There’s more than a touch of Oprah in our Prime Minister. Substitute town halls for studio audiences and you get a little of the flavour of his recent hopscotch to various venues across the country. He loves – and why should he not? – being on stage in front of people who (mainly) like or idolize him, and he’s quick, like the great Eminence Herself, on his emotional feet. By far the most affecting moment of his grand tour, interestingly on “the catastrophe and heel” of his (originally) covert stay on the yacht of his buddy the Aga Khan, came in Peterborough, Ont.
There, somewhat in the manner of the Biblical Ruth, a woman “stood in tears” as she recounted to the Prime Minister, whom she both liked and supported, how her hydro bill was now competing with her mortgage payment. “Something is wrong now, Mr. Trudeau,” she told him and the assembled crowd. “My heat and hydro now cost me more than my mortgage, … I now not only work 75 hours a week, I stay and work 15 hours a day just so I don’t lose my home.” The audience was moved. Her sad plea touched the hearts of the audience. Its rueful climax came with her reluctant confession to our green Prime Minister that “I feel like you’ve failed me.”
Mr. Trudeau, for all his gifts, could not win the moment. He paid a compliment to her “strength and (the word choice here was daring) energy.” Then – how could he not? – he acknowledged that his federal government, like Ontario’s, was “putting a price” on what he called “carbon pollution.” This is a fake designation, I point out. If carbon dioxide is a pollutant we should all be shut down, but it is a necessary thing in the liturgy of global warming to declare everything and anything in the way of the creed a pollutant. But hydro costs, he must have been pleased to point out, were Ontario’s doing – a provincial affair.
This could have been a seminal moment for Mr. Trudeau, even one of those teachable ones, so beloved by the morally earnest crowd. He could have seen in this woman’s plight one of the real-time, real-life consequences of embracing the green crusade without any hope or care of knowing how it might affect those who were to bear its burdens. Ontario is a living laboratory of what happens to a government that pays more ardent attention to the sages of Davos and the salons of Paris than the citizens of Ontario’s cold north.
The McGuinty-Wynne “world leadership on the climate change (global warming)” file is an exercise mat for flexibility training. How else could the Ontario government have mastered its current somersaults on what it hilariously refers to as its energy policy; sending rebates to citizens unable to pay to light and heat their homes, precisely because that same government went full green and put energy costs in a place where people cannot pay to light and heat their homes. The Ontario Green Dream is the world’s first genuine (taxpayer) perpetual motion machine.
This, as may be apprised by the reader, is mortifying to the regular citizen, such as the lady at the town hall. But now to the crown of our tale. Just two days ago, in this same Ontario where “energy poverty” is the phrase d’jour, it was announced that for those green citizens who wish to buy a Tesla all-electric car, or any other high-end save-the-planet roadster, vehicles in the $75,000 to $150,000 bracket, the province is restoring the full $14,000 ecoVirtue subsidy. And as an extra frill, all Tesla tycoons get to ride free in the HOV lanes and wave at the second-hand pickups stalled in the lanes for ordinary folks.
This is a story of almost Dickensian symmetry. The ecoLords who have brought mayhem to Ontario’s electricity system and reduced some of its citizens to public tears and weeping, with power being cut off to low-income residents, is hurling $14,000 subsides to those who by definition – those buying $150,000 wonder cars – have no possible need of them.
Related
- ‘I feel like you’ve failed me’: Single mom from rural Ontario blasts Trudeau and Wynne over hydro bills
- Rex Murphy: Cherish your suffering, Ontario; Premier Wynne’s green gods know of your sacrifice
- Rex Murphy: Burning the budget to heat the home
If the lady who wept to the Prime Minister hears of this, she will no doubt weep again. She can’t pay her light bill, while Tesla Tommy gets a $14,000 cheque.
Oh brave new green world that has such subsidies in it! A world where there are those who get their power cut, or make the bitter choice between food and light, where others saunter to Tesla showrooms and get a $14,000 discount. Now if you want to call this “carbon pollution” have at it. Meantime in Ottawa Mr. Trudeau looks out over Ontario and its maddening green gyrations and sees that it is good. Expect more tears.
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