Regardless of his decision to resign as an MP, former Liberal environment minister Steven Guilbeault was the perfect symbol of western alienation that has led to a referendum in Alberta on whether to have a referendum on separation.
Guilbeault's appointment and western alienation
Then prime minister Justin Trudeau's appointment of the former Quebec Greenpeace radical as environment minister in 2021 was a calculated slap at Alberta. It was typical of the Liberals' political philosophy of 'screw the West, we'll take the rest.' That phrase was coined by Liberal campaign organizer Keith Davey in the 1980 election that defeated the Joe Clark minority Progressive Conservative government and returned Pierre Trudeau to power with a Liberal majority, whereupon he imposed the hated National Energy Program on Alberta.
Resignation under Carney
Guilbeault resigned from Prime Minister Mark Carney's cabinet in November as minister of citizenship and culture and official languages, as well as Quebec lieutenant, to protest Carney's memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to build a bitumen pipeline from the oilsands to tidewater in B.C. He was also the public face of 14 Liberal MPs who wrote to Carney expressing concern about weakening Trudeau's climate policies, who didn't want to be publicly identified.
Carney's policy shift
Carney, in scrapping Trudeau-era climate policies such as the consumer carbon tax, the oil and gas emissions cap, the clean electricity regulations and EV mandates, implicitly admitted the failure of Trudeau's $200-billion-plus climate change boondoggle, consisting of 149 programs administered by 13 government agencies. Last year, Carney explicitly acknowledged that Trudeau's pie-in-the-sky targets to reduce Canada's industrial greenhouse gas emissions for 2030 and 2035 wouldn't be met.
Guilbeault's defense of Trudeau's policies
Guilbeault, by contrast, was a staunch defender of Trudeau's climate policies, reporting in December 2023 that, 'Canada remains firmly on track to meet our ambitious but achievable 2030 target' and 'is now projected to exceed Canada's interim objective of (reducing emissions to) 20% below 2005 levels by 2026.' It was nonsense. To meet the 2026 target based on the latest available government data, Canada would have to shut down the equivalent of its buildings sector by the end of this year. To meet the 2030 target, Canada would have to shut down the equivalent of its oil and gas sector in four years. Given that, Guilbeault should have quit under Trudeau, not Carney.
