The environment minister clearly wants Canada to deindustrialize
In recent years, governments are increasingly turning to a particular tool to deal with things they don’t like: the ban.
Depending on which way one leans, one may agree or disagree with a prohibition. But the practice itself is dangerous because it is an inevitable slippery slope. Once the public acquiesces to a ban or other sort of restriction, further bans are sure to follow. This was the fate of the smoking ban, which first limited cigarette smoking to outdoor areas, and has since escalated in countries like New Zealand to a permanent lifetime ban on any tobacco products for citizens born after 2009, regardless of age. This is an affront to economic freedom and consumer sovereignty.
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Enter Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault with his affront to sanity. This week, the enlightened minister announced that the Government of Canada would no longer be building any roads. For those who care to look, it is clear this is another slip on the slope to Guilbeault’s real desire for deindustrialization, the path to which he has now laid out for all Canadians to see.
Speaking to a conference on public transit Monday, Guilbeault told his audience that, “Our government has made the decision to stop investing in new road infrastructure. Of course, we will continue to be there for cities, provinces and territories to maintain the existing network, but there will be no more envelopes from the federal government to enlarge the road network.”
He added that “the analysis we have done is that the network is perfectly adequate to respond to the needs we have.”
To be fair to Guilbeault, later claimed he had been misunderstood.
“We have programs to fund roads,” he said Wednesday. “What we have said, and maybe I should have been more specific in — in the past, is that we — we don’t have funds for large projects like the Troisième Lien that the (Coalition Avenir Québec) has been trying to do for — for many years.”
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So … no funds for the large projects the federal government should be (and normally is) involved with. Colour me skeptical when I say that’s functionally the same thing as a ban.
As much as this is rightly grabbing headlines, we shouldn’t lose sight of other comments from that same conference speech. Guilbeault noted that Canadians should not think that “electric cars will solve all our problems” and that over-reliance on them would be “an error, a false utopia that will let us down over the long term.” And there it is. The future slide down the slippery slope has been telegraphed for us all to see: electric cars won’t be enough. Get on a bike, citizens.
This is the classic activist playbook on banning things. First, start with a laudable or even feasible goal — like lowering emissions or limiting smoking — that most reasonable people agree with. Second, start halting funding and implementing stealth bans on what you deem to be harmful, irrespective freedoms they impinge upon. Third, begin hinting that all the good work being done isn’t enough, and soon even the initial solution (electric vehicles) should be abandoned for more extreme measures (public transit) or even full-on bans.
Such environmental zealotry has consequences. If we need any warning of where this goes, have a gander at Germany, which just slashed its economic outlook for 2024 as it tumbles into a full-blown recession. Germany’s economic affairs minister has said that the country “cannot go on this way” and that its economic outlook is “dramatically bad.” High energy prices and lack of investment in key infrastructure is ultimately to blame. Germany shut down its safe and clean nuclear plants for no reason other than political posturing and this is the result: an industrial powerhouse staggering forward and looking at an unnecessarily bleak future.
Guilbeault has unintentionally given us valuable insight into what he really wants: deindustrialization, shuttering of towns and businesses and a general halt on improved infrastructure, roads or otherwise. This is the same logic behind a bill that was tabled before the House of Commons by NDP MP Charlie Angus last week, which intends to ban the promotion of fossil fuels.
Climate zealots like Guilbeault do not help their cause. They embarrass it. Suggesting the road network is sufficient today ignores the need for Canada to grow both economically and from a population standpoint. In other words, it ignores reality. Our population grew by over one million people last year and the luminaries in cabinet now believe no new roads will ever be required? The Onion weeps at such headlines.
Somewhere in Canada, there are people who used to identify as Liberals, or maybe still do, who see these policies for the madness they are. Guilbeault and his circus are not ministerial material. They are extreme activists who never made the transition from scaling buildings to governing a country.
Bans are not the answer. Our government needs to get out of its current top-down economic dirigisme delusion and see to its responsibility for providing quality infrastructure — like roads — which will ultimately create more wealth for our country.
National Post
Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.
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