It’s been said many times that one should never let facts get in the way of a good story. Let’s hope facts still can get in the way of a winning election campaign if that campaign is founded on distortion, exaggeration, tendentious claims, ruinous policies and utopian futility. Using facts from credible organizations, Gwyn Morgan takes a verbal stiletto to the fear-based federal Liberal election campaign that’s coming our way in a few weeks.

With every serious but hardly unprecedented weather event getting blamed on human-driven climate change, including in histrionic government press releases, some suspect the federal Liberals are laying the groundwork for a viciously moralistic election campaign. Gwyn Morgan is one, but he still sees a practical way out of the mess for Canadians and, perhaps, for the federal opposition as well.

Slowly Canadians are awakening to the fact that their country’s oil and gas industry, an essential part of the national economy, has been targeted for destruction by an alliance of American money and Canadian eco-activists. Together they have blocked pipelines, swung elections, and installed their agents in positions of power, including the office of the prime minister. B.C. researcher Vivian Krause, who exposed this decade-long campaign and the tens of millions of U.S. dollars that financed it, deserves to be recognized as a “true Canadian patriot.”

A Canadian Press poll of the national media ranked the legalization of cannabis as Canada’s top business story of 2018. Pipeline paralysis and the crisis in the energy sector ranked a distant third. Hello? The birth of a $6 billion-per-year industry is more important than the death of one generating $117 billion annually? This is the worst misread of an economy since Marie Antoinette and, as Gwyn Morgan writes, it portends more bad news for Canada in 2019.

Gwyn Morgan retired as CEO of Encana Corp. in 2006 after building it into Canada’s largest energy company and the largest of all Canadian companies by stock market value. It was the defacto flagship of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s vision of Canada as an “global energy superpower”. Now, a dozen years later, that dream lies in the ruins of current national energy policy, and Morgan’s successors have effectively moved Encana to the U.S. to escape Canada’s self-destructive business climate.

Canada’s federal government insists the only way to reduce carbon emissions is by putting a price on them. But it will take a helluva price to coerce Canadians to reduce their driving enough to make a dent in transportation emissions, which are a huge contributor. That’s why the provinces are revolting against Ottawa and the 2019 federal election is shaping up as a referendum on carbon taxation. Gwyn Morgan has a radically better idea that would massively reduce emissions without punishing consumers: incent Canadians to convert their vehicles from gasoline and diesel to far cleaner-burning natural gas by making NGV fuel tax-free. Lower Taxes for Lower Emissions sure sounds like a better campaign slogan than Pay Up or Park Your Car.

What does it take to stop a multi-billion-dollar energy project that will create thousands of jobs and billions in tax revenues for Canadians? The answer is the headline on this story.

c2c Advisory Council member and retired CEO Gwyn Morgan provides an overview of the current issue of c2c and his own thoughts on the recent economic turmoil.