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If Brad Wall is the the Great Right Hope of the Conservative Party of Canada, the Cons are doomed.

They’re likely doomed for two elections anyway, given how deeply they’ve buried their heads in the sand since the election. But if they select Wall as their leader in 2017, they may be pitching their tents in the political wilderness for a long, long time.

Why? Because Wall is not the Epsilon-Male required by the times. Remember, E is for Environment in post-Paris politics. Conservative elder statesman Preston Manning realized far earlier than anyone in the hapless Harper government — a regime that flamed out after one majority term — that the environment should be a sword issue, not a shield, for the party.

I once interviewed Manning during a symposium on how to fix health care. He said then — and he’s repeated it since — that the health of the conservative movement depended on getting the “sword” issues right. He asked the question: What moves millennials and gets them engaged in politics? Three things: social justice, extending democracy and the environment. All obvious sword issues for a party interested in growing.

Instead, Harper and the herd of sheep that passed for his cabinet and caucus for ten dismal years marched slavishly down the road of authoritarianism and divisiveness. With a few exceptions (Brent Rathgeber and Michael Chong) Harper’s minions diminished their party and themselves by uncritically falling into line, hoping for crumbs from the royal table. In the process, they firmly grasped their shields on all three of Manning’s sword issues.

The Cons made war on minorities and ignored social justice issues around the world. In power, Harper did his best through the Unfair Elections Act to shrink the turnout on election day and make it harder to vote, and made it easier to cheat by gutting Elections Canada’s investigative arm.

On the environment, Harper may have been the only leader in the Western world to deny that global warming was even an issue in the last election. As for his approach to the environment, Harper himself summed up his thinking nicely: “Everything can’t be a park.” So he took an axe to environmental protection legislation. The result was just what Manning feared: The CPC lost the cities, the suburbs and the youth vote in Election 2015.

Perhaps that’s why Nigel Wright, Harper’s disgraced former chief of staff, showed up at the Manning Conference with some advice on how the party could crawl out of the rubble left behind by the Harper years with a patina of credibility.

The party won’t manage that trick by trying to work out tactics for fighting the next election, he said. Instead, he counselled the party to decide what it stands for now, to renew the policy conversation in those areas where the Harper government so completely lost touch with Canadians before its drubbing last October. It was the first time I’d heard any Conservative from the Harper government admit there may have been serious policy disconnects.

Ignoring Preston Manning’s wise advice, Wall heard the facts about climate change and decided to completely miss the point. The premier of Saskatchewan is like a passenger complaining about the air-conditioning in his cabin when the cruise ship is on fire. Ignoring Preston Manning’s wise advice, Wall heard the facts about climate change and decided to completely miss the point. The premier of Saskatchewan is like a passenger complaining about the air-conditioning in his cabin when the cruise ship is on fire.

Enter Brad Wall. Here is a politician who boasts about not signing any cap-and-trade agreement. There was even word out of the First Ministers Conference that he didn’t even want to talk about it in a workshop.

His reason? Pure Harperism: Wall says the time to regulate the energy industry is not when it is hurting. He couldn’t give a hoot about what the Trudeau government just committed to in Paris, even though it was broadly applauded by Canadians: the reduction of this country’s carbon footprint and a move to renewable energy.

Ignoring Preston Manning’s wise advice, Wall heard the facts about climate change and decided to completely miss the point. The premier of Saskatchewan is like a passenger complaining about the air-conditioning in his cabin when the cruise ship is on fire.

Canadians have heard this kind of myopic political nonsense before. It usually happens when governments decide to carry a brief for a particular industry and to ignore the environmental facts.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mulroney government refused to close down the northern cod fishery off Newfoundland. Despite clear signs that an ecological disaster was brewing on the Grand Banks, the government of the day said there were too many jobs on the line in Atlantic Canada to shut the fishery down. So they kept casting the appropriate lights and shadows over the true scientific evidence of an imminent collapse.

So Ottawa kept issuing unsustainable quotas and the trawlers and factory freezers kept fishing, including on the spawning grounds of the northern cod. Despite the obvious madness of that approach, it was the only way to sustain the industry’s catch rates. And then the fish simply disappeared.

In the end, God closed the fishery, not Ottawa. Once the third largest biomass on the planet, this splendid fish stock was wiped out by brainless politicians in league with an industry that had forgotten it was fishing for living creatures. Nearly 25 years later, the northern cod still hasn’t returned in numbers that would support a commercial fishery. Which is merely to say that politicians may squeak on the puny anthropomorphic issues at play when industry collides with nature, but nature replies with a roar when she is wounded and ignored.

Another sign that Wall is out to lunch — and on the campaign trail — is his anger over Quebec’s move to take the fight over the Energy East pipeline to the courts. Does he really think Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard should just click his heels and salute when Wall demands everyone fall into line on a pipeline project that is both environmentally dubious and economically suspect?

Wall says it is “unfriendly” of Quebec to oppose Energy East. What he doesn’t say is that it would be undemocratic for public officials like Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre to ignore the will of most of the 140 groups that recently submitted briefs opposing the pipeline.

Quebec’s environmental groups, justifiably concerned about Trans Canada Inc.’s pipeline project, have every right to pressure their government in court and publicly to act responsibly. That’s exactly what their counterparts in British Columbia have done over the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipeline projects in their province.

And it may be a completely moot point, given how the ground has shifted under the Canadian energy sector. As former energy industry exec Ross Belot recently wrote on this page, Canadian crude is no longer selling at the huge discounts it was just a few years ago.

When the discount was $30 per barrel — largely because there was no pipeline to get the product to tidewater — Energy East made eminent good sense from a business perspective. But now that the discount has come down to $6.50 per barrel, it’s actually lower than the pipeline tariff to get it there. With both Enbridge and Trans Canada expanding their delivery systems, there’s every reason to question whether this $15 billion “national interest” project makes the any economic sense at all in the current market.

Brad Wall may be a popular dinosaur, but he’s a dinosaur all the same. The last thing Canada needs, let alone the shattered CPC, is another cheerleader for the oil industry when Planet Earth is running a fever.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, is a number one best-seller and has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for English-language non-fiction.

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