The Trudeau Liberals pride themselves on being big thinkers. They’re big on helping out struggling people, big on the environment, big on being world leaders in such areas.
But the Liberals are falling down elsewhere. Face-planting, in fact, especially when it comes to the related areas of energy, emissions and the national economy, where they are guilty of thinking in a small and parochial manner
For one thing, productivity is evidently a foreign concept to them.
Productivity is critical to the health of nation. It is economic efficiency that keeps us competitive with the rest of the world. It gets our houses and roads, products and industrial projects built on time and on budget.
The latest example of just how alien the concept of productivity is to the Trudeau Liberal mind comes from its previously named “Just Transition” scheme to move Canada to net-zero by 2050, which is now to be codified into federal law in Bill C-50.
In the 3,077 words of C-50, productivity is not mentioned once.
Net-zero is mentioned 32 times. That is the focus, to make sure Liberal leaders in Canada — where carbon emissions have been flat this century — get to boast this country is on the path to net-zero by 2050.
They’re set on pushing this even as most of the world’s biggest emitters are blatantly rejecting net-zero by cranking up fossil-fuel energy use, including coal burning.
Canada emitted 546 million tonnes of C02 in 2021, which is down from the 567 million tonnes we emitted in 2000. But the world’s biggest emitter, the aggressive Xi regime in China, has gone from emitting 3.6 billion tonnes in 2000 to 11.5 billion in 2021, reports Our World in Data.
Our focus should be helping China to reduce emissions, but our lack of action here is Exhibit A in how the insular Liberals think so small. Trudeau has questioned if there’s a business case for Canada exporting our liquefied natural gas, even as such exports would slash emissions by replacing coal-burning in China and other countries.
Natural gas production and plants also provide stable, affordable energy, hallmarks of a productive economy, much more so than unreliable wind and solar. Failing to consider matters like the efficiency of gas is another aspect of Trudeau’s small thinking, and the problem is now reflected in our ugly productivity numbers.
Canada’s productivity has been falling, economist Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary said on social media, and is now back to 2017 levels.
Tombe expanded on this dread detail in a post in The Hub, where he noted Ontario has a per-person level of economic output that is similar to Alabama. “Simply put: lower productivity almost always means lower living standards.”
There’s no easy fix, but Tombe said governments can take the big first step. “All policies should be evaluated with productivity in mind.”
But productivity was ignored in Bill C-50 and there wasn’t any kind of focus on it at the press conference announcing this crucial bill.
I was glad to see one reporter did ask Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan about the fate of energy workers in Newfoundland and Fort McMurray: “What does this practically mean to them, so that they are not sitting there thinking, ‘This bill is just about putting me out of work?’ ”
“I say to them, this puts them in the driver’s seat,” O’Regan said. “They will lead the energy transition.”
Bold words.
But if oil and gas workers were indeed in the driver’s seat, they would have the Liberals aggressively promote Canadian oil and gas over dictator oil and gas. They would also push for Alberta to be given carbon credits for exporting LNG to replace coal burning in other countries.
Why do the Trudeau Liberals suffer from such limited thinking on productivity, emissions and energy? Their base is in big cities which, by reason of geography and history, get much of their electricity from hydro and nuclear power, almost all of it built by earlier more productivity-minded generations. For the Liberal base, such inherited clean and abundant power is a given, as are the hundreds of billions in dollar transfers that have flooded to Eastern Canada, mainly Quebec, from Alberta income taxes.
They’re complacent about the status quo of wealth transfers, they don’t see how Trudeau’s policy threatens it, and aren’t willing to work smartly with Alberta to lower emissions globally.
These are the big questions and concerns that don’t penetrate the hive mind of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Perhaps when she meets on Monday with federal Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, an architect of Bill C-50, Premier Danielle Smith can persuade him to think somewhat bigger.