Justin Trudeau has just made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Very cool.

So was making the cover of Paris Match, Bloomberg Business Week and a half-dozen other glossies both here and internationally.

So is Justin really one of the ten sexiest men in the world, as Vogue declared? Is he actually in the august company of the 100 most influential people on the planet, as Time Magazine claimed?

It hardly matters. In politics, image can be overpowering — as the squelchy Andrew Scheer is about to find out.

If you are looking for a way to measure the profound change that has occurred in Canada’s international reputation since 2015, imagine (if you can) the circumstances under which the editors of Rolling Stone might have made Stephen Harper their cover boy.

Imagine Harper being gushingly described by a Stone scribe as “the free world’s best hope.” Or marching in a Gay Pride parade, let alone most of them.

Or deigning to enter the teepee of native protesters on the front lawn of the Parliament buildings, or dipping under the ropes in boxing gloves to take on a fire-plug senator with arms like pythons, or getting Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live to call him “a force for good.”

Or going to Paris and captivating the world the way Trudeau did with his bear-hug embrace of the fight against climate change after years of Canada winning Fossil Awards.

Exactly. Hell would freeze over first. Poor old Steve couldn’t even score a state dinner at the White House.

When he finally got the C-list invitation, Harper was greeted by the deputy chief of protocol from the State Department, not President Barack Obama himself. The only thing they didn’t do was bring Harper in through the service entrace in the dead of night.

Bottom line from the image perspective? Trudeau is steak tartare. Harper is yesterday’s chopped liver. Scheer is undercooked hamburger. Trudeau is working his media magic and there is no denying that it is good for Canada — maybe very good.

But there’s a far more important side to the story that is less flattering. For all that earned and unearned adoration, for all the image victories his PMO has scored, Trudeau’s inbox isn’t restricted to swooning fan mail. There are people, estimable people, who still remind the PM and his handlers that tennis star Andre Agassi had it wrong: Image isn’t everything.

In politics, leaders are ultimately judged by what they do, not by how they look or what they say. In that department, all the cover stories in the world can’t cover up some major disappointments with Trudeau — from the failure to deliver on electoral reform to the absence of new deal for Canada’s aboriginal peoples.

And then there’s the elephant in the cabinet room: the environment.

On July 25, 2017, a letter from David Suzuki landed on the prime minister’s desk. It was a plea to do what a lot of people who voted for Trudeau assumed he would do if he became prime minister. They weren’t expecting him to boost military spending and approve a spate of dubious megaprojects, including several pipelines.

Suzuki’s letter is full of the urgency of his cause. The letter cited a doomsday article from New York Magazine (The Uninhabitable Earth) outlining what could happen if governments continue doing nothing about reducing greenhouse gases. Suzuki copied Environment Minister Catherine McKenna and urged Trudeau to have all his people read the article and the responses to it.

The question is not whether Justin Trudeau takes a great picture. He does. The question is whether he gets the picture. The question is not whether Justin Trudeau takes a great picture. He does. The question is whether hethe picture.

The letter was deeply personal:

… If we don’t look at it head-on, then I believe we will continue to talk but fail to take the hard steps that must be taken now — stop all discussions of building pipelines, shut down the tarsands and fracking, and get on a hard path to renewables. That must be done if we are to even come close to meeting the 2050 targets in the Paris Accord. It is ludicrous to keep looking to the economy and market forces and consumer pressure to make us change direction. We need you to make big, hard decisions and Harper made it all the more difficult for you by failing to even tackle the low-hanging fruit … The good news is that the future predicted doesn’t have to happen, but only if you take the hard steps. You know I have no hidden agenda. I implore you as an elder near the end of my life and terrified for the future of my grandchildren.

As the fifth greatest Canadian of all time (according to the CBC), a Trudeau voter in the last election and a world-famous scientist and environmentalist, Suzuki is someone who can’t be ignored. That he and his message are being ignored by this government is passing strange, since standing up for the environment in general, and in particular for scientists who were abused by the Harper regime, was a key element of Trudeau’s rise to power.

Trudeau’s promises to come up with “evidence-based” policy and to restore the place of science in Canadian governance are especially important in view of events in the United States. Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, wants the U.S. Climate Action Plan ditched, and has already walked away from the Paris Climate Agreement.

How far has the war on science gone in Trumpland? The budget for research on pollution in the Great Lakes, one of the planet’s greatest fresh water resources, has been cut by 97 per cent.

As for the Environmental Protection Agency, it’s in the hands of the Freddy Krueger of Trump cabinet members, Scott Pruitt. No wonder Pruitt met with science-killer Stephen Harper just before he began his own purge of scientists at the EPA (as reported by the Huffington Post).

But we shouldn’t be smug about Trump’s follies — or Harper’s for that matter, now that he’s gone. For those who think that Canada became science-friendly with the election of Justin Trudeau, one of the country’s greatest scientists in the country — David Schindler — has a surprise. According to Schindler, facts still don’t matter in federal politics, even in Harper’s absence. Pro-development governments, including Trudeau’s, continue to ignore science.

In a sobering article in the June 30 edition of Alberta Views (once voted Magazine of the Year for its editorial excellence), Schindler points out that although the Trudeau government has “unmuzzled” federal scientists, scientists have yet to achieve Nirvana under his administration:

“Our environmental regulations are still those modified by the Harper government. The civil service too is unchanged: Top jobs are still occupied by career policy wonks with little understanding of science. And while more scientists may now speak about their research, they remain forbidden from public discussion of policy options.”

Schindler asserts that Canada’s environmental assessment process for big projects, which Trudeau and Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr insist is fact-based, remains “archaic”. More than that, Schindler says that federal environmental regulations are a “laughingstock”, that “science libraries”, gutted by Harper, appear to be gone for good, and too much science is still in the hands of bureacrats, whose unschooled grip is tightening.

Schindler reserved his harshest judgement for Canada’s mid-century, long-term greenhouse gas emission strategy, the “having your cake and eating it too” Trudeau manifesto on the environment.

“The federal plan was issued in 2016 with a triumphant press release that we could indeed meet our 2050 international commitments to reduce carbon — while further developing the oil sands and building several oil pipelines and LNG plants. Upon scrutiny, the various scenarios proposed all require generating over 100,000 MW of hydroelectric power … Generating over 100,00 MW of power would require 100 dams roughly the size of Site C in BC and Mustrat Falls in Newfoundland, both of which have been tied up by protests, litigation and spiralling construction costs. Build three huge dams a year for 30 years in remote areas? It will not happen.”

Finally, Schindler says, there is the federal government’s claim that such hydroelectric power, even if the infrastructure could be built to produce it, would be emissions-free. The scientist who founded the Experimental Lakes Area, killed by Harper, refers Trudeau & Company to the scientific proof that their claim is absurd.

“Forty years of detailed research, mostly in Canada and much of it by federal scientists, shows that hydroelectric reservoirs are significant long-term emitters of methane and carbon dioxide … That policy wonks are still blissfully unaware of this after decades is very telling about the role of science in environmental decision-making. It would all be laughable if it did not affect the planet we must live on.”

The question is not whether Justin Trudeau takes a great picture. He does.

The question is whether he gets the picture. On the environment, despite having said all the right words, his record says otherwise.

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