It wasn’t long ago that plant-based meat alternatives – fake meat – began to take over supermarket shelves and fast-food chains. Environmentalists and animal-right activists promised that shifting to a fully plant-based diet would make us all healthier and help solve global warming. Governments jumped in to rhapsodize and subsidize the next miracle food. But all that soon began to fizzle: consumers turned up their noses at fake meat, sales plummeted and restaurant chains began dropping it from menus. Chewing over the exaggerations and false claims behind fake meat, Doug Firby charts how this one-time centrepiece of woke foodies has been spat out by decidedly dissatisfied consumers.
Plenty of new public policies, at least to hear their opponents tell it, are destined to end in calamity or failure. But how many can be proven so based on their proponents’ own evidence? Surely such a thing requires a special, perverse kind of political genius. Peter Shawn Taylor takes a close look at the barrage of official reports and analyses released ahead of the Liberals’ ban on single-use plastic items. It turns out the disappearance of disposable plastic bags, straws and cutlery will not be as easy on the economy – or as good for the environment – as the Trudeau government would have you believe.
What is climate change really about? Is it a scientifically established phenomenon with clear human causes that poses an acute threat to the health of the Earth’s biosphere? That would certainly establish an urgent need for decisive policy actions affecting all of society. But what about what comes next? Are the serious if not devastating economic and social effects on billions of middle-class people around the world simply the unfortunate but unavoidable consequences? Or are they something deeper and more sinister – a feature of the program? Perhaps its very purpose? Andy Crooks crystallizes these questions via two fictional but plausible Canadians who first dance around, then dig into and ultimately get to the heart of the matter.
Calling environmentalism an ersatz religion may be overdone these days. But only because it’s such an accurate observation about a movement that demands absolute faith, expounds ineffable mysteries and warns of a terrifying Apocalypse. Given its recent success in spreading the message, what are the origins of this modern-day crusade? Going back four decades to the Amazon rainforests, Martin Grünn charts the early stirrings of the environmental movement as an irresistible political and social force in Canada and around the world. Then as now, money and power are the keys to imposing a new global dogma.
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 isolation imposed by the lengthy pandemic makes it both tempting and understandable for us to look inward, focused mainly on our own survival concerns and those of our immediate circle. Politics can wait. But the so-called progressive side won’t rest. It has remained busy, taking only weeks to begin redefining issue after issue through the lens of the coronavirus. More government, more regulation and less capitalism are its answers. They always are. But is this our inevitable future? Anthony Furey mounts a clear and powerful alternative case for Canada based on the national interest and equality for all.
Promising to upend entire sectors of the economy with no costs or other downsides has become so habitual on the political left that it has almost faded to political background noise. But the costs are real – in few areas more so than “alternative”, “green” or “sustainable” energy. The Green Party’s claim to conjure up millions of jobs by driving down emissions is an instalment in this fantasy genre. James Coggins systematically dissects one aspect of the Green program – its plan to plaster millions of Canadian rooftops with solar panels – and finds it wanting.
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.
Raising Canada’s carbon emissions could be a good thing – if it drove far bigger cuts to emissions elsewhere in the world. Rather than fixating on forcing domestic emissions reductions and thereby beggaring Canadian industries, Michael Binnion wants Canadian climate change policy to look at the big picture. Doing so, he explains, could not only generate jobs and wealth at home but maximize the worldwide environmental benefits.
