Last night in the Vancouver area was a case study in how even carbon-taxed gasoline, and pump prices above $1.50/litre, aren’t even beginning to make a change in the average person’s habits, exemplified by jumping behind the wheel and sitting idling for hours in traffic. (In the interests of fairness, I count myself amongst that group — although a combination of good timing with the double lane northbound on the Lions’ Gate Bridge and the reopening of the Ironworkers’ Memorial Second Narrows Bridge meant we only spent 25 minutes in the queue on West Georgia St. to access the North Shore. This is not an exercise in pointing fingers: we all have a lot of habits to re-educate.)

What made this fascinating was the sheer number of people moving back and forth between the North Shore and the City core for the purpose of getting to a prime vantage point to see the Dominion Day fireworks at Canada Place, launched above Burrard Inlet, which separates North Vancouver from Vancouver proper — and that, from the prime points of Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver to the area around Canada Place itself runs the SeaBus, a public transport system (plus free parking in quantity at Lonsdale Quay). In other words, the long queue — stretching from the bridge approach all the way back to three blocks from Lonsdale Quay of people trying to leave the North Shore for the city — was eminently avoidable (as was my family’s car trip to North Vancouver for dinner and fireworks watching as well).

Nevertheless, complaining about the sheer cost of fuel, cars lined up and docilely spewed exhaust while consuming tankloads of fuel, simply because we can’t imagine any other way of getting there from here. (Raphael Alexander’s report at his blog, Unambiguously Ambidextrous, on his mis-adventures in road life, serve as another view on yesterday’s behaviour here in Lotusland, the ecotopian gem of the country.)

It ought to be clear enough, one would think, that we have approached an inflection point where how we lived previously is in jeopardy, and that learning new habits is required. (It was in the summer of 2001 that I was purchasing fuel for my car — the same trusty economical Honda Civic I still drive — for $0.54.1/litre; today it’s $1.52.0.) Yet nothing has really changed: we complain, but suck it up and continue to pay. In the same way we move to ever-farther suburbs (excusing our pending commuting costs as “something that will come back down”) to maintain a reasonable cost of accommodation, or take on masses of debt in a price bubble real estate market (when an 80-year-old bungalow on a minimal lot in need of serious renovation and repair in my neighbourhood sells for $2.3 million, all I can do is shake my head and picture the likelihood the buyer will end up under water with that mortgage!) — common sense has left the building, and mythology and a refusal to recognise that the changes have already occurred and now intensifying in amplitude and intensity rules the day. As Shane Edwards at The Politic.com pointed out, the “law of unanticipated consequences” now waits in the wings, bringing further disruptions and systemic shocks. Enjoy the summer; the fall and winter promise to be rocky, indeed!

I engaged in a quick conversation at lunch hour today with a fellow user of Twitter.com whom I happened to bump into in person (you can follow me on Twitter via this link) and he noted how the language of environmental change offered by his neighbours in the Bowen Island community is not borne out in practice — down to development on the island and the decisions being made with general public approval that reflect a “growth mentality” unabated. We parted agreeing that the price signals being received are nowhere near the point where behaviour will begin to change. “A doubling, at least, to $3.00/litre [and its equivalents for heating oil, natural gas, etc.] will be needed” was our consensus.

Since that conversation, however, I’m not convinced that even that will be enough. This is not even a reflection of the lack of investment in alternative public infrastructure. Rather, the rapidly freezing real estate market (it has flipped, suddenly in the last six weeks, into a buyer’s market from a seller’s market) and the mass indebtedness of society will cause us to freeze, deer-in-the-headlights style, in our current arrangements. Many will be trapped in mortgages that are under water, owing more than the sale of their property will realise, and forced to continue driving to work, to buy groceries, to ferry children in child-unfriendly suburbs (cul-de-sac communities branching off of arterial roads with single-purpose zoning are, alas, decidedly child-unfriendly: there’s no alternative to being driven), and the higher costs of everything just bring the moment of dispossession or bankruptcy closer. If one is trapped and there is no alternative, change is seldom entertained.

It has, of course, the potential to get much worse. Business activity will be severely impaired. Jobs will be shed in an effort to manage rising costs. Goods delivery will be increasingly erratic, as trucking falls apart (already its economics have eaten the profits from driving, and truckers are going bankrupt or parking their rigs because they can’t afford to operate them). Laying taxes down on top of these — BC is already sending the public smoke signals that the promise of lowering personal and business income taxes as the carbon tax escalates might not be kept if the economy slows, as “revenue neutrality” will convert into “maintain government revenues” — is a deadly double whammy.

As W. B. Yeats said in his well-known poem, “The Second Coming”, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. This is what it will take to bring us to the point of actually changing our habits. For, as Yeats also said, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The average citizen is not bad; he or she is merely juggling priorities, and trying to hold his or her nose above the water while being squeezed unmercifully. Meanwhile, as always, those who thrive on controlling others escalate their volume and demand “action, more action”, thus making the problem worse as unanticipated consequences continue to pile up. Eventually, of course, the centre is rejected and the anarchy comes, but by then a generation or two have lost their assets and been crippled, and society has fallen apart to be rebuilt again.

Many, of course, plant their belief in technological change, most recently as reported in The Economist. In the long run, technological advances may well give us energy alternatives that make sense. In the short to medium term, however, we cannot reasonably expect the development and large scale deployment of the alternatives required, especially when delaying the purchase of a new vehicle is the first choice of action for anyone who is already financially strapped (and in BC, where a twenty year useful life for an automobile is not at all out of the question, and the cost of living is already sky high, don’t expect a fast turnover of the fleet on the roads to take advantage of changes). Demonstration projects and local initiatives, yes — not a wholesale replacement of the fossil fuel economy. (Indeed, just as with the oil sands in Alberta, which required the previous rise to a sustained oil price of $50.00/bbl or higher to make them economically viable, these alternatives will require today’s prices to be sustained or go higher to make them economically viable. Only those who are full of passionate intensity also believe the laws of supply and demand, or of sustainable economic activity, can be waived aside with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen and a politician’s speech.

No, it is the very dependence upon private (and near-private) motor transportation that must be overcome. But our urban and suburban infrastructures, our “globalised supply chain” economy, our ideas about single-purpose zoning and many more “facts on the ground” stand four-square against changing this, except for those willing to relocate and take losses in economic potential to do so early (the later switchers will find that the viable non-driving infrastructure is “not available at any price”).

Never forget that the Campbell Government’s top transportation priority is not public transportation, but roads for private trucking and private cars. The carbon tax that took effect yesterday is just a cash grab despite all the rhetoric: all the rest of their programme is geared to “more of the same”. Ignore their passionate intensity on the subject. As for the Stéphane Dion “Green Shift”, it is this and ten-fold worse, with its unabashed sense that “government will know best” — and no sense of what the priorities ought to be.

The life portrayed at Barkerville is returning quickly to being the best we can expect, except that we shall face it in the ruins of a civilisation that built to excess on a non-renewable resource basis. Where is the leader who will speak the truth of this? Where is the elimination of programmes to make way for investments in public infrastructure to mitigate that future? Where is the down-sizing of government to deal with a society that can’t afford its current taxation level as its economic output shrinks?

For make no mistake, if we do not prepare for this, all the personal habit changing in the world will be overcome by the violence and anarchy that will be unleashed as the centre finally fails to hold.

Today marks the 141th recurrence of the coming into force of the British North America Act of 1867 and thus the transition of the colonies known as the Provinces of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into this new creation, the Dominion of Canada. It is for this reason that this day has been historically known as “Dominion Day” — and so I still call it.

I do not wish to rant about Pierre Trudeau and his underhanded stealing of our national symbols and heritage in an afternoon, shovelling three readings of his act to, amongst other things, change the name of our national holiday to the insipid “Canada Day”, through both the House of Commons and the Senate in the space of an hour or so, then driving the act for Royal Assent to the Governor-General’s residence so that, between lunch and dinner, our history as a nation was disposed of. Just let it be said that I disagree fundamentally with his actions and refuse to recognise his changes. (Perhaps one day I shall be blessed with a Government in Ottawa that will undo this travesty — but I’m not holding my breath waiting for it.)

Instead, today, to celebrate Dominion Day, I want to reflect on what makes Canadians “Canadian”. This is as true of the newest immigrant who chooses to remain here, landed (even if never becoming a citizen), as of those of us who (unlike me) can trace their Canadian roots back hundreds of years to before the coming of European settler colonists.

We are the land of multiple identities, overlaid and interacting one with another.

Few nations have consciously chosen to be so, especially since the American and French Revolutions, which brought forth the notion of (to use Eric Voegelin’s words) a “civic theology” to bind their inhabitants together. The United Kingdom attempted something less deep, overlaying the notion of being British on the top of being (at one level) Irish, Welsh, Scottish or English, and at another level being of a particular shire or county.

When our Fathers of Confederation met — and we should not forget that it was the Maritime colonies who called that meeting to discuss forming a unitary state, and that the representatives of the Province of Canada who came then discussed a larger project (but one that could not be carried out in the context of a unitary state, thus requiring a Federal model — they recognised the pre-existing identities of the parts of what would become Canada. They also recognised that the British model would serve a Confederated Canada well: Queen-in-Parliament would apply at two levels of government, and each would have their respective domains.

In choosing to name our land, the original idea was “Kingdom of Canada”. (The Queen is Queen of Canada in her own right; if the United Kingdom became a republic tomorrow and overthrew the monarchy, the Queen would still be our Queen. Indeed, the first Act of Parliament following the death of King George VI was one to recognise Queen Elizabeth as having ascended the throne — and to style her “Elizabeth II” to avoid confusion [England's Queen Elizabeth I having reigned long before the Canadian monarchy existed, or, indeed, settler colonies in what is now Canada]. At the passing of our current monarch, we may choose to enthrone someone other than the inheritor of the British throne — but we will remain King-or-Queen-in-Parliament for all that.)

A good name, but there were worries about the reaction across the border in the United States, where the Union Army, having just won the Civil War, could be remobilised easily. The choice that was made, therefore, was “Dominion of Canada”, a new term in political parlance, to recognise the monarchical principle without suggesting that a royal house was being settled in North America. The name was used by others: the Dominion of Newfoundland and the Dominion of New Zealand come to mind — but we were the first.

We fail, often, to remember that our formative constitutional document, and our form of government, falls amongst the oldest continuous ones on earth. France, for instance, has been through an empire, three republics and the Vichy interregnum in the same time we have governed ourselves. Germany was proclaimed in 1871, when BC became Canada’s sixth province and four years after the Dominion was proclaimed, and has been through an empire, two republics plus the Soviet republic in the east, the Reich and occupation by the Allies since then. In other words, long-standing governmental systems are quite rare. We should be proud of how well our forefathers built.

From the beginning, it was expected that we would be citizens of our country, of our province, perhaps even of our region within that province. Rather than subsuming all into one “love of country”, as a civic theology impresses upon citizens born and naturalised alike, we have always accommodated the notion, so well expressed originally in Plato and as echoed in the works of Canadian philosopher George Grant, that love of the whole is built up from love of particulars. We are called, in other words, to have multiple identities, multiple loyalties, and to (as a mathematician might note) to have these be fractal structures and form a complex adaptive system of evolving identity at the national level.

Multiculturalism (yet another “gift” of the Cartesian-inspired rational Trudeauvian recreation of Canada) plays its role in this as well, as long as the multicultural community comes to share in the fractal Canadian identity (and so, to CKNW’s Christy Clark, who won an award for her shriek at a guest over whether or not “New Canadians” needed to become “Europeans”, I say “to the extent that Canada is European in its civilisation and culture then, yes, all of us do, to some extent. That’s the nice part about the Canadian identity: it is not one that replaces or encompasses other identities one has: it is just another part of the person who holds it.)

The Welsh have a wonderful word — cynefin — that means (more or less) “the place where your multiple identities dwell”. That is what the Dominion of Canada means (as opposed to the half-flag wordmark “Canada” that replaced it under Trudeau). The Trudeau change was one to create a single identity, to rationalise the others out of existence. This, in turn, backfired, and created a void in its place.

The next time you despair at pointing to “single-payer public-sector health care” or the theme for Hockey Night in Canada as symbols of the Canadian identity, saying “is that all there is?”, know that you are living in the world’s first state designed for identities that are a rich tapestry of parts that may not fit perfectly together — and was meant to allow you to be human in this way, rather than moulded to fit an invariant model of what you are to be. Americans, for instance, might say “America: Love It or Leave It”. That thought is alien to the core of a Canadian: we both love and despair, exult and wonder why, with every breath we take — and we do it regardless of what part of the country we are in, or how long we have been here.

We are a land of many nations — many First Nations, the Québécois nation, our various “English Speaking” nations, the Newfoundland nation, and on and on threads taken from around the world — interacting in a kalidoscopic interplay of light and colour. All within a set of traditions that do go back to Europe, and are a part of Western civilisation: this is the inheritance of our founding fathers, and all those who have led this country since. (Even Trudeau, whom I abhor, drew on this: simply different parts.)

We have much, indeed, to be proud of, in our quiet and unassuming way. (It is why, when I bumped into a Francophone Quebecker at the Citadel in Cannes, France, in 1991, he said “In Québec, I am from the Saguenay; in Canada, I am a Québécois; in the world, I am un Canadien”. He was an ardent supporter of both the Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois — and yet said this freely and with passion.) This is who we are.

May you have a joyous Dominion Day, my fellow journeyers on the pathway known as “being Canadian”.

Green Shift, Green Shaft, Red Shift: there are as many names emerging as there are writers. The vitriol is rising: those who don’t offer carte blanche sign-on to the notion of adding a carbon taxation element to the tax scheme (regardless of whether the new tax is “revenue neutral” or not) are climate change deniers, antediluvian cretins and a whole series of other epithetical labels. It’s enough to make one want to climb under the comforter, pull it up and block the world out — except, of course, for the nonce it’s far too hot for that, being summer and all.

So, let’s look at why neither the BC carbon scheme that settles its hooks into my meagre income tomorrow morning nor the Stéphane Dion “we must do this or the world will end” Green Shift promised as policy should the Canadian people be conned into electing a Liberal Government the next time around is deserving of support.

Frankly, both schemes are hung on several petards where these political “leaders” could hoist themselves, thence to flap in the breeze, for neither BC nor the Federal Liberals offer a true programme aimed at the environment (despite the mounds of lying statistics, promised carbon savings, threats and jeremiads unleashed by their hangers on in the corporatist “environmental axis” of academe, foundations and pressure groups). For neither is dealing in reality.

That this sort of idiocy continues to dominate the pages and airwaves of the pabulum-pushing media, of course, is due to the equally inept and ridiculous approach the Harper Government, the BC NDP, etc. are taking to the issue. They’re not dealing in reality, either. In a clash of “ideas” (hah!) between these forces it is Canadians that are the losers.

Reality: Suburbia is a Dead Duck: The notion of a car-centred plot of land with a McMansion on it that requires two parents to be pressed into permanent roles as drivers, to get to work, to get the groceries, to ferry the children everywhere, has run its course. Those who live there, for the most part, are stuck there. House prices will crash decline rapidly to reflect the cost of filling the tank and operating the vehicles. This will be accentuated by the collapse of credit, which is already unfolding around us (and is a correlate to the loss of growth potential as cheap energy fades from the scene, coupled with the blow-off strategies that have ruined balance sheets all through the 1990s and 2000s to date).

Reality: Oil Production is Already in Decline: New finds? Practically none for fifteen years now; what’s been found is extremely expensive to recover, and a small field (by comparison) to boot. World production for the last two years has not exceeded 84 million barrels/day (Mbbl/d), down from its peak of 85.7 Mbbl/d in 2005, despite many new wells, extensive growth in non-traditional oil recovery, etc. Cantarell (formerly the world’s third largest field) is collapsing at over 15% per year; Ghawar (the world’s largest) likewise. Meanwhile world demand is well over 87 Mbbl/d. While there will be price ups-and-downs (as there are with any commodity) the trend is up — and up on an accelerating curve.

What’s more important is that no oil will be saved through carbon taxation. With demand greater than supply, savings in Canada translate into product available for immediate purchase and use elsewhere. In other words, it’s not as though we would be acting to either reduce emissions or save oil for future years, when it will be even harder to come by. (Canada has less than 10 years left of conventional light crude and natural gas. The United States has less than four. Mexico has less than five.) No, it will just be burnt and add to that devil of the twenty-first century, global warming, elsewhere. A true reduction is worth some disruption; taxing ourselves to death to allow the Chinese, the Indians, etc. to drive themselves (and us) to the breaking point of civilisation as we know it just as rapidly makes no sense at all. (Note that Stephen Harper’s objections to Kyoto have centred, in good measure, on its exclusion of these countries: apparently “blue” is greener than “red”, “orange”, “teal” or “green” itself, not that any of that army of environmental “experts” nor zeitgeist-setting tub-thumpers like Lawrence Martin, Jeffrey Simpson, Carol Goar, etc. will acknowledge it.)

Reality: Trucking is for the “last mile”, not for distance: So shipping goods by truck, if fuel will be hard to come by, is a pretty dumb idea, right? Not according to the BC Government, nor the Green Shift. BC wants to build new perimeter roads, new bridges, etc., all to make shipping by truck even easier. Billions to be spent — ahead of the investments in alternative transport, either as public transit, interurban rail or heavy rail infrastructure for commerce (and nothing for water-borne transport) — to make it possible to build ever more suburbs on the country’s prime agricultural land. Stunned? You bet! Meanwhile the Dion Green Shaft makes Western Canadians and Atlantic Canadians pay so that the same sprawl lifestyle in Ontario and Québec can be maintained and extended. (Sprawl in the West and in the East isn’t sustainable either, of course, but sucking the productive parts of the country dry to keep the unproductive parts — such as Dalton McGuinty’s “same old transfer mind-set” province — carrying on just as before ends up reducing us all to penury (and makes the inevitable changes we must make that much harder for the waste of the resources we have today).

But, hey, it’s about votes, right? Not about the environment, not about changing us to live in the real twenty-first century: it’s all about just getting elected (or in Campbell’s case in BC, re-elected yet again). À l’enfer avec vous politiciens libéraux perfides — especially those who have the knowledge to know better, like Garth Turner. Comment about Garth Turner removed.

Reality: We need a better infrastructure: We need a massive investment in rail, and an electrification of many of the lines. We need to restore the interurban (lighter rail, regional services) systems we once had and ripped up to accommodate the automobile. We need electrically-run public transit: trolley buses or streetcars or light rail trams. We need the nuclear and hydro plants to power these — or a minimal number of carbon sequestration coal plants. We need to restore water-borne transport systems, using our rivers and canals. We need local agriculture. We need local manufacturing (no more McCrap from China at the “Great Wall” Mart). We need to restore communities of human scale. There is a long list of jobs, in other words, and it will be expensive.

This is what a real environmental programme would look like. Note that none of this depends on changing the behaviour of any other nation: just our own. We (barely) have the time and resources to do this now, but we (unlike our southern neighbours) can do it — our cracking of deficit financing last decade by first Chrétien and then provincial premiers, building on the removal of operating deficits under the Mulroney years, has given the country the fiscal capacity needed.

Separately, once in a generation you can uproot and restructure the tax system in a big way. If there is a complaint I have about the BC carbon tax regime and the proposed Green Shift it is that it misses that opportunity. Wipe out income tax entirely and replace it with consumption taxation (carbon and/or value added tax). Wipe out all other taxes (excise, gasoline, etc.) and just have a pump-based carbon tax. This was a time for big opportunities. Unfortunately, what we’re getting are the ideas of little men afraid of their shadows.

The Conservatives have yet to be heard from: It is time for the Conservatives to stop whingeing, fear-mongering and lashing out. Will they provide what no other party has (or probably can): a set of policy proposals that actually deal in the reality we are experiencing and that will unfold over the next few years? Or will they, too, miss the chance by playing it safe?

The time for a real leader is now.

I had the opportunity today to meet in person one of my favourite authors, Raphael Alexander of Unambiguously Ambidextrous. It was a far-too-short cup of coffee and conversation after work, and something I’m looking forward to doing more of now that he has relocated to the “right side” of the Rockies.

What I look for in a blog, first and foremost, is good writing; a close second is a degree of sensibility. People who foam at the mouth, use their blog to ladle out reams of insults, or who think being bigoted or obnoxious is in some way a substitute for trying to convince me just aren’t things I read. It’s also why I categorically refuse to join a blogroll. (Frankly, I just don’t want to be associated with some of the bloggers you find on such lists. Nor am I a reflex defender of any party or point of view, nor do I think it’s my job to be a cheerleader. Praise I give willingly when I think something appropriate is being done; criticism is given equally frequently — perhaps more often!; there are so many ways to “go wrong”.)

I also like Patrick Ross at The Nexus of Assholery, which, despite its title, is a good and comprehensive read. Werner Patels, who has had a number of excellent blogs in the past year and who now publishes as Canada Today, is another daily read — and I’ve enjoyed Werner’s “evolution of his core position” over that time. Steve V, whose Liberal-leaning Far and Wide is eternally optimistic for his party of choice and has more ways than I thought possible to drag a silver lining out of anything, yet he does not assert his hope; he gives his reasons for it, and thus makes me think. The fine author of Blogging a Dead Horse is another one.

My list is much longer, of course, even in the realm of Canadian politics, but these are the core that, fighting sleep, I will stay up a little longer to make sure I take in today.

There isn’t a soul in this list I wouldn’t find the time to meet, either. Perhaps that’s the real point: all these authors have become “real people” (in a fashion: the non-reciprocal relationship between reader and writer is a real thing — see Thomas Langan’s Being and Truth — although it is a relationship to a person in profile and fulfilling a role and not very nuanced).

Blogging is hard, especially if being generally accurate, persuasive and rational are goals of the writer. Take the time to meet the writers you most like to read. You’ll find they come from surprising walks of life — living proof that anyone can be a real citizen, not just a passenger or consumer — and are more often than not autodidacts, constantly learning on their own. In other words, they can and generally will be interesting.

Raphael, I look forward to our next conversation.

I am always surprised at how the underlying story gets missed. In the case of the global warming tale, the Green Shift announcements, and so on, what doesn’t get reported is how close to the end of a hydrocarbon-based world we are. Given the Canadian climate — and the fact that it is our commodity exports, particularly oil and gas, that are holding Federal Government revenues “together” by holding up the national economy — one would think we might discuss the current state of economic peril we find ourselves in. Instead, we see crowing, triumphal note after head-in-the-sand note being posted from almost all the blogs, regardless of political affiliation — and no attention being paid to the real situation.

So let’s do exactly that.

Light crude production in Canada is expected to dry up in about a decade. Natural gas production in this country, in slightly less time. We are not building the refineries necessary to actually use the tar sands products. (Why not? Natural gas is a key element in how this sludgy sand yields up its hydrocarbon content: if natural gas has a useful life of less than a decade, the plant won’t pay for itself.)

With world oil production — particularly of the light crudes for which our Eastern-based refineries (which depend on imported oil already) — already slipping downward as a share of global production, and, indeed, global total production (including our own) also now less than demand, precisely where will we get petroleum from? As for natural gas, we’re not equipped to receive liquid natural gas (LNG) shipments — nor do we have the pipelines built to transport it. Nor is there a particularly favourable source of supply, either: exhaustion of natural gas on other continents lags North America by only a decade or so. Again, not enough to make building the infrastructure a viable economic proposition.

Yes, we could raise the moratorium on development offshore in British Columbia. Yes, we could build the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. Offshore BC is a decade away if we start now. Assuming we ran roughshod over the Dene and just built the pipeline, its economic life isn’t long, either.

Gordon Campbell in BC, of course, has pinned his hopes on a “hydrogen corridor” running down the west coast of North America. But what’s the feedstock to produce hydrogen — today? There are two: electrolysis of water, or cracking the hydrocarbon molecules in natural gas. There is an interesting experiment being done in Japan right now to produce a water-supplied fuel cell suitable for both mobility applications (e.g. road traffic) and as a power supply in buildings or for the grid, but it’s not mature yet. As for building a hydrogen infrastructure supplied by natural gas? What’s the lifespan of that? — certainly no better than the lifespan of using natural gas directly (heating homes in winter comes immediately to mind).

Ethanol has also been proposed. Where’s the capital investment in ethanol plants using scrap wood chips, bits of dead-by-pine-beetle tree, etc.? It’s not happening fast enough. Nor are we doing the pragmatic thing and arranging to buy ethanol from Brazil, where they produce it from scrap sugar cane stalks, cheaply and efficiently. No, where we’re doing it, we’re doing it from corn. A maize-based ethanol infrastructure has a lousy energy conversion ratio: it requires at least as much hydrocarbon-based energy as inputs, for fertilizer, industrial-scale combines, and to run the conversion plants, as you get out of the ethanol. (Brazilian ethanol converts at a favourable ratio. At the scale required, the energy coefficients for wood chip conversion are not fully worked out yet — it’s important to remember that these operations are likely to be built on a local scale, just as the sawmills and pulp mills of timber country are.)

We could, of course, make more use of electrical power. We’d better move quickly: dam construction for large-scale outputs, or nuclear plants — even coal-fired plants with carbon sequestration technology — are usually decade-long construction jobs, even when you waive all the environmental evaluations, tell the local First Nations their claims will not be honoured, and pass laws forbidding legal action to delay the project. Heavy construction requires a heavy investment in fuels, too. Eventually we’ll be making choices: get to work and heat buildings, or build things, or feed ourselves (fertilizers, industrial “agriculture”).

There’s a lot of talk about alternative power. BC has many sources: extensive geothermal zones, wind potential on the coast, even solar arrays. The three Prairie provinces could do wind and solar. It’s a pity, isn’t it, that it’s not happening: in BC, for instance, the Independent Power Production [IPP] scheme put forward by BC Hydro in 2003 allows Hydro to buy out the producer after their project is built. (Not that the BC Transmission Corporation has the capability to handle much of this power, for little of it will be base load.) Why would anyone invest in a plant infrastructure only to lose it at cost once it’s been depreciated (and still useful), i.e. why give up the profits? Is it any wonder little is happening?

So what does this add up to? A sea change in the way we live, like it or not. Yes, Canada has great assets in the energy space. But they don’t make us independent of shortfalls.

When that day comes, our economy takes a nosedive. So do our exports, the vast majority of which still go to the United States, thanks to the unending myopia of Canadian businesses. (There’d be, for instance, no trouble in lumber towns if we could just recognise that the rest of the world does not use American-sized boards — and if we produced the products other countries want to buy. Instead we tell them they have to change, then moan when we don’t get the business.) The USA will be even worse off than we are.

It’s been pointed out that we ought to be thinking about these issues. Assuming Obama wins the US Presidency this November, we can anticipate a challenge to NAFTA: he campaigned on this (and needs to carry the states — all near our border — who think NAFTA has hurt them). A Democratic-controlled Congress will not be trade-friendly. Good: bring it on. We should be prepared to let NAFTA go — Homeland Security has already closed the US border to the point where integrated supply chains don’t work reliably any longer, and they have to work with an ever-sinking US dollar — in order to remove the lock-in that forces us to sell a continuing percentage of our hydrocarbon production to the US ahead of Canadian needs. Failing to do so simply advances the day our furnaces and pumps “go out”.

Eventually, alternatives will bring us back up. Don’t count on them being ready en masse in time. We may well find ourselves back in the 19th century for two or three decades while we sort it out. (If that doesn’t put paid to global warming, what will?)

All of this, of course, strongly suggests that our Governments are about to be put on a starvation diet. Instead of new mass social programmes, any spending should be going on the infrastructure needed to continue Canadian life in a reasonable fashion (the last time I looked, this was still a very cold country with a short growing season). Pruning of existing wasteful spending should also be undertaken.

For here’s the rub: without cheap energy and a continuing supply of it, the centre cannot hold. Large-scale anything requires it. When this breaks down, the pieces fall away. Except, of course, that (with the exception of the Maritimes) even our provinces are too large to hold together. (Australia and the United States, to name just two, will experience similar fracturing.)

A North America divided into a hundred plus polities will be a much poorer North America, and a much weaker one.

Any politician who isn’t dealing in these long-term realities is delusional, and leading us down the garden path to a much harder future than is necessary to experience. By that standard, there are no leaders in Canada today.

UPDATE: To my surprise, after writing this, I found half of the op-ed page of this morning’s Globe & Mail taken up with pieces on this topic written by Michael Warren and Margaret Wente. The last thing we need here is a big government approach: set up a regulatory framework that encourages investment, put what money we have into infrastructure to support the housing and employment stock we have to work with, and let the market price mechanisms do the job of encouraging personal change. After all, the last $35.00/bbl on the oil price has yet to have its impact on the consciousness of citizens!

It has been a long time between blog posts: a period in my life where my periodic depression once again got the better of me. Perhaps, however, this is a good thing: it has allowed the past few weeks, with the whole Bernier-Couillard nonsense, yet another abdication of responsibility in the voting on the final bills before the House this spring, and now the introduction of the Green Shift by the Liberals to pass without comment.

For none of them really required it, although all have received reams of commentary, and, indeed, when it comes to the Green Shift, I will enter the fray myself.

So, let’s begin at the beginning. Is the Green Shift necessary?

A societal change certainly is. It takes a particular kind of fool not to notice that, however measured, world oil production (supply) and world oil consumption (demand) teeter at a balancing point. Some believe that we have passed the point and are demanding more than the available supply, thus forcing weaker hands away from the purchasing table already. Others believe there is capacity waiting in the wings — that the Saudis can turn up the valves; that Iraq can be brought on stream quickly; etc. It’s important to note that oil isn’t a single commodity: sludge-filled oils such as Venezuela’s, the tar sands, or even what the Saudis put on the table last week require different kinds of refineries and more expense in converting them into useful products. A refinery meant for light sweet crude isn’t even given these feedstocks. Certainly the production balance is shifting to the residual sludge rather than the high quality, easy to refine product: a permanent shift, indeed, given what we know about residual deposits.

As the price rises, individual decision are made. Gas guzzlers are no longer used for daily driving; econoboxes are, instead. Or, where available and practical, transit becomes a daily option. Food choices change; so do vacation choices. In effect, the price mechanism alone is sufficient; it need not be “goosed into action” by governments.

Still, of course, there are still all those emissions. I have always supported the notion that air and water “consumption” needs to have a price: it is how pollution of the common asset is reduced (perhaps, with the appropriate incentives, nearly eliminated). Similarly, such prices — rather than treating our environment as a free good — act to create “market space” for new experiments in fuel production — something better than “food for ethanol”, which makes no sense either on a energy budget (energy in to energy potential created) or a food supply basis, one would hope. In other words, there is a reason to consider certain price mechanisms at work (and for the common assets these will probably take the form of taxes or regulations), whether one believes in the global warming theory as advanced by its supporters or not.

At this point, it becomes appropriate to ask what kind of strategy might make the most sense.

On this file the Conservative Government has been lamentably silent. Their original environmental focus on pollution was applaudable, but not followed up and that follow up communicated for understanding and acceptance. Oily the splotch and “screwing all Canadians” make for free media coverage but do nothing to advance an agenda. Here the Government is deficient; end of subject. (One could charitably hold, based on other actions, that the real position is that different provinces or regions will form their own styles of solution, suited to their own needs, in this regard, and certainly I do not think it makes sense to have both provincial and federal rules, regulations and taxes in this area, but the Prime Minister has not said this in so many words, either.)

Then there is the NDP approach, centred on cap-and-trade. Effectively, cap-and-trade systems propose to regulate the size of the market created by assigning a price to a “pollutant” — and then allow that market to arbitrate the price mechanism. (If you ever needed evidence that this issue does not turn on the old “left”/”right” categories used in the media still, this is a powerful inducement to change your mind.) The nice part of cap-and-trade is that the decision can be made in a rational fashion: to continue without a reinvestment to reduce emissions, you must ensure you have the capacity — which means paying for what was once free to you, and damaged goods to everyone. Or, you can reinvest, reduce your emissions, and benefit by the capacity you don’t have to purchase. (As an example at a personal level — and the proposed system is not a consumer-level system — for average driving distances each year, it takes more than five years to “pay for” the benefits of a hybrid vehicle in reduced fuel consumption (and emissions). If you drive less than the average, you might buy emission credits; if you drive more, the investment in the hybrid makes economic sense (since the emission credits required are reduced from the time of purchase and thus offset the higher cost of the hybrid).)

As an old Progressive Conservative, I am always on the lookout for any party speaking to those Red Tory values that are my core. The Greens come closest to this: they demonstrate, in general, quite good economic sense. Their Green Plan also has internal logic — and far less gerrymandering of the results. It is what it purports to be, and no more. I could probably extend myself to support it.

This brings us to the Liberal plan, which is, prima facie, unsupportable. It is a mish-mash of spending programmes masquerading as an environmental imperative. There is no revenue neutrality in diverting streams of funds coming in via the price put on carbon via taxation to new federal programmes, or expansions of same. Child care, for instance, has nothing to do with carbon reduction — in fact, it leads to more emissions, in that it helps maintain the two-income, two-car, suburban lifestyle a little longer.

Stéphane Dion’s plan is smoke and mirrors, one more turn of the big government crank. It is less effective than the Greens’ offering, less market-sensitive than the NDP’s. It slams itself down on provincial jurisdiction and proposes taxes on taxes every time the GST is collected. No thank you!

That this well-praised piece of tripe — loved by academics and media personalities alike — doesn’t even have any idea of what reduction targets might be expected for something that slams itself down as a permanent addition to the Canadian body politic, rides roughshod over our sovereign treaty commitments (China cannot easily be assessed for special carbon tariffs under the WTO regime, which we are both signatories to, for instance) and is, in effect, another wealth transfer scheme from the West to the East (this may be harsh, but it needs to be said), speaks volumes. It betrays the Liberal Party’s continuing view of what this country is, and their expectation that we will all just sit still and let “Big Daddy” tell us what to do.

I am no fan of the Campbell Government’s ill-thought-through carbon plans, but they are incremental in nature and can be changed. Dion’s plan is national social engineering, grandiose in conception, a blatant attempt to buy votes and a permanent degradation of the prospects of Canadians. No sensible person should give it — or the Liberals — the time of day, unless, of course, they do secretly want to be (in the words of Stephen Harper), “screwed”.

One final note: while heading out this morning I heard Bill Good’s rapid-fire phone-in on CKNW asking “if a federal election was held today, who would you vote for and why?”. (He asked this question last week for provincial politics, and got a decent split between the BC Liberals, BC NDP and BC Greens.) In the first 15 minutes of the call-in there were 20 callers — and 20 votes for “Conservative”. Not one caller mentioned the Green Shift; many mentioned their expectation that the Liberals, back in power, would steal (à la “sponsorship”) again. The first caller to offer a different opinion supported the NDP. Finally, as I was turning the car off, the first Liberal supporter showed up — and she didn’t mention the Green Shift, either. This is, of course, nowhere near scientific — but I find it interesting as a quick touchstone, given that the callers are all from the “ecotopian” Wet Coast, where greenish thinking is concentrated. Make of it what you will.

One of the things to like about the Conservative Party of Canada is its broad, shallow, “retail” donor base. One of the things to dislike about the CPC is exactly that same means of raising prodigious sums of money. Before you call me schizophrenic, stay with me for a moment and see why it is both a blessing and a curse.

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” It’s not, of course, that money plays any different a role in politics than it plays in any other field of human endeavour. Athletes need money to be free of working for any purpose other than their training, and to be able to afford to compete at the levels required for world competitiveness. Non-profits, in doing their work, need the funds to carry out their missions. Policy influence study groups need to be funded so as to pay the costs of researching and publishing their papers. Entrepreneurs need investors so as to be able to handle the start up period, when costs far outrun revenues and the newborn business is nurtured to health and potential prosperity. In all these cases, how the money comes in matters.

Have just a few funders, each of whom writes a large cheque, and you have an oligarchy (even if its members do not know the others) that, by virtue of its financial support and the weight of worry if it were lost in the future, have a significant voice in the direction of affairs in the endeavour they are funding. Have thousands of small funders, on the other hand, and those voices are stilled: the loss of a few dollars is not something that keeps the leadership of an organisation up at night, but the potential loss of hundreds of thousands all at once can cause a ready loss not only of sleep, but rationality, with worry.

What’s to Like: I said in the beginning that the broad donor base of the CPC was something to like. If I’m a donor to anything — a subscriber to start-up capital, a charitable subvention, or a political campaign — I want to know that my money will be used for the things I expect it to be used for. A broad donor base helps ensure this: the party can reasonably conclude that the record of accomplishments and policy options for the future that it puts “on the table” are what is being subscribed to with the donations. As a result, there is little reason not to stay the course, as it is the ebbs and flows of funds in their thousands of droplets that gives an indication of what the “political market” wants, as opposed to just a few voices with the undertone of “be reasonable, do it my way … or else”.

It can — and has been, many times — be objected that this reduces political participation to “consumer” behaviour rather than the involved interactions of being a citizen. Does it surprise you that we act as consumers? For most people of voting age, their entire life has been spent barraged and assaulted by the presumption that they ought to be consumers. That this message should have been internalised ought not to be a surprise. Nor should, in such a world, we be surprised that a political party “gets it” — and treats their donors in precisely the right way to trigger the “consumer” response mechanism.

What’s Not to Like: Alas, every upside does come with a downside. The downside of mass political donation rather than élite accommodation (lubricated by funds) is that there is no easy mechanism to say “hold on, guys, you’re on the wrong track”. The power brokers of old, after all, were steeped in the on-going conversation (both via the media and directly over lunches, drinks and social encounters) of other influencers in the land. High names in one sphere of endeavour — a Jeffrey Simpson, say, in print media — have their calls taken by another high name in another sphere — a Paul Demerais, say. Influence could thus be brought to bear on political parties to adjust their policy vectors — in ways “appropriate” to the large influencers, of course, but there was a path to make this happen.

This is the pattern that operates the Liberal Party, and operated the historical Progressive Conservative Party. Our New Democrats are less so, even despite the long-standing “union connections”. Greens, the Bloc and Reform/CA, on the other hand, were and are all resolutely “grassroots” driven — and it is this strain that influences the CPC today.

”Grassroots” Is a Mixed Blessing: Alas, a permanent policy “conversation” does not occur within parties. It is considered by one and all to be a source of “off message diversions”. Today the Greens, in public, do the best job, with their many Green bloggers linked via their party website, but even there’s a lot of self-policing going on. As a result, the “grassroots” becomes a means of taking over an EDA (riding association) or forcing a candidate upon a riding by weight of temporary numbers — and a source of funds. That’s it, tout court.

EDAs, in turn, are focused on getting their candidate elected at the next opportunity. A free-ranging policy discussion unfolding over months would “tear the association apart” (in the words of one EDA president) or “lose our focus on getting [the candidate] elected” (in the words of another). Yet, without these links back to the party itself, the money comes without its voice. There is the illusion of participation, but not the reality of it. “Turn out your troops for the ground war, keep us flush with cash … and otherwise know your place.” This seems to be the anthesis to the thesis of élite accommodation.

The “Chrétien Revolution”: The closing days of the Chrétien government, as we know, changed election financing in this country to make the micro-funder supreme. This is, on the whole, a good thing (although its impact on leadership selection and other aspects of party management has yet to be fully figured out): more of us can decide, month by month, who to reward and who to punish with our dollars. (The parties, on the other hand, will be working to get the vast majority of Canadians to stick a crowbar in their wallets in the first place. As with any other “consumer” situation, the by-far-largest share of the market is held by “not interested in what you’re offering”.)

Now, as the Liberals try to ramp up their micro-donor base with their Victory Fund, and the Conservative Fund keeps on massing its monies, and the New Democrats turn in substantial-enough performances at the cashbox, the second half of this revolution must be undertaken. In this, the burden will be on the donor. Part of this comes by demanding that gag laws and other anti-democratic initiatives be put to rest: parties no longer need protection, nor an exclusive field. Issues, indeed, are far closer to the future of politics than parties in a stream of minority governments! — and far more likely to engage that growing body of Canadians who can, but won’t, take part. The other part is that we must engage with EDAs and other structures and bring democratic discussion to them.

These considerations apply regardless of party — and just as much to issue-oriented groups as to classic political venues. To only give money — and not to bring your voice into the fray, somewhere — is to essentially allow those in charge to do as they please. After all, these days, there isn’t the restraint traditionally offered by the élites.

It’s our money: our voice comes with it. Only then will the synthesis of the new power arrangements be complete.

“Surely you’re not saying that anyone should be able to use their fortune to buy so much advertising that they can force us to do what they want?”, said an interlocutor earlier this week, when I suggested that the public sector unions in BC were absolutely right to be fighting the Campbell Government’s gag laws on public expression in the half year leading up to the next provincial election.

Yes, I am. In fact, I’m insisting on it.

In this, of course, I find myself championing the same sort of freedom of expression once championed — no longer, apparently — by our Prime Minister in his days at the National Citizens’ Coalition. A free people need the ability to communicate their views to others. In this era of the Internet, where anyone can open a blog or build a web page and attempt to get people to view it by using Adwords or some other matching program, what election “communication restriction” regulations and laws do is essentially say “your stated and historic rights to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly (it is often illegal to even advertise a meeting on a political issue near an election), or freedom of the press (if I’m paying for the publication, such as in blogging, I “own” a press) aren’t worth the paper we wrote them on.”

Canadians may not have had a revolution and subsequent period of Constitution-writing to enshrine the principle that Government is the servant of the People and not the other way around as did the Americans, but from Magna Carta onward that is the thrust and summation of our own history. By calling, in the 1840s, for responsible government, Baldwin and LaFontaine set Canada on a course where we people would determine the form and content of our government, not accept what was given by “our betters”, the Crown or the Family Compact. By passing the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1960, then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker encoded this into Canadian law. Section 2 of the Charter further encoded these rights, by making them Constitutional Law rather than Statute Law.

Our bureaucratic masters and political betters — as they most assuredly do think of themselves (the 2006 election’s outburst by Scott Read, the infamous “beer and popcorn” dismissal of the individual Canadian’s ability to make a decision on their own, was bad politics, and no accident: it reflects perfectly this type of thinking) — of course point to Section 1 of the Charter and say “these are reasonable limits”. But are they?

Who is protected by limiting my ability to speak out on issues in the lead-up to an election? Fundamentally, it’s not even the politicians themselves who are protected: it is their parties and the campaigns they run. This is hardly in the class of a “reasonable limit” — unless you live in the courtier society where senior bureaucrats and senior party figures intermingle, and where campaign tactics are worked out. There, anything that disturbs the planned schedule of sound bites, photo ops and “messaging moments” and the smooth working of the spin machine needs to be pushed aside. Imagine, having to actually have an unplanned, unscheduled “reaction” to events! (As for the bureaucrats, the sine qua non of civil service life, born out of the mantra “never have the Minister have to answer a question about us in the House”, is that no information should be shared, no thinking aloud is tolerated, and nothing that hasn’t come through the policy development process, i.e. through approved channels or via a co-operative quango or think tank, should ever enter the public’s consciousness.)

Sorry. In the wonderful words given to the fictional and immoral British politician, Sir Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs’ series House of Cards—To Play the King—The Final Cut, “you might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment”. Your gag laws, of course, are designed to make that so: by force, you overblown champions of self-importance and confusers of personal, party and national interest will ensure that the second part of that statement is made true.

But it isn’t so: the onus is on those who would restrict our freedom of speech, of publication, of assembly to demonstrate the reasonableness of their limits prior to implementation, not by imposing the regulations and forcing us to — “when allowed” — fight them at our own expense (You worry about the monied buying up advertising? Have you priced the cost — in money, time and emotional toil, not to mention “collateral damage” to business interests and personal reputation — of spending years fighting the near-infinite resources of “the Government”? Few of us can afford it, no matter how many hours of pro bono legal help we receive!). Or, of course, defy them and engage in a Gandhi-like struggle with civil authority through deliberate civil disobedience.

I’ve no particular message I want to champion throughout the upcoming BC election period, or during the next Federal election period. But I am a blogger. However many or few readers my written thoughts might reach, entertain and influence, what both the regulations of Elections Canada and the new gag regulations in British Columbia say is that, for the relevant period, I must censor myself. I must avoid topics I might want to write about, that are “my right” on one day and “illegal” on the next.

(No doubt the next response to that little anomaly will be to further restrict what can be discussed all the time. There is already a chill that has settled in around aspects of public security — how many of us who fly from time to time on business are willing to risk arguing that the practices of CATSA or the US TSA are ineffective, idiotic, often at odds with our fundamental rights, etc. knowing that the “No Fly” list is arbitrarily established and changed and that the functionary who puts you on it, or who forbids you to travel, need not justify their decision. That is but one example of how restrictions multiply — and rapidly — to the point where people yield their rights and become the Servant to the Master.)

What’s interesting about this whole “gag” situation is that it will be absolutely all right to comment on events — “at yesterday’s bus tour stop in front of the closed plant in Ontario, So-and-So gave a speech that was completely off topic” will be acceptable comment — but not to discuss the issue brought up in that speech if it strays beyond reporting. Analysis, for instance, of a taxation proposal could veer over a line (set only after publication by a faceless bureaucrat, no doubt acting on a complaint from a party campaign official) and be deemed to be in the banned zone, being (in their bureaucratic estimation) “the equivalent of campaign advertising without being associated with a duly authorised campaign”. The expression “gag me with a spoon” is, alas, far too close to the truth here to be comfortable; the thinking, of course, is vintage 20th century Fascist or Marxist at the core (the two ends of the spectrum do nicely wrap together, differing only on details of how the people are to be disposed of for the benefit of the rulers of the state, but agreeing entirely on basic principles).

So, too, a philosophical examination of the purpose of government, the restrictions that should be placed on lawmakers, etc., could all be seen — easily, too: witness the legal battles of the aforementioned National Citizens’ Coalition — as “equivalent to campaigning”. These are all things I have published on here and on previous blogs I have had that are legal today, and illegal tomorrow, for no reason other than political comfort. Of course, actually writing — during the “blackout” period — something along the line of one of my prior pieces on why it may be more appropriate to spoil your ballot, or to formally abstain from voting, is already banned.

Notice, too, that in British Columbia it is the public sector unions who stand essentially alone in this fight. Politically, a fair distance along the spectrum of options from the National Citizens’ Coalition in its national fights on the subject, but in both cases organizations that feel silenced by these regulations to gag them. Note, too, that the one everyone fears — “big business” — is absolutely silent. Why not? Their access already exists. A wag once defined a “business politician” as “one who stays bought”. You don’t need to spend a cent on advertising your position if you’ve already sold your case — and your opponents are barred from speaking out against it. This, at the end of the day, is further evidence in favour of the notion that election gag laws are not about money at all, but about silencing those who would upset totally-planned campaigns.

After the US Constitutional Convention closed in 1787, Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said that the attendees had given Americans “a Republic, if you can keep it”. Peace, order and good government — our Canadian framing statement — likewise requires us to keep it: governments that gag us are not giving us good government. It’s up to us to keep it.

Bring down the gag laws. Refuse to be silent in the face of them. Refuse to bend your neck to those who would be your master. They serve you, not the other way around.

We are only the True North Strong and Free until we fail to Stand on Guard to make it so.

There are many in society who now hold to the idea that the world we have built is too complex to be “taken apart” and redesigned. They hold, as a result, that the best we can do is to make many small changes — small, so that if we make a poor choice, we can change away from it, and many, so that collectively these “add up” to redesigning the whole.

Add to this the concept that society can be perfected — or that the people in society can be perfected — and you get classical liberalism. Add to that the notion that experts know better than the common man or woman what needs to be done and how to do it, and you get modern liberalism, in its range of orientations from the socialist utopians through social democrats, through the power-and-influence band, to the social moulders and corporatists. In other words, today’s Republicans and Democrats in the USA, today’s Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the UK, and today’s five parties in Canada…

Some of us disagree with the very notions of liberalism. As with Hippocrates, we begin with the principle “Above all, do no harm”: change should therefore be slow and careful (yet not wholly forestalled). Yet we stand with the people, believing them capable of understanding complex issues and making good choices about them if they are treated as competent adults rather than children to be babied by the nanny state mentality. Experts thus advise, they do not control. From the span of social order and justice (the original CCF) to the indigenous Canadian Tory, this span is currently but a fragment found (almost exclusively) in two of our parties. But it is there.

With that, let’s turn to the question of the purpose of government.

Those of us who are not liberal generally agree that the purpose of government is the provisioning of peace and order, and clarity around the rules of engagement — this is the element of justice expressed not as equality (the liberal idea) but as fairness (the same rules for all) — and the capitalisation of infrastructure needed but not yet a viable commercial investment. We may disagree on the span of items requiring infrastructure investment, and on the number of rules of engagement that may be required, but, unlike the liberals in our midst, we do not try to invoke change beyond these limits.

At the moment, for instance, it is necessary to rethink the fundamental piece of infrastructure that is our socio-economic model. This is based in (a) the uninterrupted flow of cheap energy (underlying the expectation of endless growth), (b) a disregard for locality of origin of products and services — communities, in other words, should not be encouraged to be sufficient unto themselves (globalisation), (c) a notion that despite obvious regional differences around a continental scale country one’s location should not matter (equalisation) and (d) a redistribution model for taxation expressed through the funding of many “programs” providing services (the nanny state model of extensive welfare provisioning). On these principles we have built sprawling suburbs with no attention to transportation infrastructure beyond roads, which are provided at a market discount relative to all other forms for people and goods movement, to take but one consequence.

When the environmentalists in our midst start to talk about global warming, carbon reduction, etc., it is the consequences of these fundamentals that they point to. Thus, whether we are dealing with the Gordon Campbell Government’s decision that British Columbia will have a carbon tax (to change usage patterns) and a carbon trading scheme, or the potential for their national equivalents being bruited about by various people supposedly in the know about Liberal Party policy plans, the solutions on offer are all designed to attack the consequences of the fundamental infrastructure of society that we have built.

How, for instance, retirement savings and provisioning is to be handled in a society that no longer grows at a rate sufficient to afford endless growth in nanny state activities is apparently left to the typical answer: “Oh, you’ll do it somehow”. Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, showed how this was the underlying expectation of every initiative to throw sand in the gears to achieve “social purposes”. (What she failed to examine was the question of whether we needed a new fundamental infrastructure in the first place.)

Endless growth, you see, leads to endless demand. Only in a society which is fundamentally conceived of as as allowing initiative to flourish but which may not grow will our innovations overcome our limitations without setting off year-after-year redistribution of resources.

Take government paperwork. I spend, depending on the quarter, six to eight times the time and energy handling regulations and reporting requirements for my tiny company as I do on managing that company. That is utterly ridiculous: were I to have the money to retire today, I would shut the company’s doors immediately. Why contribute one more minute of my life to bureaucracy, practically none of which benefits me? Yet the real losers from that decision would be other productive people who today can engage me on solving their problems — and to whom I would be unavailable at any price. Stagnation would replace change. Multiply that attitude, and whole communities lose their spark and die to subsist on the dole of government programs, all of which suck more life out of them than initiative would do, and which demand more money and more bureaucratic “feeding” as time goes on. The weeds take over the garden and starve the plants of life.

That is what a carbon tax would do. Forget the rhetoric of “revenue neutrality”: how can it be? Who pays, and when, changes from today — the burden is shifted. Worse, it is shifted into places we have consciously and deliberately disadvantaged by limiting their options already — and there is, despite the speechifying of politicians and experts, no real set of choices for the automobile and truck dependent far-flung villages and towns, and suburbs, of the Canadian landscape. We at one time had alternatives which we systematically starved into extinction. They no longer exist. Nor — under our current laws — will they easily come back.

Meanwhile, since no existing taxes are outright discontinued — all proponents of the social engineering that is carbon taxation merely diddle rates rather than make it impossible to collect further taxes of other types — these will soon become revenue accretive (to pay for more programs demanded to “relieve the suffering” brought about by the destruction of value in motor-dependent communities by this tax). This isn’t just sand in the gears of the economy, as one writer has put it: these are a means to outright stop innovation that isn’t part of an “approved path”. “Grind to a stop, we will.”

You can kiss your savings for retirement good-bye, then.

Let’s stop diddling around the edges. The disease is liberalism and the infrastructure it built of an economic model requiring endless growth. To “do no harm” these days we must detox our society, so to speak: we must wean it from dependency back to self-sufficiency, and wipe out taxes and programmes left, right and centre rather than add to the pile.

The end of cheap energy will take care of most of the issues with carbon emission. Going beyond that into changing what we tax to influence behaviour must start with what we stop doing and stop demanding those of us who create economic results must do. Otherwise we will starve ourselves — and, two decades hence, see if that wasn’t a highly accurate statement of our impoverishment under the weight of a state we can’t afford without the endless growth model cheap energy provided — instead of free up the initiative space and resources needed to change our fundamentals.

Sometimes the Tory advances basic change with many follow-on effects to correct a path that has gone fundamentally wrong. This is one of those times. For without such a diagnosis, this patient won’t make it.

First, detox the junkie (don’t give him or her a place to shoot the drugs into their body “under supervision”). All three Insite studies show that that medical principle holds despite the promotion of “harm mitigation”. So, too, we must detox the junkie that is the body public, whose answer to all questions is “what’s the Government doing?”

Don’t expect me to support you, Mr. Campbell, in next year’s election, unless you get cracking on what should have come with your carbon tax. As for M. Dion, I’d expect you to get the picture, too — except you’ve spent your entire working life with your lips firmly coupled to the public teat. Take your carbon tax proposal and go away.

I have taken a few days off to watch the latest tempest in a teacup bring itself to a boil. That, of course, would be the swirl of controversy surrounding Maxime Bérnier, our Foreign Affairs Minister.

Gentlemen and ladies, of course, do not gossip about the private lives of others. I have nothing to say about M. Bérnier’s choice of former girl-friend. That, of course, is what ought to have been the norm.

But there is little to no danger of finding gentlemen and ladies of principle on the Opposition benches, or in the trenches of the MSM, in Canada, in 2008. To quote the last election’s Liberal tagline, “Choose your Canada”. They have — and a rather sickly and unappetising place it is, indeed, filled with cynicism from the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition to the lowliest of hangers-on in the blogosphere (a certain group of people writing under the brand of “Canadian Cynic” comes immediately to mind).

Here’s the funny thing. At the moment, I’m not happy with the state of our nation’s Government. I’d be hard pressed to vote for its return at this juncture: I dislike the very notion of “the best out of a bad lot”. That, unfortunately, is what the Harper Government has become. It’s not enough reason to support it.

On the other hand, the behaviour of the Opposition since last fall has absolutely destroyed any chance at all that I would support the Liberals in the next election. This is not a matter of the leader of that party at all. All Liberals wear the badge of shame they themselves have earned by threatening elections and then abstaining on votes, up to and probably including today’s NDP non-confidence motion (the last Opposition-led one before the House rises for the summer session). Meanwhile the Nation’s business, which could have been discussing matters of substance, has been hijacked for a steady diet of innuendo, slime, reputation-destroying perilously close to either libel or slander most of the time: in other words, a complete and utter failure to attend to their purpose in being MPs. “A Government in Waiting”? That is what an Opposition is supposed to be.

These Liberal MPs — along with their cousins dans la dépravation in the Bloc — are anything but. I am utterly and completely ashamed that my own riding’s MP, the now dishonourable Joyce Murray, has done nothing since scratching out her by-election win in March, but add to the chorus of braying asses.

A strange day, indeed, when one looks to see Parliamentarians and finds them in the New Democrat benches, but there you are.

I do not excuse the Conservatives. Almost every Canadian with a Conservative MP has been as ill-served as those with a Liberal MP. Where are the matters of substance from the Government benches? Oh, yes … message controlled out of existence.

I look at the Harper Government’s record and am generally in favour of it. (I neither expect perfection — my views are just one amongst many and the Governing party is a big tent with many strains of political opinion — nor demand it. Show me a party closer to my views and I’ll give it a good hard look. Until then, I’m satisfied with the one that comes closest, most of the time.)

I look at the behaviour of the Government and consider them little better than Liberals, when it comes to being quality MPs. Committee chairs who undo meetings, repetition of the same point day after day instead of a quiet “that has already been asked and answered, Mr. Speaker” — for heaven’s sake, you can defend your position without descending to their vitriolic and bombastic level! — local voices stilled.

The Prime Minister’s Cabinet might well have been filled in 2006 with Ministers who lacked experience in Government — by 2008 they ought to be competent. Centralisation in the PMO has ensured they are not. Failing to build a viable bench of both party and policy leadership is a severe failing of this Prime Minister.

Yet the indignation continues, on both sides. It is strongly rumoured, for instance, that Stéphane Dion will make a carbon tax similar in intent to the Gordon Campbell carbon tax in BC a lynch-pin of his policy platform. (I shall save, for another day, my views on the whole carbon tax issue.) Nevertheless the attack guns are trained on this, with hyperbolic (and thus unbelievable claims) even before the policy statement is made.

This simply destroys Conservative credibility — what little was left, that is, after a do-nothing record laid down by Baird even on matters championed by this Government itself — even further. There are good reasons to question a carbon tax as a vehicle in a northern climate, especially one with a surfeit of geography to be traversed, and an urban planning model best described as “let’s sprawl, baby, ’cause energy will be cheap forever!”. When Garth Turner, for instance, realises that the problem with the housing bubble in his riding of Halton is as much driven by Halton’s need to drive everywhere — and thus house prices in Halton will collapse as energy costs rise, carbon tax or not — and that there is little to be done other than recognise the malinvestment and to salvage what can be salvaged from it, instead of crying out for “relief” on his blog, we’ll actually see some reality enter the situation.

But no, there are points to be made, and that takes precedence over sound policy, honest debate about contentious approaches, respect for the other party even in disagreement — all required elements to approach the truth of hard matters and gain a consensus that supports the course of action taken.

There was a time, not long ago, when the House would be raucous, and then members would cross over the lines to meet up and head off for a drink and dinner together. They were Parliamentarians first, and partisans second.

There was a time, not long ago, when policies were debated and a national consensus allowed to build. The citizens were respected first and not treated (are you listening, purveyors of Victory Funds and “oh, we’re under threat” letters such as Dr. Gerstein’s) as simply cash cows to be milked and X-markers once in a while.

The modern Conservative Party has given up on speaking to the electorate as adults. Paradoxically, it is the NDP and Green parties that hold onto a small vestige of that. (The Liberals, of course, adopted a permanent sneer toward the House and the citizens with Trudeau, never to lose it again.) Now we have — as I have oftimes said — two Liberal parties, for neo-cons are simply neo-liberals in disguise.

The indignation in the House and in the news is manufactured. The indignation of the electorate, on the other hand, will be real. It is as yet small. It threatens an earthquake if you keep going this way.

Whether that earthquake tears this Dominion apart, in a righteous anger at the very idea of Ottawa, or whether it simply leads to the sudden promotion, to Government, of one of the perennial also-rans, remains to be seen.