Joe Oliver: There’s one thing Trudeau has right: This could be a transformative election

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Most Canadians consider it unnecessary and unsafe, but the federal election could be transformative. Granted, the prime minister cannot conjure up a credible rationale for subjecting the public to a $610-million trek to the polls during a pandemic. With NDP support he has been able to govern pretty much as he wished — and “people should have the chance to boot me out of office” is not a strong talking point for the Liberals. What we are engaged in is a vanity project for Justin Trudeau to reduce parliamentary accountability and increase his personal power.

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The prime minister has exploited the pandemic to set the country on a path of unsustainable spending and intrusive government. Four more years galloping toward a dystopian Great Reset would make it exceptionally challenging for a new government to arrest, let alone reverse, that dire fate. Some commentators argue that Erin O’Toole is a centrist whose policies are little different from Trudeau’s. But the Liberals have moved sharply to the left and the Conservative platform differs from theirs on many critical issues, including natural resource development, economic policy and free speech.

Liberal policies have inflicted enormous damage on the energy industry, including $150 billion of cancelled projects and hundred of billions more in opportunity costs. The government’s intent to “transition” our vast natural resources out of existence would further devastate the economy. From 2000 to 2018, the oil and gas sector averaged a $26-billion annual gross revenue contribution to the three levels of government, or $493 billion in total, and last year it contributed $105 billion to GDP. It is a fantasy that these revenues and the economic output and energy the sector supplies could be replaced by green alternatives any time soon.

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The tragedy is that the damage achieves no meaningful environmental purpose. Producing just 1.6 per cent of global emissions, Canada cannot measurably affect climate change. And the global effort to limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees is hopeless without the full cooperation of the biggest polluters, including China, India, and other developing countries, who, despite both their rhetoric and our showy efforts to serve as a good eco-example, are moving in precisely the opposite direction.

Our biggest contribution to net global emission reduction would be to invest in innovation and adaptation and export oil and gas to countries that are rapidly increasing their consumption of much higher-emitting coal. No other nation with vast energy resources is pursuing Canada’s lunatic policy of self-harm to jobs, growth, living standards, government revenue and energy independence. That includes the U.S., the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, whose president, after cancelling Keystone XL, has been reduced to begging OPEC to increase production. It also includes the wealthy Norwegians who expiate their guilt about offshore resource development by driving electric cars.

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Economic recovery depends on growth, a fact of life basically ignored by a Liberal government intent on profligate social spending and increasing the role of government in the lives of Canadians. The lamentable result has been an average per capita economic decline in the past five years, the first such impoverishment since the Great Depression, according to Jack Mintz, writing on these pages. Action on growth strategies is particularly crucial given our aging population, low productivity, capital flight, declining competitiveness and combined federal/provincial debt burden of two trillion dollars, exacerbated by the threat of rising inflation and interest rates.

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Justin Trudeau glibly dismisses any personal interest in monetary policy and declares that budgets balance themselves. Such ignorant comments would never be uttered by a responsible political leader who actually understood economics and inflation and their implications for people and job-creating businesses. We are inured to Justin Trudeau’s pious platitudes, but whether to take his musings seriously is frequently a mystery. When he boasted that Canada was the first post-national country was this a startling insight into how he sees our identity or merely wokester cant? Words matter, especially from a prime minister, so we are entitled to judge him by what he says, and what he says about Canadians’ livelihood is chilling.

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The government remains fully committed to Bill C-10, which would allow censorship of the 25 million Canadians who post on social media, infringing their Charter-protected freedom of expression. The bill would grant the government and unelected bureaucrats at the CRTC power over content based on their ideological preferences and the latest social justice fashions. That poses a real threat to our democracy, one the public may not grasp until it is too late.

A dive deeper down the rabbit hole with Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Steven Guilbeault would further compromise Canada’s bright future as a prosperous and free country, the envy of the world. This election matters a lot.

Joe Oliver was minister of natural resources and minister of finance (2011-2015).