On Monday, the dozens of Canadians watching question period on CPAC happened upon the political equivalent of a solar eclipse: agreement between Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre. After the prime minister dropped the bombshell accusing India of being involved in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Poilievre responded with an uncharacteristic outburst of agreeability. "If these allegations are true, they represent an outrageous affront to Canada, to Canada's sovereignty," he told the House. "Our citizens must be safe from extrajudicial killings of all kinds, most of all from foreign governments.”

This detente lasted less than 24 hours. On Tuesday, the more familiar version of Poilievre was back in action, telling reporters that “the prime minister hasn’t provided any facts.” His MPs were also silent during an emergency debate later that day on India’s alleged attack on Canadian sovereignty. That prompted NDP MP Heather McPherson to wonder if this was because the Conservatives didn’t want to draw attention to former prime minister Stephen Harper’s relationship with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

Modi, after all, isn’t just the leader of the “world’s biggest democracy,” as new MP and long-standing Harper staffer Shuvaloy Majumdar tweeted last week. He’s also a key member of the International Democrat Union (IDU), the alliance of right-wing political parties that Harper has chaired since 2018. “The most significant leader of India since Independence, my friend @narendramodi is shaping every conversation on geopolitics & the global economy,” Harper tweeted in 2019. “For India to realize its potential, it needs the courageous & visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi. Proud to stand with him.”

Not everyone is so generous with their characterization of the Indian president. As the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner wrote in March, “Over the course of Modi’s premiership, which began in 2014, he has turned India into an increasingly illiberal democracy. Vigilante attacks on religious minorities have increased markedly, the ruling party has taken steps to strip citizenship from Indian Muslims, and the historically repressed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir has faced even harsher crackdowns.”

That pales in comparison to allegations about his conduct as the chief minister of Gujarat and his role in the 2002 sectarian riots that left more than 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslims (Modi is Hindu). India’s own Supreme Court once described him as a “modern-day Nero” and the United States banned him from visiting because of his apparent role in the violence.

A new BBC documentary on Modi’s role in the riots included a previously unseen British government report that “found Modi responsible for the violence and described the riots as having the ‘hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.’” Jack Straw, the U.K.’s foreign secretary at the time, said, “These were very serious claims that Mr. Modi had played a proactive part in pulling back police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.”

Like so many on the right, Harper and his IDU allies are willing to look past this part of Modi’s story. Why? As Aditya Chakrabortty wrote in The Guardian, “Modi bears a responsibility for some of the worst religious violence ever seen in independent India — but there’s nothing like looking like a winner to attract apologists.”

The same logic seems to apply to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, another high-profile IDU member whose conduct might best be described as “fascism-curious”. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton and an expert on Hungarian politics and constitutional law, described him in an interview with The New Yorker’s Chotiner as “the ultimate 21st-century dictator,” one who wields economic power and control of the media rather than brute force to serve his agenda.

That didn’t deter Harper from enthusiastically congratulating him in 2018, and the criticism he received for that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to press for closer ties between Canadian conservatives and Orban’s Fidesz party in 2023. One wonders how closely they’ll be studying Orban’s track record of surveilling journalists and undermining judicial independence, and whether they’ll want to apply those lessons here at home.

For now, there are plenty of important conversations to be had about India’s intervention in Canada and what ought to be done about it. But one of them has to include an examination of the conservative movement’s embrace of people like Modi and Orban and what it says about their own values and priorities. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in 2021, Orban’s appeal isn’t just about his overtly anti-immigration policies or social conservatism: “It’s that his interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centres and the spending on conservative ideological projects are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence.”

How far are Canada’s conservatives willing to go, and how much illiberal behaviour are they willing to look past in their friends, to achieve those outcomes here? For better or worse, I suspect we’re all about to find out.

Danielle Smith bets on Betamax

To a lot of people, Danielle Smith’s very deliberate embrace of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles as Alberta’s best path to decarbonization looked like another one of her trademark policy brain farts. After all, as a recent story out of California (where hydrogen-fuelling stations actually exist) showed, it’s now 14 times more expensive to fill up a Toyota Mirai than a Tesla Model 3 on a per-mile basis — and that’s without charging overnight, which makes the Tesla even cheaper. Oh, and you might not even be able to fill your hydrogen car if there’s a small lineup at the station. As Car and Driver noted last year, “Today’s stations can often only fuel two to five vehicles before they go offline for up to half an hour to repressurize.”

This sort of stuff helps explain why there’s tens of thousands of hydrogen vehicles on the road worldwide and tens of millions of electric vehicles, with millions more of the latter being added each year. The market has clearly spoken here and in almost any other situation, a pro-market conservative like Smith would be listening. As I joked on Twitter, Smith is betting on Betamax while the world goes VHS (someone suggested we’re actually at the Blu-ray stage now with EVs).

But as with her decision to promote small nuclear modular reactors while putting a moratorium on wind and solar development in Alberta, Smith’s pro-hydrogen stance is all part of a broader strategy — and it’s not necessarily a dumb one. By talking up technologies that either don’t exist or will never scale to the level required, she can appear to care about emissions reductions while actively impeding the technologies that could deliver them.

It’s a more nuanced position than the outright denial of climate science that used to define her politics, but it all serves the same end: maximizing the consumption (and combustion) of fossil fuels for as long as possible. The good news here is that Smith’s efforts to throw spanners in the works of the energy transition are destined to fail. The economics of renewable energy and electric vehicles are already winning the day, and that will continue as the costs for things like batteries keep dropping.

Smith is welcome to continue tilting at her windmills. But know this: they’ll continue to get built, regardless of whether she believes it or not.

Debunking Don Braid

There are few easier jobs than being a federal conservative politician in Alberta, as any number of underwhelming MPs have proven over the years. But being a conservative-leaning pundit for the Calgary Herald is definitely in the running, as Licia Corbella demonstrates almost every time she puts her finger on the keyboard.

Don Braid, the Herald’s eminence grise, tries to play his own ball a little more up the middle. But sometimes, it seems like he feels the need to feed his readers some raw conservative meat — and that’s when things tend to get a bit messy. Witness his recent take on the newest delays for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, one in which he refers to the government that bought and is building it as “climate zealots”. I’m not going to take the whole thing apart, but there are a couple of lines that need a bit of closer scrutiny.

“Five years ago, when they purchased Trans Mountain, the Liberals acknowledged with a grimace that bitumen sales to Asia could lower world emissions by replacing coal,” Braid writes.

Um, what? I can’t recall anyone suggesting that TMX’s oil exports would displace coal, and that’s because it’s not a remotely realistic idea. I think Braid is confusing oil with LNG, and you probably know how I feel about that whole argument that keeps being made by Alberta politicians (short version: yes, swapping coal for gas reduces emissions, but no, we don’t get credit for it).

“They have moved from that stance to demands that Alberta stop using cleaner natural gas to generate electricity by 2035.”

The “cleaner natural gas” line is a tell, of course, but this isn’t even true. The proposed regulations still allow for the combustion of natural gas in a bunch of different forms: gas peaker plants (if they don’t exceed limits on operations), grandfathered-in gas plants (anything built before 2025 has 20 years before it needs to be mothballed) and gas plants with carbon capture, which can operate indefinitely.

“How can they do that while someday cutting the ribbon on a pipeline that will triple bitumen shipments and require production to meet the demand?”

Well, Don, because they’ll shift exports from rail (which is more expensive and higher-emitting) to the pipeline, which also gives them access to new and different markets and helps them avoid being too reliant on one buyer. In the past, that’s cost these companies (and provincial and federal treasuries) billions of dollars, as so-called “differentials” got bigger as a result of supply exceeding available transportation capacity.

“Maybe they mothball the thing, book the loss and try to sell that as climate salvation?”

Um, no. That’s been a conspiracy theory running rampant in conservative circles for years — that Trudeau only bought the pipeline in order to kill it — but despite the feds sinking billions into its construction, it simply refuses to die. I suspect it will endure long after the pipeline is in operation.

“This is a conundrum that may yet tear the Liberal caucus apart, end the governing deal with the NDP and help bring the Conservatives to power.”

The degree of wishful thinking at work here is almost adorable. But no, Don, it won’t tear apart the Liberal caucus or end the deal with the NDP. You’re just going to have to wait until they call the election.

“Most Albertans want serious action on climate change. But they also crave collaboration, sensible measures and due consideration for the economy. They do not want to be led by intractable zealots.”

And yet, they very clearly are at the provincial level. The UCP’s hostility towards renewable energy or the reality of the global energy transition is the very definition of intractable zealotry. Meanwhile, many (maybe most) of the UCP’s supporters don’t want to see any collaboration with Ottawa here, and they conflate “sensible measures and due consideration for the economy” with “export more oil and gas than ever.”

Until that changes, the job of conservative columnists in Alberta like Braid is going to remain annoyingly easy: just churn up some poorly informed outrage against Ottawa or climate policy and call it a day.

Good News: California takes Big Oil to court

It’s long been an open secret that the oil and gas industry has understood the science behind climate change and refused to do anything about it. Now, California is trying to hold it to account for that hypocrisy and the billions of dollars in economic damage it’s done in court. “It’s not even debatable now,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a recent press conference at Climate Week NYC. “We have the receipts. The evidence is overwhelming. The deceit that has been around for 70-plus years, that they have knowingly advanced in order to deny or delay progress and implementation to address this disease.”

The lawsuit leans on previous civil litigation against opioid and tobacco companies and the false advertising on the safety of their respective products that cost them billions of dollars. And while it’s able to prosecute its case alone, California’s decision to bring it forward will almost certainly attract other participants. “California getting involved is a big signal to other jurisdictions around the country that they think this is a winning case,” said Korey Silverman-Roati, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “That could, in turn, motivate more people, more states, more cities, more counties to file.”

Or, as Newsom said, “I want to see this spread.”

On its own, the case won’t force the oil and gas industry to stop growing production and start investing more heavily in low-carbon alternatives. But it does serve as an important reminder that deceiving people about the impact of their activities can have consequences — and that even bigger ones might be on the horizon.

Required Reading: Merging climate action and equity

Believe it or not, I happened upon this report in a tweet from Sun Media emeritus Lorrie Goldstein. I don’t think he’d actually read the report he was sharing, given that it clearly laid out the importance of making climate action fair and equitable, but it’s one that everyone who cares about good climate policy should review.

As Rachel Samson notes in her report, “Business concerns have dominated discussions on climate policy over the past three decades. This has led to an emphasis on efficiency — achieving emission reductions with the lowest cost to the economy. Of course, efficiency must be part of the equation. But if emission-reduction policies are not fair and just, they will fail to rally the public support needed to be successful.”

Amen. I’ve been saying this for a while now, although perhaps not as loudly as I need to. Yes, efficiency is an important consideration, but it can’t be the most important one when it comes to designing policy. Political durability, to me, is far more important, given the inherent inefficiency associated with one government implementing and then another repealing its climate policies.

To what I suspect is Goldstein’s chagrin, Samson isn’t suggesting that we need to roll back climate policies. “Putting off emission reductions and other necessary measures will only increase costs later and leave Canada’s economy ill-prepared for the rapidly changing global economy,” she writes. But more attention — much more — needs to be paid to how the policies are being communicated and heard, and how their public perception can be weaponized by bad-faith actors.

That might mean introducing greater subsidies for lower-income Canadians or means-testing some of the climate programs the federal government has rolled out. It could mean fewer sticks and more carrots. Everything should be on the table, provided it doesn’t diminish the overall ambition being pursued.

I’m not sure the federal government is inclined to change paths here, or even has the bandwidth to do it. There are few things politicians hate more than admitting they were wrong, after all. But if the Trudeau Liberals want their signature climate policies to endure an inevitable change in government, they need to do much more to help Canadians understand why and how they benefit from them.

The Wrap

On Monday, I wrote about the E. coli outbreak in Calgary’s daycares and how it reminded me of the Walkerton fiasco that ended up killing seven people and sickening more than 2,000 in Ontario more than 20 years ago. In both cases, governments obsessed with eliminating regulations, cutting “red tape” and privatizing previously public roles and responsibilities ended up putting the public at risk in the process. The public inquiry into Walkerton helped make that clear, and we can only hope a similar process is allowed to unfold in Alberta.

On Wednesday, I pointed out the disconnect between Danielle Smith’s willingness to trade in Ezra Levant’s “ethical oil” argument and her fawning admiration for the Saudi regime. As it turned out, all the tough talk about Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses was just that, especially when Alberta and the kingdom share the same dangerous delusion about long-term oil demand growth. Ethics, schmethics.

On Tuesday, I joined Charles Adler on his podcast to discuss the politics of school boards and the fear-mongering happening around trans kids and LGBTQ issues. And on Wednesday, I popped onto Ryan Jespersen’s show for a chat about the World Petroleum Congress and Danielle Smith’s new alliance with the Saudis.

That’s it for me this week. If you have questions or complaints, please send me a note. And if there’s something you think I should be covering — or covering differently — I’m happy(ish) to hear from you.