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Mr. Trudeau, for all his gifts, could not win the moment. He paid a compliment to her “strength and (the word choice here was daring) energy.” Then – how could he not? – he acknowledged that his federal government, like Ontario’s, was “putting a price” on what he called “carbon pollution.” This is a fake designation, I point out. If carbon dioxide is a pollutant we should all be shut down, but it is a necessary thing in the liturgy of global warming to declare everything and anything in the way of the creed a pollutant. But hydro costs, he must have been pleased to point out, were Ontario’s doing – a provincial affair.

This could have been a seminal moment for Mr. Trudeau, even one of those teachable ones, so beloved by the morally earnest crowd. He could have seen in this woman’s plight one of the real-time, real-life consequences of embracing the green crusade without any hope or care of knowing how it might affect those who were to bear its burdens. Ontario is a living laboratory of what happens to a government that pays more ardent attention to the sages of Davos and the salons of Paris than the citizens of Ontario’s cold north.

The McGuinty-Wynne “world leadership on the climate change (global warming)” file is an exercise mat for flexibility training. How else could the Ontario government have mastered its current somersaults on what it hilariously refers to as its energy policy; sending rebates to citizens unable to pay to light and heat their homes, precisely because that same government went full green and put energy costs in a place where people cannot pay to light and heat their homes. The Ontario Green Dream is the world’s first genuine (taxpayer) perpetual motion machine.