Summer's over but the Liberals' climate theatrics continue
National Post, 16 September 2023
Nonsensical federal environmental decisions can best be described as performative policy
Call it picnic theatre; summer-time performances courtesy of Canada’s environmental policies.
The curtain went up this summer on performative policy as Canada’s preferred option for saving the planet. But if performance is the main point, why should existing governments have all the fun? It’s time for some other policies to make their debut.
What is performative policy? Policy that proposes to do something about something, with the main point being to be seen as doing something about something. At its most benign, it is a way of signalling some good intention and encouraging others to do the same. That approach can even be laudable, as for example when a doughty soul sets out to run, bike, skateboard or skip rope across the country to “raise awareness” for this disease or that cause. Measuring concrete results for such performances are secondary; the effort itself is admirable.
Less benign though are government efforts at performative policy. If there are no ill effects, a bit of posing here and there may do little harm, and even some good. Performative policy though is malign when it only pretends to do some good while imposing real costs to achieve minimal, if any, benefit.
Consider this bit of pantomime. I drank a good number of iced coffees over the summer, induced by a kindly $1 offer. Each came with a paper straw, mandated by a state ban on single-use plastic straws. Trying to be helpful — which paper straws are manifestly not — I asked a young woman serving me for a plastic straw, promising to use it another time. Might that get around the “single-use” stipulation? Alas, it turns out that the massive multinational establishment no longer stocked the sinister straws at all.
Remarkably enough, the cup and lid were all plastic — much more than both the volume and mass of the now elusive plastic straw. Pure pretence.
Meanwhile, the prohibition on grocery store plastic bags — which I had used for years as garbage bags — has led to some families accumulating hundreds of the more sturdy, more costly and more environmentally damaging reusable bags. Pretending to do something useful is actually more damaging.
But those are just annoyances. No paper straw will break the consumer’s back. Not so for Canada’s national energy policy, announced with great fanfare this summer by Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault, who was more or less a full-time performative protester when he was scaling the CN Tower for Greenpeace.
The federal plan is to make Canada’s electricity grid “net-zero” on carbon emissions by 2035. Fossil fuels for electricity generation will be largely phased out. It’s a typical Liberal plan — Quebec and Ontario largely generate electricity from hydroelectric and nuclear, so the pain will be targeted on Alberta.
It’s performative. Canada’s electricity grid is already 84 per cent carbon free. Killing off the remaining 16 per cent — for utterly negligible impact on global emissions — will be costly for consumers, producers, employers and workers.
Don’t typecast Guilbeault as being against all fossil fuels. He is not against Chinese coal. He went to Beijing weeks later to play the role of China apologist, the other long-running production of his government. It was for the annual meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, where everyone pretends not to notice that China’s energy-related greenhouse gases now surpass those of the United States, Japan and Europe combined, thanks mainly to coal. China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Guilbeault’s fantastical trip was aptly described by Terry Glavin in these pages.
Continue reading at the National Post.