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The problem with carbon is in the amount: excessive emissions cause too much warming. Identifying it as pollution is like saying food is poisonous. It’s not — but eating too much can cause problems.

Photo by Nathan Denette/CP

McKenna should know thus, and perhaps she does. As a francophile working in Ottawa, she can hardly miss noticing the University of Ottawa just down the road, which bills itself as “the largest English-French bilingual university in the world.” No shortage of French education there. But Liberals, like most politicians, like to skirt the truth when it serves their interests. In this case it serves the Liberals to pretend Doug Ford is being mean to francophones, as it might win them some votes in Quebec. The real lesson to be taken from such faux outrage is the bone-deep acceptance among Liberals, “progressives” and left-wingers, that no expenditure, once committed to by a government, can ever be revoked. No matter how unnecessary, ineffective or overpriced a program may be, no matter how much circumstances may change, it must be continued forever or be treated as an assault on whatever audience it was targeted to please.

Liberals, like most politicians, like to skirt the truth when it serves their interests

Ford has been under attack on several fronts on this basis. On Wednesday the minister for universities, Merrilee Fullerton, revealed that Ryerson University’s request for money to open a new law school had been rejected. The explanation was straightforward: Ontario already has plenty of law schools, there’s no shortage of lawyers, and borrowing money to finance yet another campus can’t be a priority. Predictably, Ford has been depicted as a muttonhead unleashing a vendetta against higher education, despite the fact the province is extremely well stocked with colleges and universities, which struggle to keep up enrolment and hardly need more competition from new schools offering similar programs.