Check It Out: Are we thinking about consequences?

By Joan Janzen

A youngster was being reprimanded for his behaviour by his dad. “Young man, didn’t you consider the consequences for your actions?” The son responded, “How am I supposed to think about consequences before they happen?”

Likewise, our government is not thinking about the consequences of the policies it implements. MP Leslyn Lewis, who has a masters in environmental studies, said, “I have seen first hand that good intentions don’t always equal effective policy. Punishing and taxing a person doesn’t result in saving the planet.” Neither will the planet be saved by the Liberals’ plan to introduce new taxes of up to $4,000 for people who buy a truck.

Punishing Canadians under the guise of a worthy cause, is becoming increasingly popular. The worthy cause is the government’s push to get to net zero emissions. Canadian Minister of Environment Steven Guilbeault said provincial fuel tax breaks “go against our efforts to fight climate change”.

In a National Post article, Rex Murphy wrote, “Canada has one purpose only, one duty as a country: to save the great globe of our common earth from inexorable climate doom.” PM Trudeau announced his new targets for Canada’s carbon-dioxide emissions at a recent visit to Vancouver, before partaking of a Liberal fundraiser dinner with a price tag of $1,675 a plate.

While Canada’s government is determined to lead the way in the fight against climate change, other countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China are not paying attention. An economist, Bob Murphy observed that the rationale of taxing carbon to make it more expensive so households and businesses are motivated to use something else, will cause pain for Canadians and scale back our standard of living.

A comparison could be a theatre owner complaining about too much popcorn on the floor. In order to solve the situation, he drastically increases the cost of popcorn, rather than hiring someone to clean the popcorn off the floor. Another comparison could be the government solving the problem of higher vegetable prices, by suggesting people find something to eat rather than vegetables. However the logical solution would be to grow gardens and produce more vegetables locally.

Murphy also noted that reducing emissions in Canada will have no effect world wide, while the rest of the world, particularly developing countries, won’t care about their pledges. As evidence, China continues to unveil coal fired power plants.

“The policies that are being advanced don’t make sense, even if the threat of climate change is as bad as activists say it is,” Murphy said. “The way they are going about it is much more harmful than it needs to be. The irony is, while all the focus is on policies that won’t do much, it’s distracting away from potential solutions that would work.” He said there’s plenty of privately funded research teams looking at things like seeding the ocean so more algae grows, absorbing more C02, while the Fraser Institute in Canada shows the actual numbers to try and contain hysteria on this topic.

Europe went green, but are now preparing to ration energy. Germany quickly phased out coal and nuclear power, leaving it dependent on unreliable wind energy and imports from Russia. Nevertheless, an opinion piece in the National Post noted that Canada is doing the opposite of what it should be doing amidst what is going on in the world.

Canada also relies a great deal on foreign imports, and is doing exactly what Germany did ... moving away from domestic oil production. Instead of acknowledging this, our government has announced further restrictions, and our Prime Minister refuses to learn any lessons from these events. Our Energy Minister claims we need to decarbonize our society, including transportation, oil and gas, aluminum, as well as the cement and auto sectors, without any regard to the cost for the consumer.

Green energy is offered as the solution for everything, even the war in Ukraine, which is dubbed as carbon heavy activity. The government’s way of thinking seems to be - Canada needs to be an example, for other countries to follow. But they’re not following.

Winston Churchill said, “When great causes are on the move in the world, we learn that we are spirits and not animals and that something is going on in space and time which, whether we like it or not - spells duty.”

Canadians need to contemplate what would happen if our government’s cause and policies resulted in Canada no longer using Canadian oil and becoming completely dependent on oil from other countries. What would happen to our economy? Is Churchill right when he said we have a duty, whether we like it or not?