Article content continued

Those outside the faith, and mere loitering agnostics, see nothing here but a catalogue of burdens. Shackles of an alien god. But to those within the covenant, they are the way stations on the hard and stony path to delicious rewards reserved for the elect. This is the true chemistry of belief. What appear as obstacles to heretics, appear to believers as smooth escalators to a higher state. Accepting, embracing what must be done supplies them with a sense of inner sanction, endows them with that peace of mind which a lesser scripture records, rather churlishly, as passing all understanding.

It has always been thus. Think of those Lenten pilgrims of old scuttling from hamlets all over Europe to visit Jerusalem for a glance at the bone splinters of some of the lesser saints. The “ways [were] deep and the weather sharp” but the end transmuted the journey into something sweet and fine. So it is now.

I see the mages of Queen’s Park, shivering in the polls, stripped of their popularity, the scorn of so many who once strew palms on University Avenue at their approach, I see them now embracing all that misery. For the cause is just and the cost therefore simply cannot be too high. What is a blizzard of swollen light bills and a hash of inflated power contracts to them? For is it not their pride to have done their bit to defer an apocalypse?

And so, if they raise their eyes and see that last year carbon dioxide molecules were, say, 387 parts per million in the atmosphere of our planet, and now – as a mere cost of billions and utter depression in their electoral prospects, it is, say, 386 or even 385 parts per million – Ontario, they cry, has done its bit. A bit, after all, being all that Ontario can do.