Rex Murphy:
Remember the Leap Manifesto? That was the wild-eyed ultra-greenist,
anti-capitalist dogma-sheet that Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein dragged out ...
... Kill oil. Kill all fossil fuels. No pipelines. No
refineries. Cripple the economy. Deny the poorer nations ... a cascade of unexamined and baseless assertions, a manifest distaste
for reality, a raw pulse of dogmatic certitude, and a set of
prescriptions that would obliterate a modern economy, push hundreds of
thousands out of work, and bring the industrial age back to the days of
horse cart and covered wagons for transportation. ...
The authors of Leap were ... merely projecting as it were
private fantasies into the public arena. If, however, they had presented
in Ontario, if they had urged Ontario’s government with the dreams they
urged ... I suspect they would have been mocked as timid,
restrained, unimaginative, even perhaps, regressive. For the Wynne
government’s recently revealed plans for the ‘transformation of the
Ontario energy industry,” is of a reach and scope, depth and range, that
defies all comparison.
Even if there were good evidence that alarmists are right (and there isn't) Canada's contribution to global CO2 emissions is tiny and it's effect on global climate un-measurable. But politicians like Wynne (and Trudeau and ... ) behave as if the world's fate hinges on Canada (or Ontario or ...) taking the lead in sacrificing their citizens' standard of living to Gaia. This is insanely reckless. Canada has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to move any faster on this than the least committed of the largest GHG emitting nations. Doing so is not only climatically pointless, it unnecessarily risks wrecking our economy. We are being led either by nitwits or by cynical tax-grabbers or both.
