When Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault tweets about cooperation between the Trudeau Liberals and the Government of Alberta, he self-evidently has in mind a relationship where he defines goals and Alberta gratefully accepts the wisdom of them.In other words, he has in mind the relationship between a rider and a horse.Well he would, wouldn’t he? Liberal party insiders have constructed within the Office of the Prime Minister an echo chamber of progressive thought. Within that comfortable place of certainty, it is entirely likely that the decisions made by sanctimonious dwarves such as Guilbeault are driven not — as we sometimes fear — by the sinister dictates of the World Health Organization or the World Economic Forum, but from the impregnable conviction that there could not possibly be another valid point of view than their own. Therefore people who disagree with such received wisdom must be obtuse at best, or more likely intentionally bloody-minded. That, we assume, is how he feels about Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Manifestly he does not like her: His first Twitter ("X") onslaught had accused her of spreading 'fear and misinformation' and was in essence a demand for a return to orthodoxy — as defined by himself, of course. (Speaking of 'misinformation,' when will the minister stop referring to carbon dioxide as 'pollution'? It's what plants need to produce oxygen.).It is the mentality of the inquisition, rebranded to the service to the new secular religion of climate change.And Guilbeault's latest outburst against Alberta Premier Danielle Smith reads as though Alberta’s weekend of hardship never happened.Yes... remember those three bitterly cold days that led to three energy alerts and it took an emergency purchase of power from Saskatchewan to fill Alberta’s power needs? The three days when the windmills in which Minister Guilbeault delights didn’t turn in the still air and the solar panels produced no power after dark?Who saw that coming? Actually, just about everybody in Alberta was anxious that something like that was likely. The degree to which Alberta’s energy mix relies too heavily upon interruptible power sources is common knowledge. But not, evidently, Minister Guilbeault who on Monday launched a second edition of his tiresome diatribe against Smith and her own Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz. Absent a recent psychiatric report, one ventures at one's own risk into speculation about the minister’s thought processes. But the question always returns: why can't the minister concede the simple mathematics of the situation? At those inevitable times when the solar and the wind don't work, something else needs to. That something could be nuclear. To some degree it could be run-of-river hydro generation.But something, there must be. And right now for speed and certainty, it looks like natural gas baseload generation. (The thought that a nuclear plant of any kind could be approved and built in 11 years in this country is pure fantasy. As for a hydro dam, they've been at Site C on the Peace River for 50 years and it's still not complete.)Smith has agreed to the concept of a net-zero emissions electrical grid by 2050. Guilbeault should satisfy himself with that. As for cooperation, the juvenile tone and tenor of his communications suggests that that's not really what he wants at all, just the comfortable enjoyment of his lonely seat on the summit of the moral high ground.Except there's nothing moral about the kind of stupidity that won't face the facts of survival during a prairie winter, is there?And nothing helpful to be had from Minister Guilbeault's 'sanctimonious' blatherings on Twitter ("X"). Twenty-one months to the next election.
