Don Martin: Trudeau's emissions plan fits a pattern of inconsistency and delusion


Typically, you simply should shake your head.


Justin Trudeau, the prime minister till 2025 and probably past, runs a authorities that excels at being predictably inconsistent, transparently delusional, often devious and excessively obsessive about the most recent shiny object.


Assume not? Let me rely the methods resulting in Tuesday’s newest grand delusion.


For inconsistency, take into account this week’s declared buy of the F-35 fighter jet. It comes a dozen years after the final time Canada introduced we had been shopping for them, earlier than being interrupted by Trudeau’s promise to by no means EVER purchase that exact jet.


The timing for this $19-billion flip-flop, which cupboard ministers blamed on their very own bureaucrats, was apparent.


The federal government whipped out the F-35s to provide its April 7 price range the quilt to spend huge on jets to bolster its feeble navy investments at a time when the remainder of NATO is arming up.


Sticking with navy issues, there’s a nagging inconsistency in Trudeau pledging extra deadly weapons to assist Ukraine combat the Russian invasion, which most Canadians rightly assist.


However it ignores the very fact Canada’s largest arms export is to Saudi Arabia, which is doing a ramped-up Putin-like “particular navy operation” on Yemen, utilizing Canadian armoured autos, which a United Nations report says is “serving to to perpetuate” the conflict.


Then there are the shiny political lures that just about at all times hook Trudeau.


Subsequent month, World Citizen is internet hosting a glittery star-studded occasion to assist Ukraine. Given how he’s already selling it on his workplace web site, you simply KNOW the prime minister can be basking in protection from the entrance of the worldwide on-line stage.


In the meantime, younger women are once more being denied education in Afghanistan whereas hunger takes maintain. This, in a rustic the place almost 160 Canadians died defending human rights. To this point, crickets on the prime minister’s social media accounts.


And, lastly, the prime minister does have a devious aspect.


On Wednesday, Trudeau will make an overdue go to to the Williams Lake First Nation the place 93 burial websites linked to a former residential college have been discovered.


That is proper beneath the flight path he took for a browsing getaway on the first-ever Nationwide Day for Fact and Reconciliation final fall.


Nonetheless, this go to comes the day after a big-ticket Liberal fundraiser in Vancouver, which permits the federal government jet to move the prime minister and cupboard ministers on the taxpayers’ tab for an in a single day getaway, which, I need to stress, doesn't make him the primary prime minister to overlap public duties with partisan actions.


However, all the above is a protracted winding approach of attending to the most important head-shaking growth of the week, the 270-page grand plan to cut back greenhouse fuel emissions within the pivotal combat towards local weather change.


You possibly can solely hope these formidable targets may be met as a result of it’s important for our planet’s future.


However it is a far cry from a concrete plan. It’s barely a blueprint. Extra like a want checklist sprinkled with pixie mud and REM-sleep ranges of dreaming.


Think about the most important wrongdoer, the oil sector, the place emissions have elevated by an eye-popping 137 per cent since 2005, even with coal-fired energy vegetation being mothballed.

The feds say the brand new goal should see emissions all of a sudden drop by 42 per cent in simply eight years, apparently forgetting their promise to spice up Canadian oil and fuel exports to Europe to assist cut back its dependence on Russian vitality.


When requested how Canada’s oil patch might ramp up manufacturing to assist Europe and nonetheless meet its dramatically decreased home emissions goal, Pure Sources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson declared that folks “oversimplify these points."


Canada, he stated, should “stroll and chew gum on the identical time” by serving to meet Europe’s post-Russian vitality wants, whereas remaining on monitor for deep cuts in home emissions. Gosh. Look who’s simplifying now?


The federal government additionally insists 60 per cent of recent automotive purchases should be electrical in simply eight years, this in a gross sales market the place EVs now register simply 5 per cent of gross sales. How? No thought past one thing referred to as a “gross sales mandate” now beneath growth.


The underside line, in response to Inexperienced Social gathering’s Elizabeth Could, is that simply 5 pages of charts in your complete door-stopper of a doc truly matter as a result of they flesh out the objectives with some bare-boned hints of hopeful motion.


In fact, it’s hopeless as a result of none of this may come to go.


We haven’t met an emissions discount goal in our historical past and there’s each likelihood the following prime minister will intestine or shelve this plan in any occasion.


However it suits with Trudeau’s persistently inconsistent political behaviour. He reaches to the celebs for self-reflected glory with out having his toes grounded in actuality.


That’s the underside line.

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