet, but also a political party and government going the way of the dinosaurs.

Defining The National Interest

As the video included in yesterday's post shows, Justin Trudeau likes to defend the twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline as in 'the national interest." The term itself is a contentious one, given its nebulous nature. For the Prime Minister, it seems to mean economic growth, moving Alberta's bitumen to port, and bolstering Rachel Notley's climate change initiatives.

As the following letter from a Toronto Star reader indicates, however, there is a more crucial definition that Mr. Trudeau and his fellow bitumen and pipeline enthusiasts are entirely dismissing, one that should take precedence:

PM’s pipeline woes of his own making, Harper, April 11

According to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, B.C. Premier John Horgan should compromise because this pipeline is in the national interest. Why is that? He doesn’t say.

I see the national interest as one where all of us move in a planned and purposeful way toward an economy that does not depend on oil and gas. In that world view, giving oil companies breaks on environmental assessments or emissions rules or buying pipelines so they can move their oil is against the national interest. It is the interest of oil companies not to leave stranded assets. The national interest is to move forward into a low-carbon future in Canada and around the world.

Mr. Trudeau speaks out of both sides of his mouth. “Yes,” he says, “we will meet our Paris targets.” Then he approves drilling in Nova Scotia, refuses to sign on to an Arctic heavy-oil treaty and permits Alberta oil to triple production of a very inefficient, high-greenhouse-gas emissions product, and approves a pipeline without ever reviewing its climate impacts or demonstrating that bitumen can be cleaned up.

Meanwhile we have never reduced our emissions targets as a country and are not projected to meet those targets any time soon.

And how can he say he has consulted with First Nations when the B.C. Federation of Indian Chiefs is standing at the Watch Tower, committing civil disobedience, and getting arrested to make their voices heard? Yes, let’s act in the national interest. Let’s all of us move toward a low-carbon future in right relations with our first peoples.

Rev. Frances Deverell, Nanaimo, B.C.

As The Mask Slips Away

My late father-in-law, a man of deep conviction and integrity, was fond of this saying: "Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor."

Although he did not originate the adage, he felt it firmly described the thinking of those who control the levers of power, our governments. And now that his mask is slipping away, it seems an apt description of Justin Trudeau's true sentiments and the policy decisions he is making.

As preliminary evidence, sauce as it were to the great corporate feast, consider his Canadian Infrastructure Bank scheme, about which I wrote last year. While its ostensible purpose is to raise private capital to fund various projects to rebuild our steadily decaying roads, bridges, etc., it can also serve as a neat little package of corporate welfare:

Federal investments doled out through the government’s new infrastructure financing agency may be used to ensure a financial return to private investors if a project fails to generate enough revenues, documents show.

What investors have recently been told — and what the finance minister was told late last year — is that if revenues fall short of estimates, federal investments through the bank would act as a revenue floor to help make a project commercially viable.
Experts say the wording in the documents suggests taxpayers will be asked to take on a bigger slice of the financial risk in a project to help private investors, a charge the government rejects.

All of that perhaps palls, however, now that Kinder Morgan has issued a May 31 ultimatum to the feds, threatening to suspend construction on the Trans Mountain Pipeline twinning project unless the impasse between the B.C. and federal government ends. As a remedy, a strong dose of socialism is now being considered to protect Trans Morgan's nervous shareholders:

Finance Minister Bill Morneau says the federal government will act on the Trans Mountain pipeline project in “short order,” sending the strongest signal yet that it will move to financially backstop the project to reduce the risks for its American-based backer.

[Rachel] Notley has already said her government is open to buying the Trans Mountain pipeline — meant to move Alberta oil to port near Vancouver for shipment overseas — to ensure the expansion goes ahead.

Morneau, who has been in touch with Kinder Morgan officials, said earlier in the day that Ottawa is “considering financial options” to ease those concerns. Speaking later, he wouldn’t provide specifics but said there was a need to “derisk” the project so it can proceed.

Significantly, but not surprisingly, the Finance Minister

framed the issue as an economic one, talking about the need to enhance opportunities and good jobs while saying nothing about the concerns around the environment or rights of Indigenous Peoples raised by the project.

As usual, his boss, Justin Trudeau, continues to speak out of both sides of his mouth, claiming his environmental vision is bound up with an economic one, insisting there is no contradiction between the two.

Mr. Trudeau likes to talk about what Canadians know and understand. I suspect he is speaking of those Canadians who go through life blithely and willfully unaware of the immense peril our world now faces thanks to climate change, not those of us who understand that a drastic reordering of our priorities is crucial if we are to survive what lies ahead.

That Was Then; This Is Now

Funny about campaign promises. Most people take them with a large grain of salt, yet once in awhile, large segments of us are drawn in by the hope for a better day, hope fueled by an earnest politician who seems intent on upending the traditional shoddy, cynical and ultimately heart-breaking way of doing things that has become the default position of contemporary politics.

Such was the promise of Justin Trudeau.

But that was then, and this is now.

The Star's Tim Harper writes about the pipeline dilemma now facing Justin Trudeau, one, as I noted yesterday, is self-created:

For all the prime minister’s talk about how the economy and the environment go hand-in-hand, sometimes they become detached and action is needed, not a continuation of a Goldilocks not-too-hot, not-too-cold mantra that works as a sound bite, but not always as policy.

So here we are, a defining moment for the Trudeau government, with the clock ticking; a defining moment which Trudeau has largely brought upon himself.

The battle between Rachel Notley, desperate for a pipeline win if she is to have any chance at re-election, and B.C. Premier John Horgan, whose coalition with the Green Party will fall apart if he is not steadfast against the Kinder Morgan twinning, has grown increasingly acrimonious. Predictable, perhaps, but largely wrought by Mr. Trudeau himself:

It is important to remember how a campaigning Trudeau promised to deal with pipelines and other resource development compared to where he stood Tuesday.

On “social license” the Liberal platform read: “While governments grant permits for resource development, only communities can grant permission.”

Today, however, is a different story:

That was modified a year into the mandate with a more broad definition that dealt with consultation and dropped any reference to permission.

Another golden oldie from the Trudeau campaign trail:

...from the 2015 platform was a promise to Indigenous Canadians that they would be full partners on resource projects: “This will ensure on project reviews and assessments, the Crown is fully executing its consultation, accommodation and consent obligations, in accordance with its constitutional and international human rights obligations, including Aboriginal and treaty rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

Words have consequences, and now Trudeau will have to wear that betrayal of the Indigenous people:

Trudeau is going to have to force an unpopular pipeline expansion by bulldozing it past a provincial government, Indigenous leaders and protesters.

Trudeau will expend much more than political capital. He will have his green bona fides shattered.

Justin Trudeau will hardly be the first politician to break his promises. However, given the great hope Canadians invested in his election, he can expect some long-lasting consequences to his betrayal of the public trust.

That's Another Fine Mess He's Gotten Himself Into

In a post yesterday, The Mound offered a searing assessment of Justin Trudeau's abject failure on the climate-change file. Only the most ardent acolytes of the Prime Minister will fail to see that his soaring rhetoric has far outpaced his level of achievement. Says Mound:

Raising public awareness about climate change as needed to secure public support for carbon taxes only shines a spotlight on the hypocrisy of Trudeau's pipeline policy. You can't have people thinking too much about climate change when you're trying to ramp up the extraction, transmission and export of dangerous, toxin-riddled, environmentally devastating, high-carbon, ersatz petroleum. You simply cannot square that circle.

And Trudeau's dilemma is deepening as he is hoisted on the petard of his own pleasing rhetoric about social license, indigenous rights, etc., all of which some people, especially residents of British Columbia, have taken seriously, putting them on a collision course with both Alberta and the federal government.

Alberta's Rachel Notley is warning of an approaching constitutional crisis over B.C.s refusal to play ball with the twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline:

The lack of action followed Monday morning comments by Premier Rachel Notley that British Columbia’s actions to halt construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion aren’t “too far off” from a constitutional crisis.

“If the national interest is given over to the extremes on the left or the right, if the voices of the moderate majority of Canadians are forgotten, the reverberations of that will tear at the fabric of Confederation for many, many years to come,” Notley said.

In his determination to get the pipeline built, Trudeau has a panoply of unpalatable options, all of which would entail a huge political price. As the following clip states, he could suspend transfer payments to British Columbia, impose economic sanctions on the province, or, most draconian of all, invoke the Federal Emergencies Act, which would allow him to call a state of emergency in both B.C. and Alberta, enabling him to suspend provincial law, thus paving the way for the pipeline construction.



None of these options is desirable, but again, Trudeau has brought himself to this precipice by his love of his own public image and rhetoric. One thing is certain in my mind,whatever option he chooses: in 'going to the mats' for the petroleum industry, Justin Trudeau will be making abundantly transparent that he is little more than a servile enabler of the neoliberal agenda.

The Kids Are Alright

You may note that in the title of this post, I chose the informal version of all right, lest there be any doubt about the ideology of many young people today. Hardly conservative in their propensities, it would seem that many of them are awaking to the potential for power that they have, as long as they are able to keep alive the surging outrage welling within them, the most recent catalyst, of course, being the Parkland shooting.

It would seem the survivors of that shooting are playing the long game in order to keep their mission for sensible gun laws alive. Here is their latest effort at deepening the momentum they have thus far achieved in raising crucial awareness that their country needs sane gun laws, the deep obstructionist efforts of the NRA and their supporters, including bought-and-paid-for corrupt politicians, notwithstanding.



Meanwhile, galvanized by the diseased leadership of Trump, and a sign that democracy is not entirely dead, a record number of women are running in the U.S. midterms.



Now, if we can only convince Canadians out of their complacency, maybe the least we can accomplish is strong turnouts in pending provincial and federal elections.

This Is Hard To Watch

The following incident occurred in Toronto on February 18 of this year. It is difficult to watch, but I encourage you to do so, and use headphones so you can hear, not only the anguished cries of the pinioned Black youth, but also the response of the onlookers, likely the only bright spot in this whole sorry episode.

But first, a little background:

Part of the video of a violent takedown captured on YouTube shows 19-year-old John Doe crying desperately while pinned to the ground by three men in TTC fare inspector uniforms. “I’m hurting, I’m hurting,” and “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

When Toronto Police officers arrive, they swarm the scene, keeping him down and then haul him up to take him to the cruiser and handcuff him.

At one point there appear to be at least seven men piled on to him.

Such excessive force. Why? Nobody knows. He was unarmed. He was already pinned down by three grown men. He wasn’t in any position to run.

Was John Doe's 'offense' that he is Black?

The teen and his mother have launched a $3 million lawsuit against the Toronto Police Services Board, the Toronto Transit Commission, two unidentified police officers and three unidentified TTC fare inspectors.

The lawsuit alleges racial profiling, assault, unlawful detention and negligence among others.

John Doe, a student of paralegal studies also working as a food courier, was just another guy on the 512 St. Clair streetcar preparing to exit at Bathurst St. when he was grabbed.

“He was suddenly and without warning attacked and thrown to the ground by TTC fare inspectors despite crying for help, held there, not told what was happening,” said Hugh Scher, one of his lawyers.

There was never any indication that the fare hadn’t been paid. And he had paid, Scher said. Nor was he charged with any offence of TTC bylaw infraction [Emphasis mine].

For those who say he should have simply cooperated with the authorities, all I can ask is, "How would you have behaved had you been subjected to such an apparently unwarranted and Kafkaesque experience?