Am I being too harsh? This is his opinion piece on the subject of the Liberal lead in the polls:
Let’s begin first with principles. It’s a foregone conclusion now that the Harper government has bungled its single most important economic task, that of securing U.S. and Pacific market access for Canadian crude oil. This was the linchpin of the great extractivist imperative, first articulated in the 2012 budget. It’s now 2014 and we’re no closer to a safe, permanent remedy for the Alberta bitumen bubble.
Bungled?
Does the Canadian government exist in a vacuum with no opposition? Is there not a concerted lobby of environmental groups, their rich Democratic backers in the US, their stooges in the Indian (native) communities, who provide the muscle for blockades and other quasi-illegal activities? Did the Canadian government just trip over its own feet? Did it not depend on US government approval for the Keystone pipeline?
Recognizing the falsity of his position, Den Tandt then moves the topic to the failure of Harper to persuade President Obama to ignore his own leftie constituencies and approve the north-south pipeline.
Granted, U.S. President Barack Obama has been inept here. It’s fair to blame him for letting this decision rot on the vine, while the anti-oilsands lobby gathered strength. But rule one of Canada-U.S. relations has long been that the Canadian side, led by the prime minister, must employ skill and guile in ensuring this country’s interests are served, rather than seeking to move the White House by blunt pressure.
The solution: the Conservatives ought to have bought into global warming bullshit and prostrated themselves and harmed the economy before the false god of carbon emissions – more than other countries – to persuade Obama and his global-warming purists of the sincerity of the Conservative government’s penitential intentions. Maybe only Liberals are capable of such hypocrisy.
Very simply: In order to counter the protectionist and frankly jingoistic anti-Keystone pressure being applied to the Obama administration by billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, among others, the Harper government would have to have imposed carbon-emission restrictions on Canada’s oil and gas sector, either solo or in partnership with the Obama administration. The government would have to have enthusiastically embraced sustainable development, and then trumpeted that shift. Former federal minister and soon-to-be Progressive Conservative Alberta Premier Jim Prentice has long recommended a similar posture. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney pointedly did the same in April. Instead, the Tories have played spitball politics.
Spitball politics? And then Den Tandt abandons any pretence of rationality – namely his anti-global warming argument – by admitting that the US State Department has found to be carbon neutral. So why the need to harm the Canadian economy by all the self flagellation preached in the paragraphs above? He writes:
just as Keystone itself has been found to be climate-neutral by the State Department, and for the same basic reason. Changing the means of shipment does not mean less fuel gets burnt
So is “idiot” too strong a term for Den Tandt? When a man contradicts his central position, his basic premise that we ought to have imposed carbon-emission restrictions while acknowledging that Keystone is carbon neutral, we are in the presence of an idiot.
Or a pompous fool. Take your pick.