"When it comes to the environment, the only growth industry in Ottawa these days is spin doctoring."

When David Suzuki called for the resignation of Environment Minister Catherine McKenna this week, it was a far bigger development than merely asking a disappointing politician to step aside.

Suzuki knows, along with everyone else, that McKenna is not going anywhere, hypocrite or not. In part, that is because she is merely advancing the prime minister’s agenda, and in part because the day of politicians resigning over principle is over.

You can bet the farm that neither Justin Trudeau nor Dominic LeBlanc pondered resigning after they violated conflict of interest rules — Trudeau for his trip to the Aga Khan’s private island and ex-Fisheries Minister LeBlanc for awarding a lucrative crab license to a firm linked to his wife’s cousin.

Just as Stephen Harper never considered throwing in the towel as Conservative leader when he was found in contempt of Parliament. These days, unless someone has a videotape of a bloody murder, elected officials hang on with all ten toes, no matter what they have done — or in McKenna’s case, what they have not done.

Although Suzuki is not likely to bring about a change in the Trudeau cabinet by asking that McKenna step down, he has definitely not fired a blank either. What the country’s leading environmentalist has done by calling out McKenna is call out the Trudeau government on its signal failure — the environment. And that could significantly alter the coalition that delivered a majority government to the Liberals in 2015.

In part, what has happened to the Liberals on this file has to do with overblown expectations, triggered in part by giddy overpromises during the 2015 campaign.

For a champagne bubble moment, when the pony was shiny and new, optimism was king in this country. The dreadful reign of Harper had ended and so too would Canada’s reputation as the “deadbeat” of the environmental world. At least that’s what a lot of people were led to believe.

Trudeau was young, idealistic, and eager to announce that Canada was back. And not to add to the Harper government’s impressive collection of ‘fossil awards’ amassed over years of catastrophic environmental decisions.

Instead, and despite McKenna’s early promises of setting a bolder course on reducing carbon emission rates, Canada went to the Paris Climate talks with Harper’s targets. The whole thing turned into a group hug of self-appointed and smug planet-savers from 175 countries and the European Union. They were more than happy to endorse a deal that was not legally binding. It was rhetoric without the requirement for results — political Nirvana for the short-term thinkers who run the world.

The Paris Accord may have been a temporary PR victory for the Liberals, but it was actually the ghost of Kyoto. After all, as prime ministers including Jean Chrétien, Harper and now Trudeau have proven, it doesn’t matter what target you set for greenhouse gas reductions, if you don’t do anything about meeting them.

The great charade of Paris merely continues the history over the last 20 years of politicians doing squat about seriously confronting global warming.

Despite stark and deadly warnings from scientists, world leaders continue to lose the name of action in the heat of resolve. In fact, global greenhouse gas emissions actually rose last year to a record high of 32.5 gigatonnes.

According to the UN secretary general, rich countries have not come through with the promised money to help poor countries deal with the costs associated with the war on global warming. Those costs are now estimated at $350 billion.

And despite endless talk about “transitioning” to cleaner forms of energy, the mad search for more fossil fuels continues. Perhaps that is why the UN Environment Program has tersely opined “to date, we have failed” in the fight against climate change.

And that includes Canada.

In Trudeau’s case, the aspirational notion to move Canada toward a green economy has been eclipsed by policies worthy of a ‘fossil award.’ The only thing more dubious than the Trudeau government’s initial support of the Kinder Morgan pipeline was the unpardonable sin of buying it.

Publicly acquiring a leaky, decrepit pipeline for $4.5 billion and facing construction costs approaching $10 billion — all to carry the dirtiest fossil commodity of them all, bitumen, is hardly consistent with the greening of Canada or saving the planet.

But it is perfectly consistent with what Trudeau told an audience of oilmen in Houston who gave him a standing ovation.

“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there,” he said.

What does that statement have to do with the noble sentiments Trudeau and McKenna embraced in Paris? In a recent study by U.S. advocacy group Oil Change International, the authors concluded: “There is no scenario in which tar sands production increases and the world achieves the Paris goals… If he [Trudeau] approves a pipeline, he will be the one to make the goals impossible to reach.”

Potentially adding 50 years of “production” to the tar sands is not the only thing that has environmentalists throwing up on their shoes. There has been a pattern of bad environmental decisions from this government.

What happened to Trudeau’s 2015 election promise to get rid of fossil fuel subsidies, the ones that were supposed to end in 2025?

Ottawa says it is making progress but refused to give Auditor General Michael Ferguson the documents he needed to assess that claim.

Meanwhile, Canada continues to spend the most per capita of any G7 country subsidizing oil and gas development — $3 billion in Canada and $10 billion through Export Development Canada in foreign countries.

Trudeau green-lighted the infamous Site C Dam project in British Columbia, over the adamant objections of environmentalists and First Nations.

Last February, Catherine McKenna approved permits for British Petroleum to drill as many as seven exploratory wells off the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. The water is up to twice as deep as the ocean where BP had its Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010. Eight years on and people around the Gulf are still suffering the consequences.

Then just months later, McKenna approved the first actual deepwater well for BP 300 km off of Nova Scotia.

The decision was announced by the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board, an agency mostly comprised of ex-oil industry executives. Their mandate is ludicrous — to promote oil and gas development and protect the marine environment. Can you guess their priority? The best part is that under Bill C-69, these unelected appointees will get even more authority than they have now.

McKenna seemed to think that this well didn’t pose much of a threat to the environment. But BP has already had an accident while drilling its first exploratory well — thousands of litres of mud spilled into fishing grounds off the Nova Scotia coast. Remarkably, the company was authorized to resume drilling even though the investigation into the accident is ongoing.

On top of all that, Ottawa’s national climate plan is falling apart. Alberta and Ontario are out, and Saskatchewan is on the way to court.

Trudeau’s reaction? Ease the regulations on polluters. The carbon tax on the worst of them will now be triggered at higher levels of emissions.

The threshold at which the tax would kick in was moved from 70 per cent of an industry’s emissions all the way to 90 per cent in certain cases.

The explanation for abandoning his environmental post? Trudeau was worried that certain industries would lose their competitiveness.

However, something much graver than that is at risk of being lost.

Suzuki won’t be getting McKenna to fall on her sword the way her French counterpart, Nicolas Hulot did. He resigned on live radio because he came to believe his government wasn’t serious about hitting its emissions targets.

But Suzuki might just persuade a lot of progressive voters who care passionately about the planet that the Liberals are fundamentally the party of the economy, not the environment. New mandate letters are not the same as a new direction, and both Trudeau and McKenna know it.

When it comes to the environment, the only growth industry in Ottawa these days is spin doctoring.

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