Live by the conspiracy theory, die by the conspiracy theory. That seems to be Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s guiding principle right now, as she stares down a vote on her leadership at November’s United Conservative Party AGM in Red Deer. During a recent town hall Smith made it clearer than ever that there’s no rabbit hole too deep for her to jump down.
During the Saturday session at Edmonton’s Maharaja Banquet Hall, some 500 party members showed up to ask questions of the premier and a few of her MLAs. While more mainstream things like healthcare and the economy came up, it was her answers to the more exotic questions that caught most people’s attention. From so-called “15-minute cities” to an imaginary wave of asylum seekers headed for Alberta, there was no far-right fever dream she wasn’t willing to indulge.
And yes, that includes chemtrails. In response to a question about their supposed existence over the skies in Alberta, she suggested that it might be the US Department of Defence doing it. “I have some limitations in what I can do in my job. I don’t know that I would have much power if that is the case, if the US Department of Defence is spraying us. So I’ll do what I can to investigate.”
This is about as far from John McCain’s famous 2008 rebuke of one of his supporters as you can get. At that town hall, McCain fielded a question with an equally ludicrous premise — that Barack Obama, his opponent in the presidential election, was an “Arab” — and cut the woman off before she could finish her half-baked thought. “No, ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about.”
Those days are clearly over, to our considerable collective detriment. As University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach noted on social media, “if you can't unequivocally state that the US Defense Department is not spraying us with chemicals through jet exhaust, that's disqualifying. It's disqualifying for a premier. It's disqualifying for a columnist. It disqualifies you as a thinking member of society.”
It also betrays a fundamental unkindness that contemporary conservative leaders like Smith consistently inflict on their own followers. Rather than trying to pull them out of the muck of misinformation, paranoia, and outright conspiracies, they instead encourage them to roll around in that intellectual filth. It makes them less capable of fully participating in their communities and the broader society, and more likely to say or do things that limit their economic and social opportunities. It also binds them more closely to the conservative cause, and helps feed the personal and political ambitions of those leading it.
This is the subtext to the Smith government’s proposed changes to the Alberta Bill of Rights, which are also aimed at placating the UCP membership in advance of November’s leadership vote. There is nothing in those changes that could possibly override or enhance our existing Charter rights, and the weirdly American stuff about firearms rights is clearly out of Alberta’s jurisdiction. The fact that the Alberta Bill of Rights is mere legislation rather than a constitutional guarantee means there’s a built-in future use of the notwithstanding clause on everything enumerated in it, since the next government — or even the next UCP premier — could simply pass new legislation rendering it moot.
The key driver behind these changes are the pandemic-era grievances that so disproportionately motivate Smith’s rural base. The updates to the Alberta Bill of Rights will, according to the premier, “reinforce the right of every Albertan to make their own choices regarding medical treatments they receive.” This was always a right they had, and one that wasn’t actually violated during the pandemic. It’s just that there were consequences attached to the choice not to get vaccinated that were intended to protect both the healthcare system and the broader society we all share.
The possibility of similar choice-based consequences being reintroduced in the midst of some future public health crisis isn’t getting legislated away here, either. When pressed by journalists about the need to balance individual liberties with community-level safety, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange let the truth slip out. “It will be balanced to make sure that we have the ability to function as a society as well and ensure the safety of all.”
That’s not a truth that either LaGrange or her boss are eager to share with their most devoted supporters. They will instead tell them they’ve struck a blow for personal liberty and freedom and hope that another public health crisis — one that forces the same sort of tough choices and tradeoffs that governments like Jason Kenney and Doug Ford’s made during the last one — doesn’t rear its head before the next election. They will wait for federal courts to overturn the most flagrantly unconstitutional aspects of their new bill, perhaps knowing that outcome was inevitable. And they will use the ensuing outrage and anger to further the grievance-industrial complex that both animates conservative politics in Alberta and distracts voters from the failings of their own provincial government.
If the UCP really wanted to help its most ardent supporters, it would start by telling them the truth — even, and maybe especially, the uncomfortable truths. They need to better understand what different levels of government can and can’t do, and they ought to be told when they’re trading in ideas and theories that are demonstrably (and often dangerously) false. They should be encouraged to seek out the best and most accurate sources of information on the things they care about, not driven to do their own research in the dankest corners of the internet.
Instead, they’re being treated like glorified mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of crap. This clearly serves the interests of the politicians who depend on their votes. Whether it serves the interests of the people casting them is, in the end, up to them to decide.
Another day, another lousy argument for more Canadian LNG
As I noted in last week’s newsletter, it was a relief to hear a German government official confirm that the business case for a new LNG facility on Canada’s East Coast is very much non-existent. "All studies show that the market is going to shrink," state secretary Jennifer Morgan told journalists at a briefing in September. "Germany will be driving forward on renewables, and gas demand will decline."
Alas, I now have to deal with people making the case for it on the basis of the United Kingdom’s supposed demand for Canada’s LNG. Greg Quinn, a retired British diplomat who now runs his own consulting firm, was given column inches in the Globe and Mail to pitch Canadians on his idea. And let me tell you: if you thought the business case for LNG exports to Germany was bad, wait until you hear about this one.
First, let’s dispatch a piece of obvious nonsense in his column. He suggests Ottawa is “deciding to get rid of fossil-fuel use virtually overnight,” which is pretty obviously incorrect when you think about its multi-billion dollar investment in the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion or its willingness to continue support for the export of LNG in British Columbia and the use of natural gas in Canada’s electricity system. Even the Clean Electricity Regulations still allow the use of abated natural gas in perpetuity and unabated — that is, the dirty stuff — until the mid-2040s.
He also trades in the silliness around the supposed requests from Greece and Poland for Canadian LNG exports, not realizing — or at least pretending not to — that they merely said they’d welcome all sources of potential supply. “If there truly is no business case, how come there are so many hungry buyers rapping at the door even if they’ve already seen it shut?”
Mr. Quinn doesn’t seem to actually understand how the LNG business works, or what the business case really looks like for Canadian exports off the East Coast. Nobody is proposing to pay a premium for Canadian LNG, which means it has to compete with existing sources already on the market. Qatar, for example, has some of the lowest extraction and shipping costs on earth, given that its deposits are located in shallow offshore formations and therefore require very little in the way of additional infrastructure.
The United States Gulf Coast, meanwhile, is filled with so-called “brownfield” sites — that is, locations that are comfortable with industrial activity — that make building new facilities very easy. And with huge volumes of gas being produced as a byproduct in Texas’s oilfields, they don't have to look far for a source of supply.
Canada, of course, is a different story. The vast majority of our gas is located in BC and Alberta, which means it must be shipped thousands of kilometres east. Getting LNG to the East Coast would also require a new pipeline, which would cost many billions of dollars, and a new terminal, which — you guessed it — would cost still more billions. Oh, and to make matters extra fun? It would also have to traverse Quebec, which has an understandable aversion to combustible hydrocarbons being moved through its backyard after the Lac Megantic disaster.
That’s just the supply end of things. The demand side might be even more discouraging for anyone who still wants to believe there’s a business case here. As the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted in a recent piece of analysis, LNG demand is already peaking in key markets like Europe and South Korea, with emerging Asian markets also slowing. “By the time Canadian LNG from most new facilities reaches markets near the end of the decade, global LNG supply is expected to have already outpaced demand, deflating global prices.”
Quinn even says the quiet part out loud, acknowledging that Britain’s demand for natural gas is both temporary and fleeting. “We promise we won’t use it as a permanent source of energy,” he writes. “Instead we will use it as a stopgap to cover until we have transitioned and found a better way to ensure we can survive.” That better way, which includes offshore wind, solar, and nuclear, is already here. It’s just a matter of time before it completely consumes the country’s current demand for fossil fuels.
So no, with all due respect to our British friends, I don’t think Canada will sink billions of dollars into a losing business. If Quinn can find business partners in the UK willing to lose that money, they’re welcome to fill their boots. If the British government wants to subsidize a Canadian LNG terminal on the East Coast, they can have at it. If I were Quinn, though, I wouldn’t hold my breath here.
Young people are about to get screwed over again
When the NDP walked away from its confidence and supply agreement with the Liberals, the party effectively handed the Bloc Québécois and Yves-François Blanchet a loaded political gun. Now, he’s taken aim at Justin Trudeau’s precious minority government with a pair of demands: take supply management off the table in future trade agreements and expand the 10 per cent increase in Old Age Security Payments to everyone over 65. “This is the demand in its entirety, it is irrevocable and non-negotiable,” Blanchet said.
It’s unlikely the Liberals would put up much of a fuss around the supply management part, if only because it’s not a hill worth dying on right now. Besides, if a future Trump administration were to demand changes to the system as part of yet another attempt to extort Canada in trade negotiations, that might just be a problem for a different prime minister to deal with.
The OAS top-up bill, on the other hand, is worth more reflection. It would constitute yet another fiscal transfer to a generation, the Baby Boomers, who need it less than any other group of senior citizens in human history. Between 2015 and 2020, the poverty rate among seniors was more than cut in half, going from 7.1 per cent in 2015 to 3.1 per cent in 2020. And while that started to rise after the pandemic, it’s still well below recent levels, never mind historical ones.
Let me be perfectly clear: I don’t think seniors should live in poverty. An increase to the Guaranteed Income Supplement, counterbalanced with a lowering of the clawback threshold on Old Age Security, makes all kinds of sense to me. Perhaps we could even use this as an opportunity to pilot a form of guaranteed basic income initially limited to those over 65.
But a blanket increase to Old Age Security, one that will cost tens of billions of dollars? That’s a hard pass for me — and, I suspect, many of the young voters who have already soured on the Liberal government. As Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw argued in a wonderful piece for the Globe and Mail last weekend, “Individual retirees with $90,000 incomes are eligible for full OAS benefits, meaning senior couples can qualify with $180,000 coming in. A couple with kids who together earn around $79,000 will have their Canada Child Benefit clawed back.”
Let’s call that what it is: unfair. And while it’s not a zero-sum game, there are limits to how much governments can spend — especially when they’re already running pretty meaningful deficits. Rather than cutting another blank cheque to seniors, let’s refocus the existing payments so they more fully and fairly target those who need it.
Maybe, as Kershaw suggests, that means reducing the clawback threshold on OAS from $90,000 to $70,000. Maybe it means clawing it back when household income, rather than individual income, surpasses $90,000. And yes, maybe it means restoring Stephen Harper’s plan to eliminate OAS eligibility for anyone under 67. All three changes would generate billions of dollars that could go to more fully funding the Guaranteed Income Supplement or creating a new de-facto guaranteed income for seniors. And as Kershaw noted, under all three options OAS spending would still increase more over the next few years than any federal investment targeting younger Canadians.
Maybe the Trudeau Liberals feel like this isn’t a fight worth having. But I’ll promise you this: it’s one younger voters are more than happy to take on right now.
Quick Hits
I’m not inclined to weigh in any further on the whole CTV-Poilievre debacle, except to note that it’s very bad stuff for anyone who cares about the state of political discourse and journalism in this country. I thought that Stephen Maher covered all the relevant points in his Toronto Star column on the subject, which you can (and should) read here, while Harrison Lowman had a good take on it for The Hub.
I’ll say this much, though: if we’re going to fire journalists for splicing together a clip, can we start holding politicians accountable when they lie to the public? As I wrote earlier this year, maybe it’s time for some legislation on this issue. Given the obvious contempt Pierre Poilievre has for the press, I can’t imagine he’d object to holding himself to a higher standard.
(Just joking. He totally would, of course)
With inflation coming down to the Bank of Canada’s target range, it’s reasonable to expect that major increases in grocery prices are a thing of the past. But while our overall bills are stabilizing, certain products that are exposed to climate risks continue to spike higher. And unlike the COVID-era disruptions that sparked the recent bout of economy-wide inflation, the climate-driven price increases aren’t about to disappear.
Olive oil was the first canary in this particular coal mine, with prices soaring more than 100 per cent on the back of a massive drought that hit olive-producing regions in Spain, Italy, and Greece. Now it’s apparently coffee’s turn to join this unwelcome party, as droughts in Brazil and Vietnam are putting pressure on the cost of highly popular arabica beans.
As a CBC story points out, the combination of climate change and deforestation in Brazil — the world’s biggest coffee producer — is turning once-rare droughts into more regular occurrences. In time, that’s going to mean a more expensive cup of coffee here at home. Climate-driven inflation is here to stay, and it’s only going to get worse.
And finally, for those who want to do a really deep dive on the global solar market, Bloomberg’s David Fickling — one of my favourite writers — has an amazing piece on how China (and Chinese companies) came to dominate America. It’s tempting for the China hawks to argue that this is all a product of government subsidies and giveaways, but Fickling presents a compelling argument to the contrary. He also underscores the point I always try to make to the oil and gas truthers here in Alberta: China has a vested interest (economic, yes, but also geostrategic) in producing as much solar in as short a time as it can. That will mean lower global oil demand, not just in China but also the markets where it aggressively exports its low-cost solar panels and electric vehicles.
A related (and equally interesting) piece in the Financial Times lays this calculus bare. “Decarbonisation is also key to unlocking Xi’s long-held ambition of energy independence for the Chinese nation, a significant strategic boost at a historic low point in relations with the US and other parts of the western world,” it says. Ilaria Mazzocco, senior fellow and China industrial expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the FT that “China could be, on the one hand, a lot less dependent on other countries, and on the other, it could make other countries a lot more dependent on China.”
In other words: don’t bet on the green transition slowing down there any time soon. China has every incentive, from the need for near-term economic stimulus to longer-term strategic considerations, to keep driving it faster. Buckle up.