‘Climate emergency’ on Monday, pipeline expansion on Tuesday: Trudeau the fraud strikes again

ustin Trudeau’s faux concern for the environment was always hypocritical and duplicitous — but there’s something especially slimy about declaring a climate emergency on Monday and approving an oil pipeline expansion on Tuesday.

Canada’s parliament voted on Monday night to declare a national climate emergency, calling climate change a “real and urgent crisis, driven by human activity.” The next day, Trudeau’s government green-lighted the environment-destroying Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX), demonstrating either complete indifference to the motion put forward by his own environment minister — or a severe misunderstanding of the words “emergency” and “human activity.”

The so-called “climate emergency” motion was non-binding and meaningless, of course; politicians often expect to be patted on the back for gesture politics — as though merely acknowledging the existence of a problem while taking minimal action to affect any real change is somehow worthy of admiration.

This is the second time Trudeau’s Liberal government has approved the pipeline. Its previous approval was quashed by a court last year for failure to consider the environmental impact of tanker traffic and implications for First Nations people living in its path. The pipeline would triple the amount of oil shipped from the Alberta tar sands to the British Columbia coast. Environmental groups have warned of potential oil spills, increased greenhouse gas emissions, strain on already-struggling marine life and irreversible damage to indigenous land and water resources.

But it’s not just environmental activists warning of severe environmental repercussions. Canada’s own National Energy Board (NEB) found that the expansion would have “significant adverse environmental effects” for orca whales and said the effects of any oil spills would also be “significant.”

Despite the ill-effects, the NEB decided the expansion “can be justified” and is in the “public interest.” They did acknowledge that the undeniable environmental effects “weighed heavily” on them in the decision-making process. Indeed, it sounds like they were really losing sleep over it. What part of destroying the environment and biodiversity for future generations is in the “public interest” remains a mystery.

Trudeau’s government bought the pipeline from Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd for $3.4 billion last year and plans to sell it after completion. Trudeau has tried to justify the project by warning that Canadians are currently “prisoners to the American market” and pledging to put all tax profits from the project toward clean energy projects.

That’s like “declaring war on cancer and then announcing a campaign to promote smoking,”— according to Patrick McCully, energy program director at the Rainforest Action Network.

In another example of his pathetic gesture politics, Trudeau promised last week to ban single-use plastics “from coast to coast” from 2021 — more meaningless tokenism from Canada’s fraud-in-chief, who wants plastic out of the oceans, but isn’t too concerned about killing off the marine life that lives in them.

https://www.rt.com/news/462241-justin-trudeau-tmx-pipeline-hypocrisy/