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Published:February 7, 2020 in the Calgary Sun
Shannon Stubbs has clearly had it. Like so many of us, she has really had it.
Up to here. Mad as hell.
The Alberta Conservative MP who doesn’t suffer Liberal fools gladly issues a warning. She says the Trudeau Liberals are “playing with fire.” No Teck mine and Albertans will be furious, a glimmer of hope turned to darkness.
Screw around playing the political games and deep-six the Teck Frontier oilsands mine and most Albertans will see the Trudeau Liberals punting the project “as a final rejection of Alberta by Canada.”
A final rejection. She does not retract the words. She repeats them.
Of course, many of the Trudeau Liberal politicians in Ottawa don’t give a damn what Stubbs thinks or what Albertans see. In fact, thoughts of Albertans don’t enter their minds at all.
We’re people somewhere out there, in the backwoods, on the prairie, far away.
That is, except when they need dough to cover all the cheques they cut and then they’re happy to milk the cow.
So it comes as no surprise when a HuffPost Canada report hits the pavement.
Trudeau Liberal politicians huddle behind closed doors. Many of them are big-time against the mine.
A Toronto Liberal says the project doesn’t fit. It’s a pretty easy no.
A Quebec Liberal says his people demand the government hit the target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
A Liberal from just east of Toronto sings from the same sheet music and there’s a big choir and it’s not our song.
Hell, many Liberals are catching grief from their people because the government approved and bought the Trans Mountain pipeline.
Is that like saying: Alberta, you got your pipeline, what else do you want?
I get that message from more than a few folks living in the self-satisfied, self-obsessed bubble at the centre of the Canadian political universe.
Then there’s the brainwave from down east.
Why not give Alberta an aid package instead of the oilsands mine? Wouldn’t filling up their beggar bowl shut them up or at least tone down the rage if the Teck mine is a no-go?
We all know Michelle Rempel, a Conservative MP from Calgary. No surprise, she’s in the thick of the battle and she’s very frustrated.
“People just want to work. They don’t want government handouts. They don’t want to be on the dole of the government. They want to work.”
Let’s bring MP Shannon Stubbs back.
“Albertans don’t want a friggin’ aid package. They just want a fair shake, an even playing field and for the feds to get out of the way. A federal aid package? Ugh. That would be insult after injury, injury, injury.”
Most Albertans feel the disrespect and the fear and the anger and the worry and the hurt. Elsewhere they don’t get us. Then again …
“The Liberal Party of Canada has never been a national party. They have no interest in listening to the forces of our province on this issue,” says Rempel.
“There’s a lot of very vocal Liberal MPs who do not want this project to pass. We fight it but it’s just a deluge of people who don’t want our right to work to be put forward.”
There are still optimists in Alberta and let us hope their optimism wins the day.
But Rempel says in Alberta “there’s a degree of not understanding how little these guys care for us because it’s so crazy to think they don’t.”
For the Liberals they see themselves fighting a noble cause and we’re collateral damage.
The Conservative MPs will fight for Teck and she tells us to stay tuned.
The Kenney government isn’t playing the latest Liberal game. It’s not about surrendering on the Teck mine in exchange for a $2.4-billion equalization rebate cheque or any other cash.
Alberta is supposed to get the mine AND the cheque. For starters. It’s a pittance compared to the damage done by Trudeau’s assault on Alberta.
And those suggesting this Teck mine can be traded away are just rubbing salt in a very deep wound. It’s an insult.
It’s like the jackasses who suggest Alberta will get the Teck mine if the provincial government makes concessions to the federal government and maybe even drops the province’s court challenge of the carbon tax Trudeau just imposed on us.
A week ago Sonya Savage, Alberta’s energy minister, told Trudeau to back off and play in his own sandbox.
Savage said: “I’m not pissed off yet.”
After all this Liberal jiggery-pokery you wonder.
Is she pissed off now?
rbell@postmedia.com
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