Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/09/2008 8:22:49 AM PDT by Clive
We honestly can't tell if it's brilliant or daft. As experienced reporters and editors, we have borne witness to a panoply of political spin techniques in the past, but Stephane Dion's performance at the Calgary Stampede on Monday may represent a legitimate novelty.
To be sure, no one can speak ill of the Liberal leader's courage in visiting the heart of the country's petro-economy to sell his Green Shift plan for taxing the devil out of carbon. The Stampede can be a forbidding gauntlet for a politician (nay, even for a plain old civilian): Even though Stephen Harper spent much of his life in Calgary and once worked for Imperial Oil, it took him repeated Stampede visits to master the urban-cowboy look and lose his aura of tenderfoot awkwardness. Mr. Dion stepped up and seems to have fit in pretty well for a -- one chokes on the words -- professor … from Quebec, no less.
Given his policies, he could have been expected to be treated as an enemy. Fortunately, that's not Calgary's way at Stampede time. But even though he is about as likely to win seats for his party in the oil biz capital as he is to enter the '09 chuck-wagon races, he still had to search for a way to appear sensitive to Albertan concerns about his Green Shift. And unfortunately, those concerns don't stop at the wellhead, though that would be enough. Alberta gets mighty cold from October to April, and the $2 per gigajoule that the Green Shift will ultimately add to natural gas prices will hit as hard there as anywhere. The new tax on jet fuel threatens injury to the bottom line of WestJet, a major Calgary employer. And the province gets most of its electricity from burning coal; hydro is one of those resources with which the province is not so abundantly endowed, and while new nuclear plants are being studied, getting them online will take decades, if it is permitted to happen at all. Among Alberta's carbon-spewing creatures, only the methane-expelling cattle that give their lives to provide all those Stampede burgers have been spared by the Green Shift --for now.
There is no getting around it: Mr. Dion's "revenue-neutral" plan for a carbon tax (which is only revenue-neutral if you assume, as the Green Shift accounting puzzlingly does, that the incentives in the program won't be responded to by penny-pinching citizens) represents a massive potential redistribution of wealth away from Alberta. His talk of placing burdens on foreign investors in the oil patch is particularly chilling to those who remember the exodus of capital that followed Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program (NEP). To be regionally revenue-neutral, the Green Shift would have to send much of the tax proceeds back to Albertans, and you'll search in vain for anything like that in the printed handbook.
So Mr. Dion's pitch to Alberta wisely ignored brute economics. Instead, he presented the plan as an opportunity for spiritually cleansing sacrifice. "It's very important for the world to know how much Albertans care about the environment, how much you are green and you want to do the right thing," Mr. Dion told the Stampede crowd. "I cannot accept that your reputation is damaged as it is now."
Who might have "damaged" that reputation? The light of suspicion naturally falls on the Conservative governments of Ralph Klein and Ed Stelmach -- and it is a testament to Mr. Dion's brazenness that he would claim, as an untested national party leader in the middle of Calgary, to represent true populist sentiment against the claims of such juggernaut-like vote-winners.
In any case, the Liberal leader seems to have been operating from the playbook of the tent evangelist, rather than the traditional paving-'n'-pump-priming politico. He wasn't in Alberta to pick pockets, perish the thought! He was there to rescue Alberta's compromised moral standing in the eyes of the world. Your own politicians, he was saying, have failed to understand your passion for doing good. (Reflecting on it, one almost might think they were motivated more by an appreciation of Albertans' desire to hold down a job and keep their houses heated.)
If the Green Shift merely reproduced the experience of the NEP, of course, most Canadians might be content to say, once again, "To hell with Alberta." But it is not 1980. Alberta is now footing much of the bill for public services in other provinces through equalization and is, overall, a much larger driver of overall Canadian economic growth than it once was.
At a time of high global commodity prices, a carbon tax means cutting open the golden goose of Confederation. If it proves to be what Canadian voters choose, the sacrifice may be worst in Alberta, but it cannot remain conveniently confined to it.
"Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark"
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FTW
Dion should leave spiritual sacrifice to the churches. He’ll tear this country apart yet if enough people are sucked in by him.
Somebody post a picture of Dion in a Stetson. I need a laugh today.
Too funny; from:
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2008/07/08/beyond-parody-gore-and-firedkin-at-la-scala/
srlucado:
Polar bears!
What’s happening to the polar bears?
It’s no longer just a warming scare,
They’re swimming for their lives!
CO2!
We’ve got to lower CO2!
There’s no refuge that we can go to,
How soon before the end arrives?
Kyoto!
Why won’t they sign the Kyoto?
We can’t ignore it, no, oh no,
Greenhouse gas levels must dive!
———————
You must admit the world is warm,
And icebergs no more can form,
Soon the seas will start to storm,
We cannot let this be the norm!
With fossil fuels we’ve tempted fate,
An SUV’s an act of hate,
To save the world we cannot wait,
We must act now or it’s too late!
Only one man stands at the shore,
The True Believer to the core,
He’ll stop the seas from rising more,
So save us now, Mister Al Gore!
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