Guilbeault as federal environment minister spells doom for Alberta
Newly appointed federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Wednesday – his first full day at his new job of crushing Alberta's economy – that he is not going to try to kill oil and gas jobs.
It amounts to him promising not to go out of his way to make tens of thousand of Albertans unemployed. But, ya know, if it happens, it happens.
This is the same man who, as heritage minister in the last Parliament, insisted again and again the only way to save free expression was to regulate use of the internet more harshly than in any other democracy.
Also on Wednesday, when asked if he intends to block new oilsands projects, Guilbeault said the federal government has no jurisdiction over production of oil, gas or coal, only over the emissions produced by those resources.
"We will ensure through legislation or regulation ... that emissions from oil and gas are capped at current levels and diminish over time," he said.
Pardon me, but that's just an evasive way of saying, "Yes, we will use the levers within Ottawa's power to prevent new oilsands projects."
Or as Guilbeault called them during his nearly 30 years as a radical, publicity-stunt environmentalist before he entered politics in 2019, the "tar sands."
Alberta can approve all the oilsands developments it wants, but Guilbeault intends to prevent new projects from operating by denying them federal permission to emit carbon dioxide.
That amounts to the same thing.
So when the same man says he isn't going to "try" to put a 100,000 or more Albertans out of work, he could just as easily mean he doesn't have to try. Massive layoffs will happen naturally as a side effect of the Trudeau government's anti-oil, anti-gas, anti-pipeline agenda.
When he was a climate activist, before being elected to Parliament, Guilbeault famously climbed Toronto's CN Tower to unfurl a banner protesting what he saw as the weakness of federal climate change policy. He also arranged for Greenpeace protestors to climb atop then-premier Ralph Klein's private Calgary home and screw solar panels to the roof.
He has opposed every pipeline sought by Canada's energy industry in the past two decades – Energy East, Northern Gateway, Keystone XL, Lines 3, 5 and 9.
He even opposes Trans Mountain, which the federal government owns.
As the price of his agreeing to run for the Liberals in 2019 (rather than for the NDP or Greens), Guilbeault made Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promise to let him speak out against Trans Mountain, even though other Liberal MPs have been told to support it or be tossed from caucus.
Before he entered politics, and many times since, Guilbeault has repeatedly said energy companies can never be permitted to increase their emissions. Emissions must be capped at current levels and diminish over time.
He scoffs at the industry's success already of significantly reducing emissions per barrel produced.
Guilbeault is an absolutist, so much so that he won't even accept relatively clean natural gas as a transitional fuel source until "green" energy can supply Canada's needs. To him, it is better we all freeze in the dark than burn one more gigajoule of gas.
Imagine if a Conservative prime minister appointed as her Federal-Provincial Affairs minister a unilingual anglophone who believed Canada should be officially English-only, that no province was a distinct society nor should any province be permitted to separate, even if it were to pass a clearly worded independence resolution by an overwhelming majority.
Quebec would be apoplectic. It would be having convulsions on the floor of Confederation.
But that is the equivalent of what Trudeau has done to Alberta by putting Guilbeault on the environment file.
