Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Tories scrambling to keep energy-based economic agenda on track

MONTREAL—It’s hard for a seven-year old government to correct its course when the turn not taken is but a distant point in its rear-view mirror.

For Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, missing the fork in the road that could have led Canada to a more environmentally-sustainable economy is turning out to be anything but a shortcut to lasting prosperity.

Early on in the prime minister’s tenure, both Preston Manning and Brian Mulroney made the case that the greener path was also the safer path to implementing a resources-based economic agenda.

Manning has long argued that a Conservative movement determined to carve out a central place on the political landscape should take steps to own the environment issue.

As for Mulroney, he had had an early taste of the future dynamics of the global energy/environment debate at the time of the controversy over Quebec’s Great Whale hydro development.

In the mid-1990s, the war over whether the mega-hydro project should go ahead was lost over optics on native rights and potential risks to the environment, on an American public relations battlefield.

But that lesson and Manning’s prescriptions were apparently lost on Harper.

Over his minority mandates, he put strong ministers like John Baird and Jim Prentice in charge of the environment file but it was essentially to play defence against the opposition majority.

Since he has gained control of both houses of Parliament, Harper no longer bothers to pretend that the environment in general and climate change in particular is a major preoccupation, let alone a priority of his government.

Since their 2011 majority victory, the Conservatives have set about dismantling significant sections of Canada’s environmental oversight infrastructure — a first for a modern federal government.

In another first, planet-wide this time, they have formally withdrawn from the Kyoto protocol on climate change .

They have portrayed the environmental movement as a foreign-funded lobby bent on sabotaging the country’s economy.

Their caucus has spent the better part of the past year dumbing itself down daily in the House of Commons the better to caricature the notion of a carbon tax.

Today, the chickens are coming home to roost.

In the U.S., the Keystone pipeline has become a rallying point for the environmental movement and its influential allies.

Faced with such a development, the pre-Harper Canada might have been able to use its standing as a respected, member of the global environmental community to deflect American criticism of the oil sands.

But seven years of Conservative rule have stripped whatever green veneer the country still sported after a decade of relative neglect under the Liberals.

One only needs to hear Alberta Premier Alison Redford suggest that to question her province’s environmental record is to do willful harm to Canada to measure how empty the rhetorical cupboard is becoming.

Against that backdrop, Conservative allegations that NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is undermining Canada’s energy case at home and abroad are starting to sound like pre-emptive finger-pointing designed to help the government parcel out blame if need be for a self-inflicted failure.

What is certain is that as things stand today, Redford’s definition of the national interest is lost on the majority of British Columbians who oppose her province’s bid to run pipelines to the Pacific coast. The mistrust that projects such as Northern Gateway so widely inspire is in no small part grounded in the sense that the environment is an orphan file on Harper’s cabinet table.

As it brings down its eight budget , the Harper government is racing against the clock to erase the deficit in time to shower middle-class voters with more tax breaks in the lead-up to the 2015 election.

But the biggest scramble really involves putting the government’s energy-based economic agenda on a track that does not lead to a wall.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author:  Chantal Hébert

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