Canada鈥檚 Minister of the Environment Catherine McKenna has recently told the government of Saskatchewan 鈥淣o鈥� for every attempt and version of a climate change policy she has seen from Saskatchewan.
Simply put, a carbon tax would turn Estevan into a ghost town whose only visitors would be production companies looking to use an abandoned city to make a good zombie film.聽
That sort of mass-exodus of people from a natural resource-dependent place like Estevan happened in Ontario when the New Democratic Party (NDP) was running the province in the 1990s. 聽
Elliott Lake in Ontario was a small city alongside a few others that was highly populated by miners who spent their time taking uranium out of the ground and selling it on the open market.
The NDP decided one day that the people in Elliott Lake were in fact people who mined the earth not to feed their family or to have a livelihood, but did so because they didn鈥檛 care about tress in the same way the NDP did.
Elliott Lake is now a retirement community with much of its original population no longer living there.
They were forced from their homes. Like fugitives they fled moving all over the country to find work to feed their family.
I have said it before and I will say it again, most politicians exist for power and they can鈥檛 live without it.
Power is dangerous; it can turn people into monsters and voters into sacrificial beings to be disposed of in accordance with their government鈥檚 pursuit of power.
There need not be any prospecting about the coming fight with Ottawa over a carbon tax. If the people of Saskatchewan were strong enough to vote for someone like new premier Scott Moe, they are strong enough to let the federal government know that they will not follow any laws that will endanger their ability to feed their family.
The government of Canada will not send platoons of police and soldiers into this province, arresting everyone who said no to a carbon tax.
There need not be any fear about this, there is strength in numbers and people coming together with a single voice can stop a centralized government from acting wrongly.
The people of Elliot Lake and its near by communities did comply with similar anti-business and pro-environment polices, which is what the carbon tax will be, and they lost everything because of it.
A government鈥檚 priority, more often than not, is a need to feel vitreous and appease those who put them power and no one else.聽
People in this province not only have a responsibility to themselves and their children, but they have a responsibly to Canada as a whole.
China recently decided to suspend term limits on how long a president can rule for, Russia has been selling arms to the Middle East since the fall of the Soviet Union, factions within oil rich countries in the Middle East have been caught executing gay people and the Iranian revolution of 1979 saw the end of freedom for women living in Iran.
These places will fill the vacuum of natural resource development if the free word turns its back on it because its leaders are seeking power, and the repulsive need to ascertain unearned virtue by attributing heroism to saving trees.
Money is power, global politics is mathematics, and those who control the engine of wealth production 鈥� being natural resource development 鈥� will have great leverage over the free world and will establish the financial means to fund their evil ambitions.
The United States is crushing the Canadian oil industry right now because they want to outperform places ran by dictators and rob them of finical supremacy.
Canada is caught in the crossfire with a government unaware of how evil the world really is, and consequently is unwilling to do the right thing.
Our uncompetitive corporate tax bracket, our high taxes on everything and everyone, and our continued assault on our own natural resource sector is nothing short of masochism.
If we do not act in the same way as the United States in regards to natural resource production, we will lose our place on the global stage, our ability to fight evil will reduced and the people of this country will be poor.
The government of Saskatchewan must continue its fight against a carbon tax. A made-in-Saskatchewan solution makes much more sense.
