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I was reading through quotes from former prime minister Pierre Trudeau to see if I could get some clue as to why his son appears to be sleepwalking into a national unity crisis. One of the quotes described our current national unity problem well: “Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country, and when they feel that all Canada belongs to them.”

Increasingly, Albertans do not feel at home in Canada or that Canada belongs to us. If I were to pinpoint the one issue that has driven the biggest wedge, it is the issue of greenhouse gas emissions.

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I’ve been watching the climate change debate become increasingly extreme since Canada first signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The practice of our political leaders has been to sign an agreement with overly aggressive targets, fail to achieve them, then sign onto even more aggressive targets.

The Paris Accord marked peak absurdity, where the government agreed to reduce our emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Since signing the Paris Accord, the rhetoric has become even more alarming with environmentalists claiming we actually need to reduce emissions to 80 per cent below 2005 levels by 2050, and others saying we need to be off fossil fuels completely within 10 years if we are to survive.