Conrad Black: A fragile federation awaits Carney's green assault

 The prime minister's self-improvement program for us won't be pleasant

Prime Minister Mark Carney is enjoying a honeymoon in the polls, as all incoming leaders deserve. Less comprehensible are the celebrations that are quite audibly in progress about all that he is accomplishing.

 

 I have even seen adulatory references to his “first hundred days,” and favourable comparisons with the beginning of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 when he saved the collapsed financial system and reopened the banks and stock and commodity exchanges and set up the workfare programs that provided public works and conservation jobs for the 30 per cent of the population that was without work and received no federal assistance. Obviously, we do not have a similar state of urgency in Canada today. Nor do we have a government that as far as I can see has actually done anything except announce one or two good personnel appointments and proclaim a readiness in principle to expedite some large unspecified projects.

 

As far as I can deduce, the country is waiting for the painful choices that the new prime minister must make, and in particular between his almost rabid belief that the climate is changing in a way that requires us to abandon fossil fuels with almost superhuman haste to avoid being incinerated by skyrocketing temperatures, although he claims this is a unique, but unexplained opportunity for Canada. His rather alarming book, Values, is an outright socialist manifesto, a soporific recitation of conscientious shortcomings in the capitalist system. The author dances around but does not specifically acknowledge that capitalism is the superior system of economic organization because it is the only one that addresses the almost universal ambition for more. The efficacy of capitalism and its appeal are circumscribed by the proclaimed necessity of the state to intervene constantly to correct and elevate our avaricious and insufficiently caring natures. I don’t believe any significant number of Canadians bought into this fairy tale when they were panicked in May into voting for Carney over his false pretense that President Trump was a menace to Canada.

 

On his record, we can assume that the prime minister will demonstrate why he believes government is an elitist activity which best consists in unusually high-minded people directing and improving the lives of the more humdrum among us in the lumpen citizenry who require the government to refamiliarize us with our better selves. Given the vast self-improvement program that his book and some of his public utterances condition us to expect, I do not begrudge him taking the summer to prepare for this great burden that he has assumed. But as of now I have not seen any of it. At the risk of being thought a stick in the mud, I am waiting hopefully to see how he squares our overtaxed condition with our unacceptably high level of public deficit spending and our commitment to raise the defence budget (generously defined) to five per cent of GDP. This challenge, if the other countries of the western world are our guide, will be completely unacceptable in itself to the voters.

 

In his famous first inaugural address, President Roosevelt said: “Our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things.” Unfortunately, we cannot claim the same, though we have those also. Current polls indicate that about 43 per cent of Quebecers support separatist parties, not the 49 per cent who in the 1995 referendum voted to authorize negotiations for sovereignty with association, but that’s compared to the 38 per cent who appear to be federalists and 19 per cent who are ambiguous or undecided.

 

Polls also show approximately 30 per cent of Albertans as separatists, which in practice means for many that they wish to join the United States. If Mr. Carney proceeds with any significant part of his immensely ambitious climate change program, that 30 per cent may confidently be expected to become a majority. And in those circumstances, Albertans would be right to vote for secession-they would be much better appreciated in the United States than they have been by Canadians who have pillaged Alberta for decades to try to buy the votes of ungrateful Quebecers for federalism.

 

Equalization payments were adopted by the St. Laurent government in 1955 as a consolation prize to themselves when Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, after reminding Ottawa for 20 years that direct taxes were a concurrent jurisdiction, imposed a provincial income tax and threatened Ottawa with an election on the issue if it did not allow the deduction of Quebec provincial income tax for purposes of calculating the federal taxable income of Quebecers.

 

Latterly, Quebec has been much better managed economically than Canada and it is not clear that Quebec has any reason to expect the volume of equalization and transfer payments to continue as it has. I would like the film rights to the response to the first request Quebec receives for contribution to help equalize the living standards of the Atlantic provinces.

 

These are just symptoms of the fragility of this Confederation. Next to Saudi Arabia and the United States, we probably have the greatest oil reserves of any country in the world but still import large quantities of oil in the East because as the premier of Quebec might say, “We don’t want your dirty oil.” It appears that neither side is happy with continuation of this arrangement. Nor should they be.

 

As was mentioned in this place last week, a British Columbia justice has found that the natural right of the Indigenous people of this country takes priority over the property rights of those who enjoy unencumbered fee simple ownership of real estate. If this view is sustained by our higher courts, which have deluged us with such a shower of asinine judgments that it is impossible to rule out anything no matter how absurd, then 95 per cent of the immense area of this country remains ultimately the property of the approximately five per cent of Canadians who are Indigenous. The fatuity of this state of affairs does not require elaboration.

 

The former government of Justin Trudeau acquiesced in the view that this country has attempted genocide on the natives, putting us in a category at the United Nations with the most infamous regimes in the modern world. The flashpoint was the purported discovery of unmarked graves of native children near a discontinued residential school in British Columbia. The whole country donned sackcloth and ashes and all flags were lowered for six months, but there is still no proof the alleged incident has taken place.

 

Canada is terribly enervated and has been degraded by this systematic abasement of our nationality. We are awaiting Carney’s plan to lead us to a better condition. The summer is almost over and it’s time for him to do his job. Canada’s future hangs in the balance