As fighting rages in Ukraine, energy prices soar and inflation spirals, countries and their leaders are showing what they’re made of. Some appear jolted by reality and are recalibrating foreign relations, fiscal regimes and energy policies. Others are doubling down on blind ideology. Despite acute vulnerability to Russian energy blackmail, for example, Germany still intends to shutter the last of its nuclear power plants. And Justin Trudeau, representing a country sitting on the world’s third-largest crude oil reserves, was last week pledging to help the world transition to “renewables.” Where will such unshakeable utopianism lead? To a truly terrible combination, writes Gwyn Morgan: inflation- and tax-induced impoverishment for millions of Canadians, increasingly intermittent and unaffordable energy supplies for peace-loving countries, and no effective check on geopolitical bullies who use energy as a weapon.

Reliable, affordable and plentiful energy has been foundational to prosperity in every successful country, and fossil fuels have fulfilled the vast majority of those needs – and continue to. What’s not to like? But if you believe the world is gripped by a “climate emergency” caused by those very fuels, then virtually anything is justifiable to get rid of them. But if, in fact, there are no viable replacements, the results are grotesque performative pantomimes of actual serious energy policies: the “net zero” movement. It aims to defeat and negate not only economics, engineering and common sense but the laws of physics themselves. Gwyn Morgan reviews this world-touring theatre of the absurd and finds there’s no vaccine strong enough to inoculate against global dysfunction.

Early this fall C2C Journal posed the question whether countries should rely so heavily on vaccination to subdue the Covid-19 pandemic – whether we could “inject our way” out of trouble. The massive autumn waves of infection in numerous heavily vaccinated countries should have prompted serious reflection – perhaps even a change in direction. Yet even as the latest mainstream research and recent events demonstrate that the vaccines are only partially protective and woefully temporary, our public authorities are further intensifying vaccination programs while crushing the lives of the unvaccinated. Gwyn Morgan, an early proponent of universal vaccination, puts the pieces together and demands that we consider a new approach.

Its many supporters claim Canada’s vaunted universal healthcare system was simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of Covid-19 patients and the relentlessly recurring waves of the pandemic. But if that is the case, how did the U.S. hospital system (with a few local exceptions) easily accommodate and treat a far higher per capita caseload than Canada? Examining key statistics in each country, Gwyn Morgan concludes that something serious is ailing Canada’s healthcare system that Covid-19 did not cause. It can only be cured, Morgan writes, when those who call the shots on healthcare policy overcome their ideological aversion to innovations and ideas that are already used in every other highly developed country around the world.

Among the many mysteries of our age is why, when faced with clear and sustained evidence that their seemingly laudable goal is unachievable, proponents neither reflect nor modify their plan. They simply double-down. Failed methods are intensified, public spending and subsidies are raised, commitments are restated in ever-more grandiose terms, marketing campaigns become deafening – and doubters are vilified rather than debated in good faith. Following his recent comments on how to deal, in a practical way, with global carbon dioxide emissions, Gwyn Morgan experienced the full force of this latter phenomenon. Here, he responds to his critics.

The zeal with which many politicians push environmental policies seems in almost inverse proportion to their practicality. The more expensive, unrealistic, utopian and unachievable, the more it animates them. Justin Trudeau and his key ministers are the apotheosis of this tendency, appearing determined to wreck western Canada’s economy and ruin the prosperity of millions in an impossible quest to “save the planet.” The economic carnage and impoverishment they’ll wreak seems almost like a feature rather than a bug, worn like a national hairshirt or display of religious penance. Gwyn Morgan, however, believes it’s still possible to craft a Canadian emissions reduction strategy based on facts and economic opportunity rather than ideology and fantasy. Canada, he explains, “can do good by doing well” – reducing global emissions by exporting to eager markets around the world a Canadian natural resource that we have in practically unlimited supply.

Canada’s Conservatives drew a bigger share of the popular vote than the Liberals in the last federal election. Today the Liberal government is mired in scandal, more-than-merely-runaway spending and a horrifically underperforming Covid-19 vaccine acquisition program. Yet the government’s popularity remains solidly ahead of the Official Opposition’s. New Conservative leader Erin O’Toole promises a new approach, better policies and a different-looking party, but so far most Canadians don’t understand or don’t like what he’s offering. Gwyn Morgan thinks he knows why, and employs a pointed format to offer an alternative pitch from O’Toole to those millions of orphaned Canadian voters.

While much of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s behaviour remains mysterious, one pattern seems clear: the greater the hand of Canada’s Liberal government in the response, the higher the likelihood of a shambles. One can virtually plot the curve! International travel policy is an egregious and worsening example. While “essential” travellers who have collectively logged millions of border-crossings remain exempt from Covid-19 testing, and arriving migrant farm workers head straight to the fields, those travelling for “mere” personal reasons must foot the bill for hotel-prisons and remain quarantined even after two tests. Gwyn Morgan chronicles the mess – and fingers the culprit.

Canada’s economy was supposed to have been cruising along the road to recovery by late last year. Instead, the nation is once again shedding jobs, unemployment is high, companies continue to shrink or go under, entire industries are threatened and growth is almost nowhere to be seen. So why are governments seemingly doing everything in their power not only to hold back recovery but destroy much of what remains? Gwyn Morgan assesses several key areas of our nation’s battered economy and reviews the central role played by poorly thought-out, unneeded and avoidable government policies in each one.

Carbon dioxide emissions are a globe-girdling phenomenon driven by industrialization, and atmospheric gases obviously don’t care about national boundaries. So it’s distinctly weird that some left-leaning governments, Canada’s Liberals among them, insist that recognized emissions reductions must take place right here at home! Isn’t the goal “saving the planet”? In fact Canada has a clean-burning energy resource that’s voluminously abundant and economically accessible with current technology – and which the world can’t get enough of. As Gwyn Morgan writes, jobs, wealth-creation, tax-revenue and environmental improvement on a global scale all await, if only governments dropped their ideological blinkers.