You will never go broke on a bet by overestimating the hypocrisy and shamelessness of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The looming trade/tariff war between the U.S. and Canada shows why.
Our lame duck PM, who called Canada the world’s first post-national state with no core identity — himself with a racist past he endlessly apologizes for — is now sashaying around Europe acting like Captain Canada because of the economic threat posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
In criticizing Trudeau, we in no way endorse Trump’s bizarre and reckless bid to blow up one of the world’s most effective trading relationships by engaging in economic warfare against a fellow democracy and ally.
That said, Trump’s threat is all the more devastating because of the Trudeau government’s lost decade in power, where it failed to expand our capacity to sell our oil and natural gas resources to global markets, in the idiotic belief that since fossil fuels would soon be replaced by wind and solar power, it was best to keep our enormous reserves of both in the ground to save the planet.
That meant we had to sell them almost exclusively to the U.S., our only major customer, at huge discounts, costing our economy billions of dollars every year.
This while foreign leaders were visiting Canada practically begging us to sell them liquified natural gas (LNG).
Trudeau sniffed that he didn’t see a sound economic case for doing so while the industry itself said the reason it wasn’t feasible was the Trudeau government’s constant stream of anti-gas and anti-oil regulation and legislation.
So, while Canada slept — the Liberals arguing they intervened to save the TMX pipeline and that Canada’s first LNG plant is scheduled to open later this year — the U.S. roared ahead with building new oil and gas pipelines and infrastructure.
That’s not just true under Trump. When Barack Obama was president, and hypocritically killing the cross-border Keystone XL pipeline, he was simultaneously boasting that during his administration the U.S. had constructed enough new oil and gas pipelines to more than encircle the earth.
Now we see the Americans signing lucrative deals to export LNG to countries like Japan, while Captain Canada pontificates from the sidelines.