Pipelines, carbon taxes and Boushie

March 19, 2018, 4:06 pm

For the second time in less than a week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau jetted to Regina, this time to let Evraz steel workers know that he’s supporting their industry and resisting U.S. tariffs on steel which have so far exempted Canada.

If the Prime Minister thought further about Evraz he would seriously reconsider his passive stance on oil pipelines.

He’s already cancelled the previously approved Northern Gateway line and presided over the death of Energy East.

At Evraz, Mr. Trudeau stood in the midst of people who manufacture pipelines.

Yet he won’t stand up to the BC NDP-Green government’s unconstitutional attempts to kill the Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline extension.

The growing concern is that Mr. Trudeau will linger on the sidelines, as well financed enviro-activists delay the project until Kinder Morgan packs up and quits.

The upside for Mr. Trudeau and his self-proclaimed “progressive” agenda is the survival of over a dozen Liberal seats in Vancouver, the Lower Mainland and Sunshine Coast.

In the heartland, oil producers, jobs and the economy get hammered with reduced access to markets, higher oil transport costs and lower prices for oil.

The Saskatchewan-Canada carbon tax stand-off took an interesting turn last week.

Mr. Trudeau’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine Mckenna, for a third time in as many months, wrote a letter lecturing Saskatchewan that we must have a carbon tax or Ottawa will impose one.

Saskatchewan hasn’t budged and is pursuing its own carbon strategy—one that won’t saddle our industries and businesses with taxes that will make us less competitive.

All the while, Ottawa complains, nags, threatens, imposes and then moves deadlines. One government is looking frustrated and desperate; the other one, not so much.

If the Ontario Progressive Conservatives win the election scheduled for June 7th, they have threatened to abandon the expensive and inefficient carbon scheme in Canada’s largest province.

A year from now Albertans will vote and with a strong likelihood of the United Conservative party defeating the Rachel Notley’s NDP, there is no doubt that carbon pricing will be scrapped next door.

Catherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau may soon be longing for the days when they had just Saskatchewan saying no to their carbon folly.

And, it was an interesting week in the continuing aftermath of the racially charged case of rancher Gerald Stanley, acquitted five weeks ago in the shooting death of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old man who was with a group of intruders who arrived at the Stanley Ranch in August 2016.

In the face of significant trial evidence that completely contradicts the narrative of many media and activists, they continue to try mightily to keep spinning the story that Boushie and his companions were mere innocents with a flat tire who were shot at when they came to ask for help at the Stanley’s.

I’d finally had enough this week when Canada’s state broadcaster, the CBC, and its “sources” literally created fake news in a piece criticizing the RCMP for poor investigative work.

The CBC reported that on the night of the shooting Stanley was arrested and photographed by police but then released. Also, his clothes were never taken by investigators.

This is completely contradicted by a chronology of events prepared by the Chief Justice during a written pre-trial decision where he wrote of Stanley being taken to police cells, spending the night locked up and his clothing being seized.

The CBC has not apologized for making up news but did offer a correction. The correction aired briefly the other night at the 19-minute mark of its newscast, when a few days earlier they spent the first 8 minutes of the news reporting on “sloppy and negligent” policing.

Clearly, on the claim of shoddy work the CBC shouldn’t be throwing stones.