Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Canada is apparently revelling in its status as the world’s most politically correct country.
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There are undoubtedly many Canadians who are embarrassed, as I am, by the amusement that the American and British media enjoy in referring to us as a people who are obsessively preoccupied with pre-emptively and aggressively making every conceivable concession to previously unheard of sensibilities, supposedly in the interests of being inoffensive. The Trudeau government over the last eight years has been almost entirely preoccupied with three issues, each of which is an inexhaustible reservoir of potential politically correct policy blunders. It has been tireless in exploiting that rich potential for misguided policy.
1) The emphasis has been on climate change, what is misleadingly called “reconciliation” with Canada’s Indigenous people and gender issues. The official pursuit of the government’s goals in these areas has been extremely costly and has produced practically no benefit to the country.
The known facts about climate change must now be familiar even to its catastrophically fixated champions. The hackneyed cliche “settled science,” which along with several others we owe to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore (who at least became a centimillionaire by peddling climate hysteria), is nothing of the kind. There is extensive dissent, especially when it comes to the inaccuracy of climate models and the correct public policy responses to climate change.
There is a consensus that the world has become approximately 1.1 C warmer since 1880, though this varies widely geographically. The climate does appear to be changing in many places but not always in the same way or to the same extent and is extremely difficult to measure.
In the six years of the Second World War, there was, every single day, appalling desecration of land and sea, terrible conflagrations of intensive aerial bombing, massed artillery use, the sinking, ultimately, of millions of tons of shipping with hundreds of millions of barrels of oil released into the oceans, and the entire cataclysm concluded with the only two atomic bombs ever detonated on populated areas.
All of this had no discernible impact on the world’s climate. Much of the alarmist rhetoric on the subject has been thoroughly debunked. Canada’s carbon footprint is substantially less than two per cent of the world’s total, and no changes effected in this country would have the slightest impact on the world’s temperature. The great majority of fossil fuel use is in developing countries, led by China and India, which have made it clear that they will not make any effort to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And the few economically advanced countries, such as Canada, that take this subject seriously have set targets for the reduction of fossil fuel use that they have no chance of achieving and are squandering stupefying amounts of money trying unsuccessfully to accomplish, for no discernible reason.
Several countries have effectively abandoned their targets in response to public outrage at energy cost increases.
2) The officially sponsored agitation about gender is an unutterable waste of the public’s attention: there are only two sexes, and every person must be free to work out their own sexuality without affronting reasonable standards of public decency or engaging in coercive activity, and especially not with minors. This includes the right of adults, but not children, to seek physical surgical changes.
All the rest of this controversy, including the harassment of those who cling to the quaint (constitutionally guaranteed) bourgeois notion of freedom of expression and resist demands that they address interlocutors in improvised gender-altered terms, should never have been legitimized or tolerated.
3) The subject of Canadian policy toward Aboriginal peoples. Neither I nor anyone else that I know of disputes that the Natives have been shabbily treated. I believe the great majority of informed Canadians objects, as I do, to the routine claim by the prime minister and a like-minded claque of supporters and professional advocates of victimhood that any form of genocide was ever attempted against Indigenous people in the history of this country.
It is obvious to almost everyone that those responsible for federal and provincial Indigenous policy should seek out the most representative and competent Indigenous spokespeople and hammer out with them, with generosity and goodwill, an entirely new regime that reflects faithfully the wishes and the interests of those whom it serves.
We have already committed $4.7 billion in reparations for residential schools and what is needed now is not more histrionic lamentation, but remedial action. Those who delight in calling themselves “progressive” must finally take a stab at generating some progress.
These issues are all components of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda that’s now almost universally applied to commercial matters. In this area, too, Canada is unfortunately a leader.
Canada’s corporate sector has capitulated more abjectly than that of any other advanced country to the insane notion that those responsible for the lawful and prosperous direction of the private sector must also busy themselves with the moral imperative to inflict upon their companies the prevailing and frequently fatuous requirement for environmental posturing, tangible lip-service to jejune concepts of egalitarianism and prostrations of participatory corporate administration.
Other than in some companies that have controlling shareholders, the executive function has been so heavily collegialized that no one is really responsible for anything, because our executive class has accepted responsibility for being an environmental busybody for “sustainability” and a militant crusader for faddish social causes, while causing the executive function itself to devolve into a consultative process in pursuit of a public relations objective.
We normally follow the Americans eventually, and many U.S. states have acted to remove ESG pressures on corporations so management may focus again on its raison d’être: maximum profitability along with responsible behaviour and complete compliance with all relevant laws and regulations. Those money management and private equity operations that gather in money from investors and deploy it in pursuit of higher returns have suffered heavy withdrawals where, as in BlackRock and several other large funds, the managers used the funds of their investors to pressure corporations into supporting left-wing causes and political candidates.
The United States is already pulling back from the impulses of what the late British public intellectual and humorist Malcolm Muggeridge called “the great liberal death wish.” This is one area where sensible Canadians will wish to follow the Americans.
Conrad Black: Justin Trudeau's 'great liberal death wish' — National Post
The Trudeau government over the last eight years has been almost entirely preoccupied with three issues, each of which is an inexhaustible reservoir of potential politically correct policy blunders
There are undoubtedly many Canadians who are embarrassed, as I am, by the amusement that the American and British media enjoy in referring to us as a people who are obsessively preoccupied with pre-emptively and aggressively making every conceivable concession to previously unheard of sensibilities, supposedly in the interests of being inoffensive. The Trudeau government over the last eight years has been almost entirely preoccupied with three issues, each of which is an inexhaustible reservoir of potential politically correct policy blunders. It has been tireless in exploiting that rich potential for misguided policy.
1) The emphasis has been on climate change, what is misleadingly called “reconciliation” with Canada’s Indigenous people and gender issues. The official pursuit of the government’s goals in these areas has been extremely costly and has produced practically no benefit to the country.
The known facts about climate change must now be familiar even to its catastrophically fixated champions. The hackneyed cliche “settled science,” which along with several others we owe to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore (who at least became a centimillionaire by peddling climate hysteria), is nothing of the kind. There is extensive dissent, especially when it comes to the inaccuracy of climate models and the correct public policy responses to climate change.
There is a consensus that the world has become approximately 1.1 C warmer since 1880, though this varies widely geographically. The climate does appear to be changing in many places but not always in the same way or to the same extent and is extremely difficult to measure.
In the six years of the Second World War, there was, every single day, appalling desecration of land and sea, terrible conflagrations of intensive aerial bombing, massed artillery use, the sinking, ultimately, of millions of tons of shipping with hundreds of millions of barrels of oil released into the oceans, and the entire cataclysm concluded with the only two atomic bombs ever detonated on populated areas.
All of this had no discernible impact on the world’s climate. Much of the alarmist rhetoric on the subject has been thoroughly debunked. Canada’s carbon footprint is substantially less than two per cent of the world’s total, and no changes effected in this country would have the slightest impact on the world’s temperature. The great majority of fossil fuel use is in developing countries, led by China and India, which have made it clear that they will not make any effort to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And the few economically advanced countries, such as Canada, that take this subject seriously have set targets for the reduction of fossil fuel use that they have no chance of achieving and are squandering stupefying amounts of money trying unsuccessfully to accomplish, for no discernible reason.
Several countries have effectively abandoned their targets in response to public outrage at energy cost increases.
2) The officially sponsored agitation about gender is an unutterable waste of the public’s attention: there are only two sexes, and every person must be free to work out their own sexuality without affronting reasonable standards of public decency or engaging in coercive activity, and especially not with minors. This includes the right of adults, but not children, to seek physical surgical changes.
All the rest of this controversy, including the harassment of those who cling to the quaint (constitutionally guaranteed) bourgeois notion of freedom of expression and resist demands that they address interlocutors in improvised gender-altered terms, should never have been legitimized or tolerated.
3) The subject of Canadian policy toward Aboriginal peoples. Neither I nor anyone else that I know of disputes that the Natives have been shabbily treated. I believe the great majority of informed Canadians objects, as I do, to the routine claim by the prime minister and a like-minded claque of supporters and professional advocates of victimhood that any form of genocide was ever attempted against Indigenous people in the history of this country.
It is obvious to almost everyone that those responsible for federal and provincial Indigenous policy should seek out the most representative and competent Indigenous spokespeople and hammer out with them, with generosity and goodwill, an entirely new regime that reflects faithfully the wishes and the interests of those whom it serves.
We have already committed $4.7 billion in reparations for residential schools and what is needed now is not more histrionic lamentation, but remedial action. Those who delight in calling themselves “progressive” must finally take a stab at generating some progress.
These issues are all components of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda that’s now almost universally applied to commercial matters. In this area, too, Canada is unfortunately a leader.
Canada’s corporate sector has capitulated more abjectly than that of any other advanced country to the insane notion that those responsible for the lawful and prosperous direction of the private sector must also busy themselves with the moral imperative to inflict upon their companies the prevailing and frequently fatuous requirement for environmental posturing, tangible lip-service to jejune concepts of egalitarianism and prostrations of participatory corporate administration.
Other than in some companies that have controlling shareholders, the executive function has been so heavily collegialized that no one is really responsible for anything, because our executive class has accepted responsibility for being an environmental busybody for “sustainability” and a militant crusader for faddish social causes, while causing the executive function itself to devolve into a consultative process in pursuit of a public relations objective.
We normally follow the Americans eventually, and many U.S. states have acted to remove ESG pressures on corporations so management may focus again on its raison d’être: maximum profitability along with responsible behaviour and complete compliance with all relevant laws and regulations. Those money management and private equity operations that gather in money from investors and deploy it in pursuit of higher returns have suffered heavy withdrawals where, as in BlackRock and several other large funds, the managers used the funds of their investors to pressure corporations into supporting left-wing causes and political candidates.
The United States is already pulling back from the impulses of what the late British public intellectual and humorist Malcolm Muggeridge called “the great liberal death wish.” This is one area where sensible Canadians will wish to follow the Americans.
