Jesse Kline: Trudeau demands climate sacrifice, while China burns coal with

Last week, my son announced at the dinner table that his school had turned off the lights for a time to “celebrate” Earth Day. To my mind, it seemed more of a lesson in why we need electricity to power our modern civilization, yet the kids were apparently allowed to spend the time playing computer games, which makes the overall point of the exercise hard to decipher.

Or maybe that’s the point: Canadians need to accept such incongruencies if they are expected to blindly support government policies that have a detrimental effect on their economic well-being, while achieving little more than virtue-signalling about climate change; and if they are going to pay more for basic amenities while China exploits the altruism of Canadians to gain an economic advantage.

Despite imposing a national carbon pricing scheme in 2019 that was ostensibly designed to incentivize industries and individuals to find ways to reduce emissions, the oil and gas sector has been singled out with industry-specific emissions targets that are expected to be detailed in the coming months. And that will be on top of existing regulations that already impose unique targets on the energy sector’s methane emissions, which the government is currently considering making even more onerous.

The Liberals don’t care because they know they have no hope of winning seats in Alberta, but their actions will further hobble a key driver of the Canadian economy, with ramifications far beyond the western Canadian oilpatch.