Sometimes, it’s what you don’t say that tells the real story. That seems to be the case with Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre’s silence following Monday’s shocking allegations from the RCMP about the Indian government’s illegal activities. Poilievre is the most terminally online political leader in Canadian history, and he rarely misses an opportunity to share his opinion on something that involves Justin Trudeau. And yet, he couldn’t be bothered to say a word about the biggest political bombshell we’ve seen dropped on Canada in a long time. Instead, he posted a generic Thanksgiving Day greeting on Twitter and called it a day.
But oh, what a day it was. As Global’s Mercedes Stephenson and Stewart Bell reported, “Agents working out of India’s high commission in Ottawa and consulates in Vancouver and Toronto were behind dozens of violent crimes across Canada that targeted opponents of the Modi government.” These six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, were also allegedly involved in the plot to murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023. And as the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Marieke Walsh noted in their own reporting, information about this campaign of state-sponsored violence in Canada was “shared with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national-security adviser Ajit Doval and Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah.”
The Conservative Party of Canada did put out a statement on Poilievre’s behalf — one that, of course, blamed Justin Trudeau for everything — but Poilievre didn’t even see fit to share it with his followers. Instead, it was laundered through the social media accounts of CPC MPs Michael Chong, Jasraj Singh Hallan and Tim Uppal. Poilievre didn’t bother to retweet them, either.
Indeed, you’d never know about the RCMP’s allegations against the Indian government if you got your information about Canadian politics from Poilievre’s feed, which featured tweets about a custom cabinet maker in Etobicoke, a group of Tae Kwan Do students in Brampton, and the door knocking he did for a CPC candidate in Mississauga-Lakeshore. There’s no way that’s an accident.
His statement, by the way, didn’t mention India’s well-documented efforts to interfere in Canadian elections, including the very Conservative leadership race that Poilievre went on to win after one of his key rivals, Patrick Brown, was disqualified. As the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference has heard, an October 2022 CSIS Intelligence Assessment concluded that “Government of India agents appear to have interfered in the Conservative’s (sic) 2022 leadership race by purchasing memberships for one candidate while undermining another.”
It’s safe to assume the Indian government’s agents weren’t buying memberships for Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown. As one of Brown’s campaign team members told Baaz, an online news outlet catering to the Sikh diaspora, “we knew that local pro-Modi organizations alongside Indian government actors were mobilizing against the Brown campaign as they were concerned with the strong support we had from both the Sikh and Muslim communities.” According to Baaz’s 2023 reporting, one of the MPs who sided with Brown was told by Indian government officials that they should retract their support for him. As it happens, two of them did just that in early June.
There’s no way of knowing if the Indian government had anything to do with Brown’s eventual disqualification from the race in July 2022. As the Brown campaign argued in its official statement at the time, the decision to remove him was based on anonymous allegations they were never given an opportunity to evaluate — and seemed driven by a desire to protect the front-runner. “It was expecting a coronation for Pierre Poilievre,” the statement says. “When the final membership numbers came in, it became clear Poilievre did not have the points to win this race.”
Generally speaking, I’d file this sort of spin under the heading of “predictably sour grapes.” Losing campaigns always find creative ways to blame other people for their loss, and that includes ones that get disqualified for breaking the rules. But Poilievre’s behaviour ever since, most notably his continued refusal to undergo the security screening needed to get briefed on classified intelligence related to foreign interference — something all other party leaders have done — keeps raising the same question: what is he so afraid of here?
If he wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, Poilievre needs to clear the air on his relationship with the Government of India once and for all. He needs to get fully briefed on the issue of foreign interference in our elections, if only to better understand the full scope of what he might have to face one day. He needs to explain why he was so uncharacteristically quiet about the RCMP’s findings, and why he seems to reflexively side with Narendra Modi’s government rather than our own. And he needs to prove, once and for all, that he’s willing to put Canada’s best interests above his own.
The political plague of lies keeps spreading
It wasn’t that long ago that getting caught in a flat-out lie could end someone’s political career, or at the very least alter its trajectory. Then, as with so many things, Donald Trump came along and changed that equation for the worse. He has proven to other conservative politicians that they can lie with impunity, that there are no real consequences associated with deceit and deception, and that the truth is what you make of it. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has argued, “there is no shame in lying now.”
Canada’s Conservatives have clearly been paying attention. Whether it’s yet another video that blames the carbon tax for the recent increase in grocery prices, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, or BC Conservative leader John Rustad telling voters he witnessed a drug overdose death that never actually happened, lying now appears to be a regular feature of the right’s political toolbox.
So too, it seems, is inventing characters or anecdotes to advance a pre-existing narrative. Whether it’s “Briane in Chilliwack” or “Mustafa in Calgary”, their stories — impossible to verify, of course — always seem to align perfectly with the pre-existing Conservative talking points on the issue. They almost certainly learned here from Jason Kenney, who cited the feelings of Venezuelan refugees about COVID-19 public health measures as justification for his government's failure to act more quickly. When Kenney made the critical error of giving the public enough identifying information, the CBC was tracked them down and tested their story against the one Kenney had provided on their behalf. Predictably, Kenney had stretched the truth.
Lying about things like the carbon tax or COVID-19 measures is bad enough, and the damage it does to our shared discourse is real and measurable. But as Trump and his Republican Party keep showing us, these lies will only get bigger and more dangerous unless we find a way to nip this in the bud. The recent pair of hurricanes in the US southeast attracted a whole new set of lies and liars, and they actively impaired the ability of first responders to help those in need, even putting FEMA workers’ safety at risk. Not surprisingly, many of those lies were aired on Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Canada doesn’t have hurricane truthers here yet — mostly, I suspect, because we don’t really get hurricanes very often, for now — but we do have people who are more than willing to weaponize natural disasters. As Liberal MP Adam Van Koeverden noted during a recent Environment Committee meeting, Parks Canada officials are now receiving death threats as a result of an ongoing Conservative effort to blame them for this summer’s massive fire in Jasper National Park. “In asserting that Parks Canada didn’t proceed with controlled burns or mechanical thinning for political reasons, they’re blaming the same people who they should be thanking for saving Jasper. It's been debunked multiple times,” he said.
Conservative MPs on the committee also suggested that Parks Canada’s refusal to let a small private contractor into the Jasper townsite somehow contributed to the disaster. Never mind, for the moment, that Jasper mayor Richard Ireland made it clear that no amount of firefighting equipment or personnel could stop its approach. As Jasper Local’s Bob Covey pointed out in a recent piece, the Conservative claims coming from Ottawa don’t line up with the evidence on the ground in his community:
“Jasper said yes. To resources. To help. They said yes early and they said yes often. They said yes to wildland teams and they said yes to municipal departments. We kept saying yes,’ Parks Canada fire specialist Landon Shepherd said. But they didn’t say yes to everyone. They did not say yes to a self-dispatching team who had not signed an agreement to abide by the ICT’s rules of engagement. And they did not say yes to a crew of mercenaries known as Arctic Fire Safety Services, the bulk of whose resources arrived the day after 350 structures burned in Jasper. ‘We can’t just have rogue agents patrolling around,’ Shepherd explained. ‘It’s too dangerous. What if they get in the way of wildfire operations we’re doing?’”
These facts haven’t prevented the lies about what happened in Jasper and who’s to blame from spreading like, well, wildfire. When there’s no political penalty attached to this sort of behaviour, it’s only going to continue — and only going to get worse. That’s why, as I’ve written, we need something like a law against lying in politics, or at the very least some sort of code of conduct that actively discourages this. Let the free speech advocates make their usual noises, and let everyone else see just who stands up and speaks out on behalf of the right to lie to Canadians. The truth can still set us free here — if we want it to.
Postmedia is the ultimate sellout
Like most media companies in Canada, Postmedia is struggling to generate revenue as online companies expand their chokehold on the advertising market. Unlike most media companies in Canada, Postmedia is apparently willing to sell its credibility for pennies on the dollar. Last week, users of its app were served up an ad that looked like a news story claiming “Jagmeet Singh suffers fatal accident on live television.” This is the worst sort of clickbait, and it should be beneath a company that ostensibly trades in accurate information.
But its decision to sell the front page of the Chronicle Herald — the most important newspaper in Nova Scotia, and one it just recently acquired from Saltwire in July — to false advertising from the Government of Alberta is an even bigger problem. Selling the front page of any newspaper is bad enough, but allowing the advertiser to print lies on it should be a bridge even the most revenue-starved corporation won’t cross. And yet, that’s exactly what happened, with the large font headline proclaiming that “Ottawa’s energy production cap will make groceries more expensive.”
First and foremost: no matter how many times the Government of Alberta and its clients in the oil and gas industry want to pretend otherwise, the cap is on emissions, not production. As University of Calgary economics professor Blake Shaffer said on social media, “How is this overt misinformation legal? I’m no fan of the policy, but it’s an *emissions* cap, not energy. Purposely conflating the two is pure disinformation and also a slap in the face to those claiming to try to reduce emissions intensity.”
The federal government’s targets merely formalize the promises and pledges that oil and gas companies have been making for years. The noisy objections here coming from industry and conservative politicians are really just an admission that they were never serious about living up to those promises. Now, it seems, they’re prepared to ramp up their campaign of gaslighting and take it nationwide.
As for the impact it would have on grocery prices in Atlantic Canada? Most of the oil imports coming into that part of the country are from the United States, and it can always send an extra tanker or two if production from Western Canada suddenly tanked. Transportation costs are only a small portion of the cost of groceries, something we know because it’s had to be checked again and again in light of the endless stream of nonsense about the carbon tax coming from Conservatives. Canada’s carbon tax has increased by $30 per tonne over the last two years and yet inflation in food prices has decreased substantially, from 11.4 per cent in January 2023 to 2.4 per cent in August. Food price inflation in Canada has also essentially matched what the United States — which has no carbon tax — has seen. In reality, the real drivers of food price inflation are things like supply chain bottlenecks, drought, and cattle cycles.
Neither Postmedia nor the Government of Alberta are interested in sharing these facts with readers in Atlantic Canada. Instead, they’re going to drown them in misinformation about the aims and outcomes of federal policy in order to prevent the oil and gas industry from having to live up to its promises.
Quick Hits
In brighter news, the renewable energy revolution continues to unfold in the rest of the world. As the International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2024 report shows, 670 GW of new solar, wind and other renewable capacity was added in 2024. Better still, it expects to see 5,500 GW added by 2030, a figure that’s equal to the current total power capacity of China, India, the United States and the European Union combined.
This puts the pledges made by nearly 200 governments at COP 28 last year to triple the world’s renewable capacity by the end of the decade within reach. “Renewables are moving faster than national governments can set targets for. This is mainly driven not just by efforts to lower emissions or boost energy security – it’s increasingly because renewables today offer the cheapest option to add new power plants in almost all countries around the world,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “This report shows that the growth of renewables, especially solar, will transform electricity systems across the globe this decade.… By 2030, we expect renewables to be meeting half of global electricity demand.”
This is the real threat to Alberta’s oil production: not the federal government holding the oil and gas companies to their word, but simple economics. The electrification of transportation is already chewing into global oil demand, and that will only continue — perhaps at increasing rates — as both electric vehicles and renewable energy continue to get cheaper in tandem. Maybe it’s time for the federal government to run its own advertising campaign in Alberta around this (I hear Postmedia’s front page is available).
And speaking of grocery prices, a study published recently in the journal Nature suggests that so-called “heatflation”— the portion of inflation caused by the climate crisis — could cause global food prices to rise by up to three per cent annually by 2035. Beyond that point, it depends on how good of a job the world does at reducing its emissions. “Beyond 2035 the magnitude of estimated pressures on inflation diverges strongly across emission scenarios, suggesting that decisive mitigation of greenhouse gases could substantially reduce them,” the authors write. “Under a best-case emission scenario, exogenous pressures on inflation are only marginally larger in 2060 than in 2035, but a worst-case emission scenario would cause pressures on food inflation exceeding 4 per cent per year across large parts of the world.”
In other words, if the Government of Alberta actually wants to protect people in Atlantic Canada from rising grocery prices, it should force its oil and gas industry to actually reduce its emissions like it has promised. Based on the way Alberta’s Environment Minister was triggered by the very mention of the term “heatflation,” I wouldn’t hold my breath there.
Finally, I wanted to highlight a couple of pieces that caught my eye this week. First, there’s the warning in The Walrus from Gerald Butts — yes, that Gerald Butts — about rising separatist sentiment in Quebec and the role that climate policy could play there.
“It’s easy to imagine the ‘Yes’ side campaigning on a modern version of Quebec’s historical ‘maître chez nous’ argument,” he writes. “It would go something like this: ‘We can be a clean-energy superpower, the Norway of North America. We’ll never get anything serious done on climate change while we’re tied to that oil and gas company the Anglos call a country.’ Sovereigntists will argue that independence is Quebec’s path to prosperity in the new-energy economy, and that a ‘Yes’ vote is the clearest possible statement of its determination to fight climate change.”
With Pierre Poilievre as Prime Minister, and Danielle Smith still running the show in Alberta, this could be an argument that resonates with a lot of Quebeckers.
We’ll close with my colleague John Woodside’s wonderfully wonkish piece on the Bank of Canada’s role in helping manage the financial risks being created by climate change. “The Bank of Canada is a lender of last resort when Canadian banks are in trouble, so could wield tremendous influence on how commercial banks like RBC, TD and others conduct business,” he writes. “One way to do that would be to charge higher interest rates for commercial banks exposed to fossil fuels, imposing a cost in the present, rather than leaving it as a future risk that could be ignored. Another way to make fossil fuel investments less attractive would be to require banks to keep more money in reserve with the central bank if their lending to fossil fuels crosses a certain threshold.”
It’s an interesting idea. What do you think? Send me a note at [email protected].