GOLDSTEIN: Liberals screw the West for political gain – again

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Another federal election and the Mark Carney-Justin Trudeau Liberals are employing their tried-and-true tactic, made famous by the legendary Liberal campaign organizer Sen. Keith Davey in the 1980 election, to “screw the West, we’ll take the rest.”

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The Liberals deliberately divided Canadians 45 years ago for political gain and continue to do it today, recklessly and dangerously straining the bonds of Confederation.

In that 1980 election, the Liberals defeated the minority Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark.

Armed with a Liberal majority government, Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, imposed his infamous national energy program, forever hated in Alberta because, as then Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed said, it intruded into provincial jurisdiction, deprived the province of oil revenues and sparked massive job losses and bankruptcies.

Sound familiar?

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Kicking Alberta (and Saskatchewan) in the teeth is nothing new for the Liberals.

They made that crystal clear in 2023 when Trudeau’s rural economic development minister, Gudie Hutchings, committed a classic political gaffe which occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

She said that if the Prairies wanted special deals on carbon taxes like the three-year holiday on paying them to heat their homes the Trudeau government had just bestowed on Atlantic Canada, “perhaps they need to elect more Liberals … so that we can have that conversation as well.”

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While the exemption applied across Canada, it was only for home heating oil, disproportionately used in Atlantic Canada compared to natural gas in other parts of the country, which were excluded from the tax holiday.

The Liberals’ message could not have been clearer – the Trudeau government was punishing the West for not electing Liberals MPs.

Other examples during the Trudeau years included his waves of anti-energy legislation attacking Canada’s oil and gas sector, which are linchpins of the Alberta and Saskatchewan economies, and poking a stick in the eyes of Westerners by appointing a former Greenpeace radical, Steven Guilbeault, as environment minister.

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All of this has helped to create the hysterical atmosphere where Alberta’s Conservative premiers are routinely portrayed as evil incarnate by the Liberals – Danielle Smith being the latest example.

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She has been absurdly accused of treason for defending Alberta’s fossil fuel industry in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war with Canada by Liberals, Liberal cheerleaders and liberal media apologists largely based in Eastern Canada.

These attacks are neither random nor spontaneous but strategically designed to increase the Liberal vote in Eastern Canada by portraying the Carney-Trudeau Grits as defenders of Canadian sovereignty against the rogue ruling United Conservative Party in Alberta.

This happens all the time.

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In the 2019 election, Trudeau, campaigning in Montreal, urged Quebecers “to stand up and fight against” then-Alberta premier and former Stephen Harper cabinet minister Jason Kenney, describing him as not just wrong on issues like climate change, gun control and addressing poverty, but unCanadian.

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By contrast, Trudeau said: “We’ve demonstrated that we, as a team of Quebecers, are always there to stand up for Quebec values and indeed Canadian values,” a shameful but not surprising way of playing off one part of the country against another.

In 2010, when Harper was PM, representing the Alberta riding of Calgary Southwest, Trudeau, then a Liberal MP, told a Quebec media outlet: “Canada isn’t doing well right now because it’s Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn’t work.”

Asked if Canada was better off with Quebecers in charge, Trudeau said:

“I’m a Liberal, so, of course, I think so, yes. Certainly, when we look at the great prime ministers of the 20th century, those that really stood the test of time, they were MPs from Quebec … This country, Canada, it belongs to us.”

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Two years later, Trudeau suggested that as a Quebec MP, he might campaign for separation if he became convinced Harper’s views as PM (and an MP from Alberta) were shared by most Canadians outside Quebec.

“I always say that if I ever believed Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper … and we were going backward in 10,000 different ways, maybe I’d think about wanting to make Quebec a country.”

But it isn’t just Trudeau.

In the 2000 election, then-Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien mocked Albertans, suggesting they were “different” from people in Eastern Canada and demonstrated it in the politicians they elected.

“I like to do politics with people from the East,” Chretien said. “Joe Clark and Stockwell Day are from Alberta. They are a different type.”

He declared, “I’m joking,” but after the crowd kept laughing, he added, “I’m serious,” saying the West needed “tough love.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com

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