Getting off of Taxme’s mom, & back to the thread topic….
May I throw in the most rhetorical of rhetorical questions. Did Guilbeault, or Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself, convene meetings with actual farmers and their families before bringing in these measures?
Did any or all of them — via government jet, Pearson is such a bore these days — drop in to Weyburn, or Redvers, or Red Deer or — this is the real challenge — Fort McMurray, to ask the people whose lives and jobs are at stake under this fixation with the Trudeau brand of “climate action,” what they might have to say? Did they test their “law” with the people who have to live with it? The question is its own answer.
As always I must ask — and I know people do not like to be reminded of this question — whether, if farming were as important in Quebec as it is in Saskatchewan, a Trudeau government would issue, arbitrarily, the same mandate? If Ontario was the oil province of Canada, would there not be pipelines going in every direction of the compass?
The Liberal government's fixation with Trudeau-style climate action is fracturing Canada
apple.news
Which leads me to another point. We are in a two-tier Confederation. Perhaps even a three-tier one.
Quebec is a solidly protected singular independent-in-all-but-name entity. It is as close to being a sovereign nation as one can be while still wearing provincial brocade.
Ontario with its population and wealth, and being the centre of finance, communications and parliamentary seats, is a king among barons. The Atlantic provinces — a mere addendum, worth a fly-by but essentially, each on their own, without real force or voice in the Confederation. And British Columbia, sometimes a player, more often a spectator of Ottawa’s distant machinations.
Back to the central point. Where in a Confederation does the power lie for a national government to target, assault and injure the central economic concerns of certain provinces on a say-so? These edicts, measures, bans — call them what you will — keep coming down, as if such great national issues merely require, to take effect, a photo-op besides some tree, with a cluster of nodding ministers behind the PM. And we’re supposed to accept them. (???)
Our country, under this imperative mindset, is unwittingly toying with its own fragmentation.