Rex Murphy: I quoted our new economic czar, Chrystia Freeland, in my last column, saying, “I think all Canadians understand that the restart of our economy needs to be green.” To which I asked, “Where, oh where, did she pick up that strange understanding?” Maybe this would be true if there were a poll taken on Pluto, assuming a few Canadians are there, but not from the Canadians on the planet we are already familiar with.
There is no basis whatsoever for asserting that all Canadians believe (or want) the recovery to be “green.” What that statement really represents in this government’s grossly cynical attempt to leverage the great health crisis of our time, and the dislocation and anxiety surrounding it, as an instrument to pursue its one unfailing objective: to blunt, wound and radically downscale our central natural resource industry.
A recent Bloomberg article on the Liberals’ recovery plans makes the point explicitly: “One line of thinking says they will go for large-scale investment in renewable energy and other green initiatives selling it as a job-creation package that can help Canada get past its reliance on exporting oil and gas.”
An ideological fixation — global warming — is taking over genuine efforts to fix the economy. It is, to revive one of the most depressing utterances in politics, a perfect example of the maxim, “never let a crisis go to waste.”
No comments:
Post a Comment