Justin Trudeau is in deep, deep trouble. Based on recent polling, which continues to push Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada ahead by double digits, Trudeau’s Liberals appear headed for the sort of once-in-a-generation political shellacking that Brian Mulroney handed John Turner in 1984 and Stephen Harper dealt Michael Ignatieff in 2011. Ironically, there might only be one person who can save the Liberals from this fate: Pierre Poilievre.
I’m sure this sounds delusional to most conservatives, given how high Poilievre is riding in the polls right now. But a recent video of him chatting with fruit growers and a local journalist in British Columbia — released by Poilievre’s own team, no less — serves as a reminder of his weaknesses and why they could make the next election more competitive than it looks right now. The very fact they released it, meanwhile, shows that his team can’t see the danger staring them right in the face.
The video, titled “How do you like them apples?,” is clearly a reference to one of the defining moments in 1997’s Good Will Hunting. But rather than coming off like Matt Damon’s character, Poilievre seems to be channeling the condescending Harvard student that gets humiliated by Damon in the scene. When a local journalist named Don Urquhart asks him about his populist political brand and willingness to borrow from Donald Trump’s political playbook, he gets visibly annoyed. “What are you talking about? What page? Give me a page.”
There are many ways he could have handled this line of questioning, from a gentle pivot to the importance of listening to the average voter to an articulation of what his own playbook actually includes. He doesn’t have to behave like a petulant jackass, in other words. But with Poilievre, it seems, petulance is the point. It’s who he’s been his entire political career, and it’s what still bubbles to the surface almost instinctively, regardless of how much time and money his team spends trying to change it.
His penchant for two-dimensional thinking and deliberate oversimplification is also on full display in his response. He talks about the importance of balancing the budget and cutting spending, but when pressed on the details of where and how he would do that, he produces a grab bag of Conservative hobby horses that wouldn’t amount to a rounding error on the federal budget. “Defund the CBC, save a billion dollars,” he says. “Get rid of the ArriveCan app. Reduce the monstrous contracting out. Stop sending our money to foreign dictators, to terrorists, and to international bureaucracies that waste it on ourselves.”
Oh, about those “dictators and terrorists” to whom Canada is apparently giving money? When asked to clarify, he could only come up with the $257 million given to the Asian Infrastructure Bank, which funds low-carbon projects in China and other parts of Asia. Poilievre, though, suggested it’s really about “building pipelines that we don’t allow to be built here” (we do, of course: see TMX and Coastal GasLink) and “designed to re-establish the ancient Silk Road of the Chinese empire. Why would we pay to establish some kind of imperial silk dynasty with Canadian tax dollars for a communist dictatorship? It’s insane.”
This is a childish answer to a serious question, but it’s a telling one as well. It’s typical of Poilievre’s approach to politics, one designed to dumb everything (and everyone) down to an elementary school level of analysis. His fondness for simplistic — dare I say, Trumpish? — political formulations and his inability to resist blaming his opponents for everything under the sun might appeal to the conservative base, but it surely sits less comfortably with the general public. Most people, I think — I hope — understand there are no easy solutions to the challenges we face, especially when it comes to things like climate change and other global economic and geopolitical realities.
The Trudeau Liberals have less than two years to remind Canadians of who Poilievre really is and why his fundamentally unserious approach to politics is a threat they should take more seriously. Given their demonstrated lack of competence on a bunch of different files of late, that might be well beyond their abilities at this point. You can only campaign on being the steady hand at the wheel if the car isn’t swerving all over the place, after all.
But if there’s a path to victory for the Trudeau Liberals in 2025, it has to revolve around Trudeau’s willingness to acknowledge the complexity of the moment we’re in right now.
We live in a world where there are no free lunches, and few easy meals of any sort. Poilievre’s entire value proposition to voters, meanwhile, revolves around serving them an imaginary platter and pretending someone else will pay the bill. It’s long past time the Trudeau Liberals called that out. If they’re going to go down, they might as well do it swinging.
Speaking of free lunches…..
It’s the conservative dream that just won’t die: Canada using LNG exports to meet its emissions reduction goals. Greg Ebel, the CEO of Enbridge, was the latest Albertan to pretend this is a serious approach to addressing climate change rather than a self-serving fantasy that ignores the fact that importing countries like China, Japan, and India aren’t operating as charities — and have no interest in giving away credit for emissions reductions happening in their countries.
In an op-ed for the Financial Post, Ebel writes that Article 6 of the Paris Accord — which allows countries to trade emissions reduction credits through bilateral or multilateral agreements — “presents a major global leadership opportunity for Canada. In fact, it’s been staring us in the face for the past decade, with little to no progress, while the United States has seized upon it.”
This is arrant nonsense. Japan and Switzerland have frameworks in place to buy credits and count them towards their “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), but no deals have yet been struck to that effect. The only thing the United States has seized on here, meanwhile, is the opportunity to convert LNG import terminals into export-oriented ones, and build new facilities on old industrial land in the Gulf of Mexico. In terms of anything to do with Article 6, they’ve achieved the square root of jack squat.
Interestingly, Ebel refers to the Paris Accord as a “legally binding agreement,” which suggests he has at least some awareness of the need for Canada to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions. But his push for more Canadian LNG terminals is really about raising his own company’s top and bottom line. Enbridge’s proposed Westcoast Connector Gas Transmission pipeline would move gas from northeast British Columbia to the coast, where it would feed the proposed Ksi Lisims LNG project.
Once again, this fixation on exporting more LNG to reduce global emissions is really just about finding another way for Alberta to increase its output of fossil fuels. It distracts from the actual work of reducing the emissions that said industry is already contributing to the climate, and consumes valuable political oxygen that we could be using to discuss real and meaningful solutions. Oh, and for folks like Ebel? That’s probably a feature, not a bug.
If his company wants to build a new pipeline, let it stand on its own economic and environmental merits. And if another company wants to export LNG from the west coast, let it do the same. We don’t have time to keep chasing these sorts of free lunches, especially when they’re so easily revealed as such — and when the fossil fuel industry so obviously benefits from the distraction.
As to Ebel’s notion that Ottawa needs to make it easier for companies like Enbridge to build their projects? The truth here, one that oil and gas executives like him have consistently refused to acknowledge, is there are no shortcuts through British Columbia and its unique political and legal geography. The more project proponents try to rush the process, the longer it ends up taking. The west coast of British Columbia isn’t even remotely similar to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and the ongoing effort by Alberta conservatives to pretend otherwise reflects poorly on them. Yes, it might help keep their base of supporters angry at Ottawa and Justin Trudeau, but it won’t help get anything built. Then again, maybe that was never really their true objective.
Why an Alberta Pension Plan is so un-Canadian
Despite a government-funded advertising campaign that’s been going on for weeks now, the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan doesn’t seem any more popular with Albertans. And no wonder: those opposed to the idea are spoiled for choice when it comes to arguments against the scheme. Is it the delusional math that informs the government’s proposal? The risk it could pose to people’s retirement planning and safety in future years? The obvious attempt by the government to manufacture consent, one that has so far proven unsuccessful? Or the fact that it’s being pushed so aggressively by a government that didn’t even have the courage to campaign on it?
For me, it’s the fundamentally un-Canadian nature of the Alberta government’s strategy here, and their attempt to pilfer the retirement savings funds that properly belong to other Canadians. As I wrote on Twitter, we should be perfectly clear: Alberta hasn’t contributed anything to the CPP, save for the employer portion for its own employees. Canadians living and working in Alberta have. That’s the key detail folks like Jack Mintz and other advocates for the idea — and the faulty assumptions that underlie it — refuse to acknowledge.
They also deliberately ignore the reality of Alberta’s demographics, which only appear so outrageously favourable because so many Albertans retire to other parts of the country in their late 40s, 50s and 60s. At this point, huge swathes of the Okanagan are a de-facto Albertan colony, with Kelowna serving as their unofficial capital. Include their pension payouts in the conspicuously gerrymandered math and the numbers start to look a whole lot different.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that withdrawing more than half the funds in the Canada Pension Plan would force Canadians in other provinces to make up the difference. The Alberta-first crowd isn’t particularly interested in the well-being of other Canadians, given the steady stream of nonsense they’ve been fed by conservative politicians about their disproportionate contributions to confederation and the apparent lack of respect they’ve been paid in return. But the part they always seem to miss is that paying the same federal tax rate as other Canadians doesn’t entitle them to preferential treatment by Ottawa, and it doesn’t require other provinces to submit to Alberta’s economic imperatives regardless of the impact they might have on their own interests.
Those of us who have the good fortune to live in Alberta are not special, much as some of us love to pretend otherwise. We are as Canadian as anyone else in this country we share, and it’s long past time that we started acting more like it — not less.
Alberta’s Pyrrhic Supreme Court Victory
Few people (full disclosure: including me) were expecting the Supreme Court of Canada to side against the federal government and its Impact Assessment Act, which was the subject of a reference case originally filed by the Government of Alberta. That was even more true after Russell Brown, the most Alberta-friendly member of the high court, stepped down after allegations of personal misconduct during a recent vacation. But last Friday, the court ruled that major portions of the Act, which oversee approvals of major projects, were declared unconstitutional.
“Environmental protection remains one of today’s most pressing challenges, and Parliament has the power to enact a scheme of environmental assessment to meet this challenge,” Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote in the 5-2 majority decision of the court. “But Parliament also has the duty to act within the enduring division of powers framework laid out in the Constitution…This scheme plainly overstepped the mark.”
Conservative politicians were clearly overjoyed by the surprise win. Former UCP leader and Alberta premier Jason Kenney posted a long thread dedicated to gloating, while his replacement declared her province “open for business.” MP Rachel Thomas best captured the mood when she tweeted that “This is a major victory for the Alberta energy sector and the Canadian people.”
In reality, it’s anything but. The Supreme Court’s decision won’t actually overturn the Impact Assessment Act since it was providing an opinion on a reference case. The federal government has already said it will update the act to reflect the court’s ruling, and that it intends to plow ahead with its proposed Clean Electricity Regulations and promised oil and gas emissions cap. More importantly, Ottawa’s jurisdiction over things like interprovincial pipelines, which are the real impediment to any major new oil and gas development, was reaffirmed by the court’s decision.
For business, the decision is far more likely to add uncertainty than remove it. Years of potential litigation lie ahead between the federal and provincial governments, while Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to eliminate the federal carbon tax stands in the way of big-ticket investments in things like carbon capture and storage and other emissions reduction projects.
And while Danielle Smith apparently thinks the decision puts things like Teck’s Frontier oilsands mine back in play, the truth is that federal oversight and attention was never the project’s biggest problem. When it was mothballed in 2020, CEO Don Lindsay appeared to lay the blame on the lack of alignment between Ottawa and Alberta on climate policy. “[G]lobal capital markets are changing rapidly and investors and customers are increasingly looking for jurisdictions to have a framework in place that reconciles resource development and climate change, in order to produce the cleanest possible products,” his letter to Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said. “This does not yet exist here today.”
It’s hard to see how scrapping the Impact Assessment Act, which was designed in part to give project proponents more clarity, would make things like Teck Frontier more likely to get built. More to the point, the biggest hurdle standing in their way is simple economics. When it was being considered, Teck’s project needed oil prices to average US$75-85 just to break even. After three years of post-pandemic cost inflation on everything from basic materials to labour, it’s safe to assume that figure would be even higher. There are lots of ways that bet could go wrong, from accelerated global climate ambition to a renewed price war led by OPEC, and very few that it could go right.
This is the part that the increasingly noisy oil and gas lobby in Canada refuses to acknowledge. The obstacle standing in the way of projects like Teck Frontier, or new LNG terminals on the west coast, isn’t federal legislation or regulations or the government’s refusal to say enough nice things about them. It’s the inherent conservatism of an industry that, for all of its talk about entrepreneurship and risk-taking, is exceptionally risk-averse. Its biggest leaps forward have been underwritten by government funding, not entrepreneurial zeal, and it’s continuing that pattern with the carbon capture and storage projects it insists it wants to build — and continues to wait for the government to fund on its behalf.
There is no realistic universe where these companies were ever going to roll the dice on a new oilsands project with a break-even price above $100 per barrel, especially when it would take upwards of a decade for the proponent to recover its costs. There’s probably no realistic universe where another new major LNG project gets built, given that it represents a massive bet on the spread between fossil gas prices in North America and Asia. But, of course, our politics aren’t informed by realistic universes any more — just fantastical ones where the federal government is the cause of, and potential solution to, all of industry’s problems.
Good News: The Rise of the “Nones”
If I had to bet whether the United States would be a democracy or a theocracy at the turn of the next century, I think I’d have to bet on the latter. The country’s continued slide away from a rules-based order and towards a glorified personality cult seems almost inevitable at this point, and the religious right is clearly enabling (and abetting) that transformation.
But some new reporting from the Associated Press suggests that all is not, in fact, lost. It documents the rise of what it calls “the nones”, people who don’t identify or affiliate with any organized religion, and their numbers are particularly strong among young people. Indeed, 43% of 18- to 29-year olds identify as “nones”, which seems to augur well for a future in which things like freedom of religion and freedom of speech still matter.
Yes, organized religion still exerts a huge influence over American life, and avowed atheists are only slight less rare than unicorns in their political culture. But maybe, just maybe, the trajectory there isn’t as bleak as it might look sometimes.
The Wrap
I’ve been away for a week taking care of some family stuff, but I managed to squeeze out a couple of columns before I left.
Last week, I wrote about the totally serious, not-at-all-sarcastic case for Alberta independence. Yes, it was written with my tongue buried in my cheek.
I also revisited Alberta’s strange love affair with Quebec, one that seems destined to end in tears. Alberta’s conservative politicians continue to pretend they want to be just like Quebec when their province grows up, but their voters are unwilling to do the things that bring Quebeckers meaningful political power in Ottawa. And with Quebec increasingly opposed to any new fossil fuel development in Canada, it’s hard to see this weird crush lasting much longer.
Finally, because I’m sure at least some of you are wondering, I have nothing useful to say about what’s happening in the Middle East, and I’d strongly suggest that there’s almost nobody in Canada who does. But I’m reminded — by Terry Glavin, I have to confess — of a quote by George Orwell that seems well-suited to the moment we’re in. “To see what is in front of one’s nose,” Orwell said, “needs a constant struggle.”
As we watch the horrors unfold in an increasingly horrible situation over there, I think we’d all do well to keep that in mind.