Does the future belong to China?
Among other things that I regret having to say here: quite possibly.
That’s the underlying tension in my conversation with Stewart Muir of Power Struggle, a series of encounters with guests from industry, climate science, government and elsewhere, to probe the reality of modern energy.
Some necessary background to the conversation
The case I make, as far as energy goes: Canada’s priority should be energy sovereignty. As for energy exports, we should be focused on getting LNG to Europe. We built a damn railway in the 19th century from coast to coast, for God’s sake.
As far as Canada’s economy goes, we should be less reliant on foreign trade and more reliant on trading with ourselves. And here’s where I depart quite a lot from the Conservatives and the Liberals.
Building a soulless Leninplatz Complex on top of every Canadian city and town will not advance the cause of affordable housing (see especially here, under the subhead Crisis? What crisis?). In the same way, building pipelines and expanding port infrastucture to ship even more oil and coal and raw resources to China will do nothing for Canadian energy sovereignty, economic stability or national security:
Canadians aren’t stupid. They’re scared, angry and confused.
After nearly a decade of the Trudeau Liberals’ constant, whole-of-government denigration of Canada’s traditions and institutions as the relics of a genocidal colonial settler state, a flourishing of pent-up patriotism was inevitable. It would have occurred quite dramatically even if Donald Trump had not won last November’s U.S. presidential election.
This is the reason why the Liberals airbrushed Justin Trudeau from the public consciousness on March 9. It’s why the man who was our prime minister for almost ten years has been rendered strangely invisible since that day, and hasn’t been heard from since.
Vanishing Act
I can’t think of any other time like this in the history of Canadian prime ministers except in 1891 and 1894, first with the vanishing of John A. Macdonald and then John Thompson. The had good excuses. With Sir John A. it was death from a stroke. Prime Minister Thompson died of a heart attack.
In Justin Trudeau’s case, we know he was still alive on March 17, when he posted a selfie on Instagram. He was buying kitchen utensils at a Canadian Tire store in Ottawa. Apparently he’s living an unexamined and undisturbed life in a rented house somewhere in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe neighbourhood.
I regret to say the news media was inadvertently complicit in the Liberals’ understandable determination to induce a state of amnesia in the electorate about Trudeau, and about the extent of the wreckage his government made of this country.
Have we all been getting the story wrong?
Quite possibly. It sure wouldn’t be the first time.
I take a close look at all this in a piece in the National Post later today. For now let’s just say I am not content with the received wisdom about how Donald Trump was the primary reason why it came to pass that Canada’s prime minister is now a suave and worldly big-money asset manager whose expertise lies in engineering the smoke and mirrors of global neoliberalism.
I’m suspicious of this consensus, which is wildly popular in the United States and elsewhere, but especially in America’s Democratic Party circles. I dissent from some of my National Post colleagues on this subject as well.
While Trump’s jingoism was properly a subject of our close attention, it’s also true that the Beijing-aligned Mandarin bloc was every bit as active and engaged in Election 2025 as it was in the monkeywrenched federal elections of 2019 and 2021. It’s as though the Hogue Commission on Foreign Interference had never even happened. It’s as though our political class had learned nothing.
This is not simply a “foreign policy” issue, or a problem of political sabotage and subversion. It’s not just about national security, as the term is ordinarily understood.
It’s about geopolitics alright, but it also has everything to do with what life is like in Canada for at least half of Canadian voters. They live paycheque to paycheque. And then there’s the nearly one in five Canadians who rely on foodbanks to feed themselves. Six in ten Canadians who don’t own a home have already given up on ever owning one.
The situation is by no means hopeless. But we’re coming apart at the seams.
It must be noted that Carney did not speak of the tariffs levied by China, which Western farmers largely bore the brunt of.
It is ironic that under the climate obsessed Liberals Canada is shipping more fossil fuels to China which is the world leader in adding CO2 to the atmosphere. All this while here at home the Canadian economy is disintegrating and the Canadian standard of living is dropping like a stone. And PM Carney plans to correct this while honouring C-69 and directing trade away from America.