Peter MacKay. Let the Feeding Frenzy Begin.

Having sold out the Progressive Conservatives to Stephen Harper, Peter MacKay is looking to climb over Andrew Scheer's moribund corpse to capture the Tory throne. And he has the gall to say that Andrew Scheer "stinks."

One-time and possible future leadership contender Peter MacKay says the “stinking albatross” of Andrew Scheer’s social conservative values cost the Conservatives the election. 

He offered the devastating critique of Scheer’s campaign performance during a panel discussion Wednesday hosted by the Wilson Center in Washington. 

“To use a good Canadian analogy, it was like having a breakaway on an open net and missing the net,” MacKay said. 

An increasing number of Conservatives, disappointed that Scheer was unable to defeat the Trudeau Liberals, have begun openly calling for him to resign and make way for a new leader who can expand the party’s base and gain more traction in Ontario and Quebec. MacKay — who briefly led the Progressive Conservatives before they merged with the Canadian Alliance to form today’s Conservative party — is prominent among those named as a potential successor.

Daft Peter, son of 'Airbus scandal' Elmer, proves that the apple rarely falls far from the tree.

MacKay, shown above shaking Andy's hand, demonstrates that it only takes one hand to shake, leaving the other free to wield the skinning knife.

Update:

What a difference a day makes.  Pete, it seems, had a late-nite change of heart. A few pointed phone calls perhaps?

"I've repeatedly said I support Andrew Scheer and I worked very hard to help in the campaign," he wrote.

"Reports of me organizing are false. Recent comments are about our party's shortcomings and making the necessary improvements with modern policies and better coms so we can win the next election."

But, Pete, you've got a history of repeatedly saying things. Remember that solemn pledge never to betray the Progressive Conservatives to Harper? I'm sure you said that repeatedly. Eh, Pete? D'incha?

Better Than Scheer? Hard to Tell.

Is Peter MacKay planning a comeback? According to the Globe, MacKay's people are laying the groundwork for a leadership challenge if Andrew "Summer Help" Scheer loses on the 21st.

Veteran Conservative Party insider John Capobianco, a senior vice-president at the public relations and marketing agency FleishmanHillard Inc., confirmed to The Globe and Mail that friends of Mr. MacKay have discussed the possibility he could seek the leadership if Mr. Scheer falters. 

Mr. Scheer would face an automatic leadership review in 2020 and senior players in the Conservative Party, to whom The Globe has granted confidentiality to speak about sensitive matters, say he would have difficulty holding on to the top job if he can’t lead the party to victory at a time when many loyalists believe Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is electorally vulnerable. 

Mr. Capobianco and other Conservatives reached by The Globe stressed that no one is trying to undercut Mr. Scheer’s leadership, and that Mr. MacKay and his supporters are working hard to elect a Conservative government on Oct. 21.

Yeah, right.

This Dismal Season

Sorry. I asked around. Couldn't find anyone who bothered watching last night's leaders' debate. Not one. I suppose it has something to do with that "none of the above" attitude that permeates the general election this year.

All but two were university grads, the sort who usually pay some heed to these things if only for coffee or dinner conversations. Not this year, sorry.

I'm told some of those I asked simply missed it. The timing was awkward. You might settle down at 9 o'clock to watch the fireworks but, on the coast, you have other things to do - fixing dinner for example or just getting home through rush hour traffic, that sort of thing. One woman told me that she had it on her car radio but it was all gibberish as they talked over each other so she lost interest.

I see that Trudeau's most obsessive attacker was left quite tumescent but, again, so what?

What does it say when we're witnessing the Clash of Titans - a stammering school marm versus a summer-help counter clerk. I've never seen the like of it and I do go back a ways. There's something that is just so dismal about this election. Sort of like trying to mend a flat tire with four puncture wounds. You know very little good will come of it.

It's a pity really because there is so much at stake in this election including the fate of our youngest people and the generations to follow them. Time is running out and this time, four years hence, will probably be too late for Canada to change course.  Too little, too late.

This brings to mind Gary Mason's column in the Globe in late September where he contrasted Mulroney's brilliant effort to 'fix' the seriously damaged Ozone hole to the endless greenwash we're getting today on climate change.

...Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said at a town hall event in Peterborough in January, 2017, that while he couldn’t shut down the oil sands immediately, “we need to phase them out, we need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.” It should not have been a controversial statement because it’s true. And yet, politicians in Alberta (and many citizens, too) lost their minds, accusing the Mr. Trudeau of betraying them, of forging a plan to rob thousands of people of their livelihoods. A few days later, Mr. Trudeau tried to undo the damage, saying that he “misspoke” – the oil sands would not be going anywhere soon, he assured Canadians.

Mason offers four reasons not to swallow the green smoothie voters are being force fed in this campaign.

First, neither of the two parties who will form government when the votes are tallied has a coherent plan to cut emissions enough in the limited time remaining. The Liberals at least have a vague plan but it's aspirational at best. And haven't we heard this aspirational talk from Justin before?

Second is the "fire and fall back" approach to climate change in vogue today. They're not denying the affliction any more. Instead they've moved on to undermining the solutions.

It’s not just members of the public who are in denial, but politicians and the oil and gas industry as well. Everyone agrees there is a problem, but few are willing to accept the sour medicine it will take to do something about it.

Mason's third reason is the refusal of the oil and gas industry (bolstered by their political stooges) to accept that their industry's days are numbered - at least if we intend to see our society last a few more generations.

A recent piece in The New York Times by Christiana Figueres laid it out in stark detail. The life of many of the world’s oil and gas companies, in their current form, could be as little as five years in some cases, but no more than 30 even in the most optimistic scenarios, predicted Ms. Figueres, who was the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Markets have started to abandon many of these companies. Exxon Mobil was the last big oil giant remaining in the top 10 of the world’s most valuable companies – until it dropped out earlier this month for the first time.

We either cut our own throats or we end fossil fuels. It's what Hans Joachim Schellnhuber meant when he said at the 2015 Paris climate summit that our only hope was for an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy giants. Survival depends on our governments putting them down, blowing them up. We know that the highest carbon, most toxin laden fuels have to be left in the ground yet here we have a prime minister so ensnarled in cognitive dissonance as to believe there's a legitimate purpose for building a 60-year, high capacity bitumen pipeline squaring off against a counter-clerk who attacks him for not getting it built fast enough.

Mason's final source of despair is how deeply and angrily divided Canadians are, especially those rallying to the defence of the petro-economy. Even Dame Cathy "we must not harm the economy" McKenna now needs a bodyguard to protect her from the petro-thugs.

Jason Kenney, for one, has relied on often incendiary oratory to get supporters riled up against the Liberal government in Ottawa, which he blames for trying to kill the oil industry. (Even though it bought a pipeline.) But a phalanx of conservative premiers has railed against the dangers of climate measures that will “kill the economy.” The doubt these politicians have sowed in the minds of the public may be having an effect. A recent survey by the firm Ipsos found nearly half of those polled thought scientists were elitists whose findings they discounted because they don’t align with their personal beliefs. Other polls have shown that people believe climate change is real but don’t want to sacrifice much to reverse its effects – a result no doubt influenced by the words of politicians who have convinced many Canadians that measures such as a carbon tax are a mere money grab that will have no measurable impact on GHG emissions.

Mason concludes by observing how quickly we praise Greta Thunberg and her good works and then, just as quickly, put all that out of our minds and, like moths, are drawn to the lanterns of Scheer and Trudeau.

This is a Potemkin campaign with everyone convincingly painted up to appear as someone or something that they're not. That's true of Scheer and Trudeau. It's also true of "late to the party" Jagmeet Singh who can't even get Rachel Notley to say she'll vote for him this time round. I've listened to Jagmeet and I'm convinced he's a very slick and opportunistic bullshitter, not that it's going to matter. Singh may have, pardon the term, found "Climate Jesus" but the New Dem rank and file haven't shown much sign they're with him.

So I will dutifully cast my ballot on October 21 but I don't think I'll waste my time watching the returns.  Maybe I'll dust off my Indiana Jones DVDs and make a night of it.

The Tyee Trolls Andrew Scheer

The headline says it all - "SCHEER AMBITION: The Private Sector Months. And Then - to Government."  It's apparently the first in a series on the life and times of Chuckles, our would-be prime minister.

Andrew Scheer has a problem. No one likes to be labelled a career politician — particularly not a Conservative. The conservative ideal is Cincinnatus, that noble Roman who left his fields to save the Republic before returning once again to his plow. But the Conservative leader is neither Cincinnatus nor silver-tongued Cicero. Nor, as his zig-zag to power shows, is he Voltaire, the defender of free speech whose mantle Scheer has often sought to don.

...It stands to reason that Cincinnatus might have had a more difficult time taking power had he been revealed to be a resume-padding stable boy, but ultimately no one is likely to have supported Scheer due to a sterling career peddling supplementary hail coverage anyway. His qualifications, for good or ill, are political.

If You're Pouring Gasoline On the Fire, Don't Pretend You're Fighting the Flames.

It's funny, with the October elections nearing, how concerned the Conservatives and Liberals are becoming about climate change or, at least, the flooding that has ravaged eastern Canada and the maritimes.  Oh they're all eco-warriors now. So precious.

It might be inspirational if they weren't such petro-pimps, eager to flood world markets with high-carbon, high-cost, low-value sludge bitumen. It doesn't matter where that garbage is burned. It's all going up into our shared atmosphere and it's our warming and more moisture-laden atmosphere that's delivering all those floods.

Hell, even PostMedia's Montreal Gazette is getting wise. Today the paper warns that this flooding could be Quebec's "new normal." Not really. Give it another ten years, twenty to be sure, and Quebeckers might be remembering this as the good old days. This is just "early onset" stuff. There's no stasis. The climate is worsening. There'll be plenty of new normal to come, sort of like the "oldest person on Earth" contest.

In today's Globe, Ibbitson writes that even the Tories are now getting onside about climate change. Why does Greenwash smell so much like horse shit? Ibbitson begins with the mandatory disclaimer that no weather event can absolutely be linked to global warming and then follows up with this whopper:

Although the United States, China and India are far more responsible for climate change than Canada, that does does not relieve this country of its moral obligation to do its part.

We're really not the problem. Until you consider that Canada consistently ranks in the Top Ten countries for overall emissions and an impressive Top Three standing for per capita emissions.  And that's before we get an honest accounting for the emissions from Alberta and Saskatchewan's bitumen producers (don't hold your breath waiting).

There may not be another issue that has prompted so much blatant dishonest from governments as climate change. Pity it's also an existential threat, the gravest in the history of human civilization. Scheer is about to pull some sort of eco-bunny out of his backside. Singh will go tut-tut, tut-tut. Trudeau will fill a sandbag, maybe flash his abs.

Who to trust, who to believe? The one that produces a convincing policy to meet the immediate baseline requirement for averting catastrophic, runaway global warming - a 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 leading to a near total decarbonization by 2050.

You'll know they're lying if they don't identify how they'll fund such a Herculean effort. Where's the money coming from? What will we have to sacrifice? Who loses so that we all might survive? Something has to give. What'll it be? How about those billions in subsidies and benefits you're lavishing on the Oil Patch? That would be a start.

No rush. The Three Stooges might just get solutions from the motion Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party will table in Britain's HoC this Wednesday.  Harnessing the energy of the Extinction Rebellion and the Greta Thunberg-inspired student climate strikers, Corbyn will demand that the government declare a national climate emergency. It's expected that part of that deal will require a firm commitment to meet the 50 per cent by 2030 and near total elimination of GHG emissions by 2050, something our government hasn't even acknowledged much less accepted.

A Window Into the Hateful Minds of Canada's Far Right

The Globe & Mail has got its hands on what they were never supposed to see - 150,000 chat room messages exchanged among Canadian rightwing extremists.

They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in every province, in communities large and small. 

They gather on the internet to strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized. They are the new far right in Canada. 

The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old multicultural consensus in this country.

The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.

The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.

Our "friend" may run cover for Andrew Scheer and his dog-whistle messaging but the Tories and their leader are not on the side of the angels.

The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the upcoming election.

EXPLORING CONSERVATIVE PARTY INROADS 

In early 2017, members of the Canadian Super Players chat group set out to make their mark on mainstream politics. Their vehicle for doing so: the leadership race of the Conservative Party of Canada.

The first candidate they rallied behind was Kellie Leitch, who was proposing screening immigrants for cultural values. When her leadership campaign stalled, they moved en masse to support Maxime Bernier. 

One person in the chat room, who went by the name of Cyrus online and who described himself as a law student, said he attended a Bernier event in March, 2017, and described the politician “dog whistling pretty hard. He mentioned western values and western civilization a lot.” But Cyrus was less persuaded by Mr. Bernier’s libertarian policies and was unhappy that he did not take a stronger stance against asylum seekers crossing the border on foot. 

A few other chat-room participants praised Andrew Scheer, but the consensus was that Mr. Bernier was the better bet. Dank, the student teacher, even expressed dismay that he couldn’t cast more than one ballot for Mr. Bernier.

It's a pretty dark look into these groups and it's pretty obvious they're not supporting the Liberals or the New Dems or the Greens. It deserves to be read in its entirety. Check out the link at the top.

Will We Let Them Off the Hook Again? Sure We Will.

There are times when politicians have to treat voters like grown-ups. This is one of those moments.

Like it or not, we live in perilous times. It is in such difficult times that we need candour and clarity from those who seek to lead us. That's part of progressive democracy.

You might disagree but I believe we need a direct explanation of what our political parties, the lot of them, propose to do about climate change. The warning we've been given is that we have somewhat less than 12 years to slash our greenhouse gas emissions by half if we're to have a reasonable chance - yes, chance, not certainty, not even probability - of averting catastrophic runaway global warming.

That's like a doctor warning you must choose - quit smoking right now or die.

Remember, this warning comes from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that, since its inception, has established a dangerous pattern of understating - sugar coating, if you will - its predictions on climate change.  Even the boys and girls with the rose-coloured glasses are saying if we don't give up our carbon-ways and rapidly, we're screwed.

When you're up against a threat like that, you need some answers. You need honesty.

Politicians aren't very good at honesty. That's especially true for the Conservative and Liberal parties that, between them, have shared the reins of power in our country. They'll say pretty much anything and everything they calculate you want to hear, whatever it takes to get your vote, and then, the winner will go about breaking an awful lot of those once solemn promises.

Remember Harper came to power promising two things: accountability and transparency. When those tricks worked, he set about building a Hermit Kingdom, in which government was walled off from the public, their own public service. Harper then set about to implement change by incrementalism, slowly enough you would have to be pretty sharp to notice, its path greased with lies and darkness.

Justin brought a happy face to the scene but his promises of wisdom and light were almost as meaningless as what we endured with Harper. Lots of inspirational talk about electoral reform, social licence, First Nations reconciliation and more. It was all just a bag of shiny things and it worked.

We can't have that sort of blather again. Our children's lives are at risk. Our grandchildren's lives are in real peril. There's no more time for politics of the past, including the immediate past.

We need answers. How does the petro-state intend to address climate change? Do the candidates accept the IPCC warning? Are they willing to pick up that gauntlet? Do they intend to meet the "50 by 30" challenge or not? If yes, then how? If no, then what?

Carbon taxes - carbon bullshit. There is nothing in a minuscule carbon tax that would remotely meet the "50 by 30" baseline target. One has little to do with the other. Carbon taxes are gestural, nothing more.

We spent a decade in Afghanistan playing the gestural game. We pumped a lot of money and too many lives into that "mission" and we left the place pretty much as we found it. We never had a chance to tame Kandahar province, not with a paltry force of 2,000 for a job that required 15,000 to 20,000. That was a gestural response. Now the Americans are desperately negotiating for a "peace with honour" deal with the Taliban, much like the deal they cut with North Viet Nam to cover their retreat there in the 70s.

There are deep parallels between how we approached Afghanistan and how we're approaching climate change. The big difference is that climate change is something we just cannot walk away from. It won't let us.  Hiking a mile uphill is not the same as summiting Everest.

For me the question is going to be whether the candidate accepts the IPCC "50 by 30" warning and has a credible plan to meet it. A credible plan, not just carbon taxes.

Credible as in understandable and believable. You have to see how they intend to get from here to there and you have to consider whether they're believable. On both scores, Andrew Scheer is a write-off. He won't pretend that he'll make changes of the required magnitude. He's all for going the other way. His "executive prime minister," Jason Kenney would see to that.

As for Justin Trudeau, we've seen how he meets his promises. He apologizes. He's an ardent neoliberal and he believes in the petro-state. "50 by 30"? How do you figure the chances of Trudeau even promising to meet that target?

Our very survival as a civilization is at stake. It will take a truly Herculean effort and there's precious little time remaining to us. It would be costly and immensely disruptive to meet the target.

One won't. He's the honest one. The other will say he will but won't. Neither of them is worth a tinker's dam. Then again they don't have to be one whit better than they are. When the ballots are counted this October, the two of them will have, between them, about 70 per cent of the vote. With that near certainty, honesty doesn't have much relevance.

David Attenborough Takes Off the Gloves - At Last

He's been criticized for ducking the hard issues of climate change in his breathtaking nature series. That's over. David Attenborough's hour-long BBC documentary, "Climate Change - the Facts," lays bare how we are eliminating life on our planet.



Watch it if you've got the strength and then reflect on Canada as a petro-state and the driving forces behind it, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party of Canada.  Time is running out. Carbon taxes won't get us where we need to be, not in time. We know that the global economy has to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Canada is nowhere near that target. Our focus is on a rapid expansion of the production and export of high-carbon, high-cost, low-value garbage fuels like bitumen.

This Is What Gives Them Away

A lot of stupid people in Canada have come to think of Athabasca bitumen as "oil." That is the single most important victory the petro-state has achieved.

It's not oil. It may be turned into oil at a distant refinery, probably in the States  but we're told even in Asia, at some time, somewhere. Until it leaves that distant refinery it's something quite different from  any conventional oil.

"They" - the federal and provincial governments, our bitumen-friendly media, and the Oil Patch - are lying to us about this stuff, filling your mind with images of something that is not. Whether it comes out of Justin Trudeau's mouth or Andrew Scheer's mouth or Jason Kenney's mouth, they're feeding you carefully contrived horse shit and, by the look of things, you've got a taste for it now.

They don't want you to trouble your precious minds with what they're really doing. They don't want you dwelling on what's really in the crap they're squeezing through their pipelines.

They don't want you dwelling on the ultra-high carbon, granulated coal in their crud - petcoke. Out of sight/out of mind. That stuff gets refined out. Then it gets sold wherever no one is too fussy about burning it. It's a lot worse, pound for pound, than brown or thermal coal, the real garbage stuff.

They'll howl like cut cats at the first mention of the lethal toxins embedded in  unrefined dilbit.

The heavy metals, rated as priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, include mercury, arsenic, beryllium, copper, cadmium, thallium, lead, nickel, zinc and silver. All are toxic. Arsenic is a known human carcinogen; cadmium can severely destroy the kidneys and other organs; and thallium is so poisonous that it pops up in Agatha Christie mysteries as a murder weapon.

That stuff threatens environmental catastrophe wherever a dilbit pipeline runs. It threatens British Columbia's pristine coastal ecology with every wallowing supertanker that navigates our waters.

They know that a dilbit spill in BC waters is virtually beyond clean up. They know that the diluent quickly evaporates out leaving the dense bitumen to sink to the bottom, hundreds of feet down, where it can never be cleaned up and will destroy the marine food chain for many decades, perhaps forever.



They know how pernicious and devastating this crud is. That's why Trudeau's environment minister, Dame Cathy McKenna, has approved the use of Corexit as an "oil dispersent." It's nothing of the sort. It's an outrageous lie whether it comes out of Cathy's mouth or Justin's.  Corexit doesn't disperse oil, even ordinary conventional crude oil. It sinks spilled oil to the bottom. Out of sight/out of mind. It was used in Price William Sound for the Exxon Valdez. It was used in the Gulf of Mexico for the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. It has one purpose - to make the problem go away for those who can turn their backs on what they've done.

Crews are regularly sickened by Corexit. Most of the crews that worked the Exxon Valdez spill fell seriously ill.  Just read the warning label from Nalco, the producer of Corexit.

Corexit is for use on spills on land. Nalco's clean up directions make that obvious.

"Do not contaminate surface water." As if.

There is no justification whatsoever for exposing my province, my land, my coast to this environmental disaster in waiting. All these things - the toxins, the petcoke, the acids and abrasives - could easily be refined out in Alberta, in Athabasca.

The thing is. If they were responsible - Alberta or the feds - and showed just a little respect for British Columbia and demanded that it be refined on site, it would expose how worthless this high-carbon/high-cost/low-value garbage fossil fuel really is.

Despite all this these bastards threaten us. They jail us and give us criminal records.  It's ironic that we should be going to jail, not them. It's pretty rich to hear Liberals whine that, if we don't vote for their boy, we're electing Andrew Scheer. What a laugh.

This Could Be Another Difficult Day for Mr. Trudeau

He panicked and tossed away $4.5 billion on a pipeline project, money we might not (probably won't) get back. He's about to pour another seven to nine billion into constructing the Justin Trudeau Memorial Trans-Mountain Pipeline.

At the time the prime minister justified this climate wrecking venture as the price we had to pay to bring Alberta onside with carbon pricing, emissions cuts.  The outgoing premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, dutifully nodded, a wry smile crossing her lips.

The predicted incoming premier, Jason Kenney, won't be fulfilling Ms. Notley's eco-pledges. He will, however, expect Justin to finish that pipeline and be quick about it. And Jason knows Justin can be played.

Welcome to a future of pipeline politics, an issue tailor-made for greasy pols like Kenney.

Jason knows that the Sword of Damocles hangs over Alberta's bitumen pits. With the price of both clean energy generation and storage plummeting, the writing is on the wall for high-carbon/high-cost/low-value fossil fuels - i.e. bitumen. The halcyon days of the Tar Sands are over. Analysis after analysis reach the same conclusion - it will still sell in limited amounts at marginal prices.

There'll be blame aplenty and endless finger-pointing by those not wanting to get their fair share. For some, such as Kenney, an easy out will be the pipeline. The popular narrative, implausible but ingrained, is that Alberta's economic woes are the result of a lack of pipeline capacity. Ottawa has dragged its heels, British Columbia has thwarted Alberta's divine right to imperil BC's coast, yada, yada, yada.

Blaming outsiders is key to ignoring that Alberta's real woes are self-inflicted. It's economy is internally destabilized by provincial energy policy.

During the era of Ralph Klein the people of Alberta were conned into believing they could live beyond their means. Oil and bitumen royalties would cover the tab. No need for sales taxes. Those were for losers. A lot of them still believe that nonsense.

Jim Prentice wanted to bring back the long pants (i.e. taxes) but, when he sought a mandate in 2015, Alberta voters punished the PCs, ending their 40 year reign and consigning them to third place.

Alberta would remain a place that could pay its bills and provide basic services so long as oil prices were booming. That's high-grade stupid.

The delusions of oil run deep across Alberta but, like most fantasies, they can leave scars when they're taken seriously. In Alberta, even education has been neglected, unable to overcome the allure of easy money in the oil patch.

While postsecondary education is not an issue that will get the blood of Albertans boiling the way Quebec and equalization do, it’s arguably far more important to the province’s future. In fact, there is an incipient crisis in this area that so far has been largely ignored by Alberta’s political masters. 

Here is the problem. 

Over the past several decades, young Albertans – especially young men – could get good-paying jobs in the oil patch right out of high school. That’s no longer the case – and likely won’t be ever again. And beyond disruptions in the global energy market, advances in the world of technology – robotics, artificial intelligence, among others – are also affecting job opportunities for low-educated workers.

...Alberta has the lowest participation rates for postsecondary education in the country. According to a recent paper done for the Council of Post-Secondary Presidents of Alberta, between 2007 and 2014 the participation rate for men and women 18 to 34 averaged just 17 per cent. Nationally, that rate fluctuated between 22 and 24 per cent.

...Others have tried to sound the alarm about Alberta’s dismal record on research and innovation, which is what the future is all about. The province received an overall grade of D from the Conference Board of Canada in itsinnovation report card, with a particularly poor mark for research and development. 

In its paper, the council also points to something a recent TD Economics study called the “scarring effect.” This is the wage penalty associated with the period of unemployment for youth first entering the work force; the longer young people sit on the sidelines without a job, the greater the impact it has on both their future earnings and the economy overall. In a province with an outsized number of kids without any secondary education, this could be significant.

Today's editorials in the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald back Kenney all the way as though, once Notley is driven out, Alberta's petro-economy will return the province to bountiful prosperity of its past glory. Full steam ahead and spare not a thought to the consequences. This brought to mind a recent column written by Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee, "The Coddling of the Alberta Mind."

Oil, a commodity that nurtures dependency, has so coddled the Alberta mind that it has fostered a provincial culture of victimization as poisonous as the identity politics unsettling university campuses.

...Every day the province’s oil-obsessed politicos warn Albertans that Canada is a dangerous place full of self-righteous climate activists (and some are indeed self-righteous), anti-pipeline protestors, dumb courts, stubborn First Nations, and nasty liberals. 

Moreover the province’s potential for offence-taking has become as grand as Justin Trudeau’s vindictive Liberal Party of Canada. It can’t tolerate any truth-telling either.

...Albertans have become such a fragile, oil-reliant people, reasons Kenney, that the province now needs the equivalent of university Bias Response Teams, in this case to foster “a safe and inclusive environment” for its petroleum exporters who have now claimed Alberta’s identity as their own. 

(The rulers of Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia, we should remember, don’t much like oil critics, either. The political records show that oil relishes conflict and breeds political aggression like no other commodity, except cocaine.) 

...Over many years, Alberta’s Tories repeatedly gambled that the price of bitumen, a garbage crude that requires upgrading and complex refining, could only go higher, and they bet wrong.

So did the NDP, another oil-coddled entity. (And yes, Albertans should be very angry about the gross mismanagement of their gas and oil resources by their elected politicians.)

...Coddling a mind is a terrible thing, but coddling a province is a social disaster.

In the current election campaign, no politician wants to pony up and tell the truth.

It wasn’t foreigners or bad actors who created Alberta’s failings; it was Albertans and their damn greed and lack of strategic planning.

Albertans, and only Albertans, share the blame for not collecting their fair share and saving for a rainy day. 

All the angry talk about leaving Canada is the whinging of coddled minds in the land of the Wild Rose. Kenney knows how to play the victim card even better than Notley and, barring some miraculous turnaround in markets for high-cost/high-carbon/low-value sludge bitumen, Kenney is going to be looking for whipping boys.

Just like Trump's Gullibillies, Kenney has a ready-made base of easily-manipulated dupes and he has the manual for their care and feeding. He's a bit like the Nigel Farage of western Canada with Andrew Scheer a dull impersonation of Boris Johnson. They've got their sights set on Justin Trudeau and, for that matter, British Columbia. This could be a long and difficult night for the prime minister and for B.C.