Rex Murphy: Good to see Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, Seamus O’Regan, is back in his office after his sojourn to dear Newfoundland, on behalf of Premier Furey, in the botched provincial election. The election itself was halted, or cancelled, or put on ice — to use a phrase — after the province had, for it, a huge spike in COVID cases. Prior to the — let’s call it a postponement — Mr. O’Regan was out doing the old door-to-door with various Liberal candidates, a sprightly sight for Newfoundlanders weary from lockdowns, February and firing up the woodstove.
But as said he’s back now, and back at what remains his prime minister’s absolutely No. 1 fixation, trimming Canada’s carbon-dioxide emissions. Adorning Twitter Thursday was the minister’s message that — Hallelujah — “Electric snowmobiles will get us to net-zero.” How sweet it is to know after a full year of COVID and lockdowns, businesses failing from one coast to the other, people almost driven numb by anxiety and loss of normal socialization, that someone is keeping, as they say, their eye on the ball, and tending to the important things, namely, exhaust from winter recreational vehicles. And to think some complain they don’t have their priorities straight.
In my own province, if a band of merry snowmobilers are roving the long- abandoned railway line, or even more daringly out on the dread Witless Bay Barrens, in temperatures even colder than, say, Texas yesterday, and the batteries fail, what do they do?
Where’s the charging station? In that little clump of spruce trees over there? Not likely. Perhaps near some landmark familiar to the outdoors types. Nope. And despite their populous presence along the province’s bit of Trans-Canada Highway, you will not find an Irving Station in the loon-haunted wildernesses of Newfoundland and Labrador. You can go miles and miles in country and there’s not a gas station to be found anywhere. Strange, isn’t it?
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