{"id":67749,"date":"2020-09-16T00:23:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-15T21:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/farewell-to-the-liberals-easy-green-revolution\/"},"modified":"2020-09-16T00:23:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-15T21:23:00","slug":"farewell-to-the-liberals-easy-green-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/farewell-to-the-liberals-easy-green-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"#Farewell to the Liberals\u2019 easy green revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Farewell to the Liberals\u2019 easy green revolution<\/strong>”
\nPaul Wells: Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didn’t cancel gravity, and that ‘building back better’ will, in fact, be hard work<\/p>\n

\n I\u2019m grateful to the excellent Toronto Star<\/em> columnist Heather Scoffield for noticing some fascinating comments Gerald Butts made on Monday.<\/p>\n

Butts, of course, resigned in 2019 as Justin Trudeau\u2019s principal secretary and has been working since then as a consultant, climate-policy opinion leader and Twitter<\/a> scold. He was a member of the Task Force for a Resilient Recovery, which spent the summer pushing hard on the \u201cbuild back better\u201d rhetoric that imagined the coronavirus pandemic as the dawn of a bold new green-energy future.<\/p>\n

To say the least, excitement about a pandemic is counterintuitive. I started writing about the contradictions in June, when nameless Liberals were telling reporters, \u201cIt\u2019ll be a good time to be a progressive government\u2026 There are a lot of us who are dreaming big.\u201d I came back to the theme<\/a> in August, when the PMO was setting Bill Morneau up as some kind of obstacle to their plans to \u201cbuild back better.\u201d And I wrote last week about the unsettling spectacle of Trudeau greeting Morneau\u2019s departure as, essentially, the end of history: \u201cWe can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking. As much as this pandemic is an unexpected challenge, it is also an unprecedented opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was already clear last week that some of these considerations were starting to weigh, perhaps belatedly, on the Prime Minister and his advisors. \u201cThere\u2019s a sensitivity to being perceived to hijack the moment for a green recovery,\u201d a senior Liberal source told the CBC\u2019s David Cochrane. Boy, I sure hope there is.<\/p>\n

Along comes Butts, who on Monday was addressing something called the Recovery Summit, an ambitious online virtual conference organized by some of the usual suspects, including the (Trudeauist) Canada2020 think tank in Ottawa and the (Clintonist) Center for American Progress in Washington.<\/p>\n

Butts kicked off the proceedings by pouring industrial quantities of cold water on everyone.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to\u00a0\u201cunderstand and appreciate the level of anxiety that people are going through right now,\u201d he said. Conferences like this one were made by and for members of the \u201cprogressive movement,\u201d he said. But in a clear warning to people who consider themselves members of that movement, he added, \u201cWe depend on the support of the broad middle class and regular people. When we keep that support we form governments. And when we don\u2019t, we lose governments.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an even clearer warning against the weird self-celebratory tone of some of the rhetoric from the government over the summer, he added:\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s really important to emphasize what we\u2019re doing and whom we\u2019re doing it for\u2014rather than celebrate the fact that we<\/em> are doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t spoken to Butts since a few months before the SNC-Lavalin controversy wrecked his career in government, and I doubt he minds at all. So it was odd to hear him sounding warnings that resembled things I\u2019ve been writing for months. It\u2019s pure coincidence. It simply reflects the fact that to anyone with any distance from the government echo chamber, the Trudeau circle\u2019s weirdly giddy triumphalism of recent months has got to sound jarring.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo put it diplomatically, I think that in any crisis situation, people will repurpose their pet projects as urgent and necessary responses to the crisis at hand,\u201d Butts said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s vitally important that, when people are feeling as anxious as they\u2019re feeling right now, we start the solutions from where they are and build up from there. And not arrive in the middle of their anxiety with a pre-existing solution that was developed and determined before the crisis that\u2019s arisen.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know there\u2019s a widespread assumption that Butts never really left the Trudeau circle, that he remains the PM\u2019s puppeteer. I think that\u2019s farcical. Butts probably has an easier time getting Ben Chin to return a call than some of my colleagues do, but for the most part he\u2019s basically a sympathetic outsider who\u2019s watching the work of friends from a distance. His remarks amplify and consolidate things Dave Cochrane was already hearing from senior Liberals last week. Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didn\u2019t cancel gravity or smite the foes of progress, as they define progress, from the earth. When Parliament returns next week, it will still be a venue of measurable personal risk for its occupants, like any large room for the foreseeable future. It will still contain more MPs who aren\u2019t Liberals than MPs who are. It will be watched by a population that is worried, defensive, and incapable of ignoring risk for the sake of a resounding slogan. It speaks well of the Liberals that they have spent the summer working some goofy rhetoric out of their systems before returning to the real world.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean the government shouldn\u2019t pursue reductions in carbon emissions. They ran on promises to do so. They set ambitious targets, having spectacularly missed easier targets in the past. They faced concerted opposition and won. Working to reduce carbon emissions is necessary work with broad public support.<\/p>\n

But it will be work. The clear implication of the \u201cdreaming big\u201d and \u201cunprecedented opportunity\u201d talk was that Liberals, including the Prime Minister, were talking themselves into believing school was out. That a global calamity would somehow transform hard work into a party, disarm the political opposition and, once again\u2014this is a particularly sturdy fantasy of life in Trudeau-land, as Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau could tell you\u2014delegitimize internal dissent.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t so. Meeting the Liberals\u2019 own climate goals will be hard work that will feel like hard work, if they care to take it up. The necessary changes will impose costs that will feel like costs before they provide benefits that feel like benefits. The very nature of this crisis will make \u201cbuilding back better\u201d anything but a cakewalk.<\/p>\n

First, because 2020 hasn\u2019t wiped out the former world. \u201cBuilding back better\u201d became a slogan a decade ago after earthquakes in New Zealand erased a lot of existing infrastructure. COVID-19 has been more like a neutron bomb, interrupting livelihoods but leaving neighbourhoods intact. If I had to build a new rail link from scratch between Toronto and Montreal, I might build something fancy. But the old one is still there. That makes a difference.<\/p>\n

Second, because there\u2019s little likelihood of a sustained, long-term recovery like the one that characterized Canada\u2019s economy for 30 years after World War II, a comparison that was briefly fashionable\u00a0a few months ago with the build-back-better set. The recovery\u2019s likely to be pretty quick, to pick up steam only after a vaccine or effective treatment becomes widespread, and to last only about as long as it takes to return to the status quo ante. It\u2019s fantasy to imagine miracle growth lasting the rest of everyone\u2019s lifetime will take away costs and tradeoffs.<\/p>\n

So the Trudeau government\u2019s duty to meet its climate targets remains, and so does just about all the difficulty of meeting them. Which means a central question about this Prime Minister\u2014does he rise to challenges, ever? \u2014 also remains.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Farewell to the Liberals\u2019 easy green revolution” Paul Wells: Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didn’t cancel gravity, and that ‘building back better’ will, in fact, be hard work I\u2019m grateful to the excellent Toronto Star columnist Heather Scoffield for noticing some fascinating comments Gerald Butts made on Monday. Butts, of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43485,1356,67806,69984,67816,67817,67805,2169],"class_list":["post-67749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-climate-change","tag-covid-19","tag-editors-picks","tag-farewell-to-the-liberals-easy-green-revolution","tag-justin-trudeau","tag-liberals","tag-ottawa","tag-pandemic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}