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This stance is unworthy of any citizen in a democracy, especially a premier. Progressives share with the most regressive fundamentalists, this tendency to mark off the world into good and evil. Naturally, the progressives are on the positive side of that table. It is a nasty phenomenon. And if it results, even indirectly, in an indictment of Dosanjh as less of a moral being than those he challenges, as being in the camp of racists and xenophobes — the very forces he has faced with personal courage and resolve — then it is very easy to see how shameless and bankrupt that line of thinking really is.

All this occurred in the same week David Suzuki, wandering much the same uncivil trail as Wynne, compared people who defend working in the oilsands to the 19th-century plantation owners’ defence of slavery. What rubbish. There are absolutely no grounds for associating working in the oilsands with slavery and any analogy between the two is so feeble, it would distress the mind of a mildly alert five-year-old. On that, the science is settled.

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Suzuki’s zeal is usurping his intellect and these days — there is far more anger in his outbursts than reason. Saving the world, or at least posing as one who would save the world, invites hubris and high self-regard, which Suzuki has taken to heart.

I don’t know where Dosanjh is on the vexed question of planetary apocalypse brought on by global warming, but even if he is as committed to that cause as Suzuki is, it is no wager to say that Dosanjh would find a more civil and convincing way to make his case than this latest intemperate outburst from the very dean of global warming. The one pummels where the other, more worthy individual, would persuade.

National Post