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I
asked one of my sons the other day what he thought of Justin Trudeau, and he
answered briefly, but tellingly: “He’s all we’ve got.”
There must be many people in Canada
feeling as he feels, as they watch Trudeau stumble from one mistake to another,
displaying less than a firm grip on the
tiller of government; and at the same time regarding with some horror the
idiocy of most of the reactions by Andrew Scheer, the Conservative Party
leader, who seems to be the only person with a chance of beating Trudeau at the
coming election.
Of course speaking personally, I can
take these disappointments more or less equably, because neither of these
leaders nor their parties ever reach my expectations of what I would call good
government.
I confess to having shared the
widespread pleasure and surprise at the election of Trudeau, who seemed to have
an open-minded attitude that was very much improved on that of the previous
Prime Minister, the sepulchral Stephen Harper. And I even remember before that
election realizing one day that this handsome young man, who seemed able to
talk about issues coherently, might have the capacity to sweep the country.
That pleasure lasted for a month or
two, but eventually the “sunny days” attitude began to become a bit cloying,
and from time to time the young man himself began to exhibit a shortness of
temper that seemed to be not far from arrogance. Most people, observing this, appeared to
shrug and say, well, with an upbringing like his, the son of a wealthy,
prominent and powerful family, what could one expect?
He slotted in, from the beginning, to
the modern habit of proclaiming that everything he was doing was for the
benefit of the middle class, as if even to mention that working people belong
to a working class were anathema to him. But then, what do we judge the Liberal
party and its policies against?
Surely the danger to everything
Canadian lies in the model exhibited south of the border. In spite of the
immense pressure provided by their power, wealth and influence, (and I must
include the overpowering, world-wide
influence of their soft power, transmitted through pop, but also formal,
culture), we have succeeded in building a relatively efficient welfare state,
with our nationalized health service at its centre. Of course it is only half
completed, with obvious gaps in its meagre provisions for day care, something
that is drastically needed in any society
that demands, as does ours, that
a single family needs two wage packets if it is to get by comfortably.
Both the Liberal and the New Democratic
parties together deserve approbation for this, but it is necessary to say that
the Conservative Party, the repository of the loyalty of the wealthier Canadians,
has played little part in this. In fact
I often recall the statement made in the 1950s by Dr. George Grant, a Conservative
political philosopher, who outlined in a book called Lament for a Nation how any movement designed to keep control of
our economy in Canadian hands had always faced spirited opposition from the assembled
ranks of commerce, whose practitioners and controllers have always looked to the Conservative Party
to represent their interests.
There has recently been an egregious
example of this when the leader of the Conservative Party was the main speaker
at a semi-secretive gathering of CEOs of the fossil fuel industry. This is an
area where Mr Trudeau has tried to be on both sides at the same time, a tactic
that has simply exposed him to be an economic lightweight without the backbone
to resist the bullies of capitalism.
Set against Trudeau’s making an ass
of himself during his visit to India (for much of which I blame his New Age,
far-out wife, who seems to have a great deal of influence with him) I would say
that Scheer’s gaffe in putting himself helplessly at the disposal of the
captains of industry was much more definitive of the guy, especially if we are
measuring them against the likelihood of their becoming our next Prime
Minister. An even more determinative issue would be their attitude to our
number one challenge as members of the human race, namely, the onset of human-made
global warming. Here, Scheer so far isn’t even in the race. Trudeau it is true,
has adopted a totally impossible policy which is to set national targets for
global carbon emissions, in line with the demands of the Paris accord agreed by
195 international participants, but also, as his government keeps saying “to get our resources to market,” by which he
means simultaneously to expand production
of the Alberta Tar Sands, the digging up of which has required such high levels
of carbon emissions as to make it known to be one of the major polluting
sources available anywhere in the world.
This double-barrelled policy is nonsense,
as its rough history thus far indicates.
The Federal Court of Appeal examined the diligence with which the
National Energy Board (NEB) approached its approval-in-principle of the
building of the expanded pipeline to get more Tar Sands oil across to tidewater
on the British Columbia coast where it could be shipped, at what Albertans
believe would be a premium cost, to China, and although they said they had no
power of judicial review of the NEB’s decision, they did challenge the
Order-in-Council issued by the government by which approval for the pipeline
was granted. They found the NEB attitude
to the problem had been inadequate in two aspects.
For one thing, they discovered on examination
something that every interested person in Canada could have told them years ago,
that the process of consulting the indigenous communities lying along the way
had amounted to little more than writing down notes about what the indigenous
people said, and then throwing the notes away, in effect. This is no new discovery: this has been the
norm throughout history. The only difference this time is that under guidelines
agreed to by Canada when it finally adopted the Universal Declaration of the
Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), the government party is obligated to
recognize that “states shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the
indigenous peoples concerned… in order to obtain their free and informed consent
prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and
other resources,” and that this must apply “particularly” to the development,
utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.
This concept of “free, prior and informed
consent” of indigenous people in relation to any development proposed for their
lands is the one provision from UNDRIP that has caught hold so far among the
indigenous people of Canada, and it certainly is not something that could be
denied by a government that came into office trumpeting how it was willing, able and indeed, determined, to re-conceive the entire relationship between
government and indigenous peoples that has been, as one foreign journal recently
described it, “Canada’s secret shame” for generations.
Indeed, as one person who has studied
the historical record, and checked that out with dozens of visits to native
communities and many discussions on the subject with indigenous people, I can
say without hesitation that this has always been the most shameful aspect of
Canadian history.
The Federal Court of Appeal found
that the Government of Canada acted in good faith and formed an appropriate
plan for consultation. However, at the last stage, the consultation itself, “Canada fell well short of the minimum
requirements imposed by the case law of the Supreme Court of Canada.
“The Government of Canada was
required to engage in a considered, meaningful two-way dialogue. However, for
the most part, Canada’s representatives limited their mandate to listening to
and recording
the
concerns of the Indigenous applicants and then transmitting those concerns to
the decision-makers. On the whole, the record does not disclose responsive, considered
and meaningful dialogue coming back
from
Canada in response to the concerns expressed by the Indigenous applicants. The
law requires Canada to do more than receive and record concerns and complaints.”
To my mind, this is a
stinging response to an attitude that, as I have outlined above, has always
existed --- one of treating the indigenous people --- as was once the official
position --- as wards of state with the status of children.
But there was a second part of the
NEB’s inadequacy, neatly summarized by the Court in its judgment that although the NEB had concluded that
project-related tanker traffic would have negative adverse effects on the
resident population of killer whales, nevertheless they had advised the
government that the project was not likely to cause significant adverse
environmental effects. “The unjustified exclusion of project-related marine
shipping from the definition of the project rendered the Board’s report
impermissibly flawed,” Court said in judgment. The report did not give the Governor in
Council the information and assessments it needed in order to properly assess
the public interest, including the project’s environmental effects—matters it
was legally obligated to assess.”
Canadian environmentalists must have
been waiting for decades to read a judgment like this in relation to what has
always seemed to be an untouchable NEB.
This judgment caused the company that was
proposing to build the new pipeline to withdraw, leaving the federal government
as a face-saving measure to buy the
existing pipeline for $4.5 billion, along with the obligation to build the new
section, if once it is approved, for another estimated $9 billion.
I intended to get on to Mr, Kenny,
the little weasel who has taken over Alberta, a politician we have already seen
at work in the Harper federal cabinet, now eagerly whipping up the Alberta
people against the rest of the country, to ensure his election. And along with
him, Mr. Ford, the idiot elected by the people of Ontario. But I will have
plenty of opportunity in future so I leave it here for the moment.
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