John Robson: Guilbeault is Aligning Himself with Tyrants by Visiting Beijing
If the Babylon Bee claimed Canada’s environment minister was an official climate advisor to the Chinese communist regime, you’d call it too heavy-handed for effective satire. When he really is on the executive committee of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development which our aid money helped found, you’d call reality too heavy-handed for effective satire.
What is Guilbeault thinking being the only foreign government official on this body? What is his boss thinking letting him? And what does the Politburo even want him for?
It’s far from clear what useful knowledge he could share on climate change. The Canadian government has missed every greenhouse-gas emissions target it ever set. Admittedly going back before his time in office and across party lines. But what achievements under his direction makes you think this man could even coordinate planting more trees in a country that’s a giant forest?
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Moreover, as alarmists like to sneer at skeptics, Guilbeault is certainly “not a climate scientist.” Instead, Wikipedia says, after enrolling “in industrial relations at the Université de Montréal in 1989 … he switched his major to political science. He minored in theology, exploring questions of international morality, liberation theology, poverty and the environment.”
It would be bad enough if Guilbeault were merely the first Canadian cabinet minister to visit China since 2018, given their misdeeds from geopolitics to the “two Michaels.” It’s a lot worse that he’s making common cause with these tyrants. He genuinely thinks they care about climate, and respect him. Can we not see what they are?
The answer is no. “We” cannot, if by “we” you mean the Trudeau administration and much of Canada’s Laurentian intelligentsia.
When Justin Trudeau blurted out his admiration for “China’s basic dictatorship” in 2013, it was widely dismissed as the sort of cute daffy thing he would say without meaning or understanding it. So widely that he went on to become prime minister, though it seems a strange basis for trusting someone with that job. But a stubbornly juvenile quality pervades government in Canada nowadays of the unreflective sort that made Che Guevara T-shirts popular among undergraduates 50 years ago.
Indeed, Guilbeault’s once-trendy far-left “liberation theology” brings me to the phrase “useful idiots.” Widely though apparently inaccurately ascribed to Lenin, it doesn’t refer to garden-variety low-IQ dolts, but to those people of whom Orwell, knowing the territory well, said “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
For instance our hapless foreign minister claiming we have contingency plans if the United States lurches into fascism after the 2024 election. She genuinely seems to consider Donald Trump far more dangerous than Xi Jinping. And on the commanding heights of our politics, culture, and academia, I think you’d find widespread agreement that Xi’s our kind of guy, with a few rough edges, whereas Trump is totally beyond the pale.
There’s no conspiracy here, centered on Davos or anywhere else. What you see is what you get. Including when long-time U.S. communist Gus Hall died in 2000, he received glowing obituaries from mainstream media outlets including ABC’s arch-establishment anchor Peter Jennings intoning, “Even after his friends …
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