Steven Guilbeault is not on your side

The Liberals would rather play eco-footsie with China -- the world's top emitter -- while they actively interfere in our elections, than do business with Western Canada. That's kind of a big deal.

Image care of our talented friend, the Golden Pup.

In Richard Wright’s celebrated collection of essays that appeared in The Atlantic in 1944, entitled “I Tried to Be a Communist,” the author recounted what first drew him to the Communist Party in the 1930s, and what ultimately drove him away. To date, it feels like the gold standard in understanding that dreaded ‘other side,’ and the endless cycle of radicalization that occurs on both ends of the political horseshoe.

I followed the [protester’s] procession to the Loop and went into Grant Park Plaza and sat upon a bench. I was not thinking; I could not think. But an objectivity of vision was being born within me. A surging sweep of many odds and ends came together and formed an attitude, a perspective. “They’re blind,” I said to myself. “Their enemies have blinded them with too much oppression.” I lit a cigarette and I heard a song floating out over the sunlit air: —

“Arise you pris’ners of starvation!”

I remembered the stories I had written, the stories in which I had assigned a role of honor and glory to the Communist Party, and I was glad that they were down in black and white, were finished. For I knew in my heart that I should never be able to write that way again, should never be able to feel with that simple sharpness about life, should never again express such passionate hope, should never again make so total a commitment of faith.

Their enemies have blinded them with too much oppression.

That simple sharpness about life.

So total a commitment of faith.

For Canadians mired in the depths of a standard-of-living catastrophe, and our American compatriots suffering in a few blue states where the morning walk of the dog brings to light more human feces than canine, a rumination on such misguided zealotry rings both true and familiar.

If Canada’s dour, fanatical, unfrozen caveman for an environment minister were capable of self-reflection, he could learn a thing or two from such passages; instead, he’s hopped on a plane to China to meet with his fellow communists, the same communists currently interfering in Canadian elections on behalf of his Liberal government.

Call us old-fashioned here at the newsletter, but that’s kind of a big deal — and it’s an even bigger deal that he has been revealed as an adviser in the very employ of the greater Mandarin bloc:

If it isn’t bad enough that Guilbeault is making nice with China, he is also directly part of a committee run by the Chinese Communist Party itself, in what seems to be a massive conflict of interest given his role as Canada’s environment minister

The CCICED is run by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the Chinese Communist State.

As Steven Guilbeault advises Communist China – a nation that kidnapped two Canadian Citizens, is interfering in our democracy, has helped back Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, and is threatening to invade Taiwan – he’s attacking Western Canada and trying to crush the oil & gas sector with his extreme ‘net zero’ by 2035 plan.

As covered extensively here before (see below) — and reported on in more journalistic detail by fellow Substackers Terry Glavin and Sam Cooper — making the Liberal-CCP relationship all but ‘Facebook official’ isn’t particularly surprising (they’ve been seeing each other for years), but is now really the best time to be rubbing it in the faces of the everyday Canadians they once pretended to represent?

This is, after all, a nation where the top social media trend at the moment isn’t some vacuous display of vanity, but heartfelt pleas from the working class and working poor, who feel utterly trapped and alone among the ruins of once-promised prosperity and quality of life.

What more insulting time then for team ‘Just Transition,’ who wish to further dampen and darken lives, and vacuum-seal the average Canadians’ ‘footprint,’ to prioritize the business needs of China, the world’s top carbon emitter, over the needs and wants of best-in-class Western Canadian energy producers, who, if the red tape were removed, could free Canada from a myriad of Liberal-made affordability crises in a matter of months.

“I don’t think people realize that the best thing that could happen for the planet is if Canada doubles its emissions,” an anonymous, high-level energy expert told yours truly of late.

“The very concept of carbon leakage shows that Canada has lower embedded carbon emissions down the production line than other countries. For example, the same amount of aluminum produced in the United States produces more C02. There have been tens of billions invested in decarbonization in Alberta, the world is begging for our oil and gas, by increasing our emissions and continuing to evolve the world’s greenest delivery of O & G, we lower the planet’s emissions by far more than Canada’s measly 1-2 percent global share.

“But there are no new ideas from big government. They’re dinosaurs. They’re ten years behind on how to solve for this. You can’t tax, ban, and subsidize. 65% of Canadians already believe new tech can improve O & G emissions. People believe in technology. We have to think global, not local. Our policy has to harmonize with America. [Prime Minister] Harper was right when he said that Canada cannot go it alone, in his speech surrounding the Paris Accord. If we stay the course now, America and the rest of the world leave us behind.”

Yet that’s precisely what these ironically anti-fossil-fueled dinosaurs are hoping for. Steven Guilbeault would rather cozy up with their fellow totalitarian Covid hypochondriacs, and help ‘broker a deal’ with a hostile foreign power (that China will never follow) to reach the outright myth of ‘net zero’ by 2060, yet Alberta finds itself saddled with 2035, because f*ck’em, that’s why.

If these hallucinatory Liberal battle lines were drawn eight years ago, consider them now solidified with sandbags and anti-tank obstacles. Even at increasingly-historic lows in the polls, with a self-made crisis on every front, you almost have to admire their efforts to dig in, and to fight to their political deaths for the right to turn off your lights.

They’ll fail, of course. For prosperity’s sake — and even the environment’s — they have to. But regretfully, it won’t be before they stick a few million more Canadians with the pointy end from “that simple sharpness about life.”

If history has taught us anything, it’s that one can only try to be a communist for so long.

Alexander Brown is a writer, comms director, and part-time politico living in Toronto, Canada. For more from the writer, you are welcome to follow him on Twitter or Instagram.

Acceptable Views is a reader-supported publication that reaches tens of thousands per month. Click to become a free or paid subscriber.