Article content continued

Now that we are back to the world of facts and truth let’s tour real Quebec in the province’s best-selling vehicle, the Ford F-150, a gas-guzzling stud of a truck. You’ll see a lot of them running around rural Quebec, often with a dead moose in the back. It is interesting and relevant that rural Quebec is where the Bloc Québécois won almost all its 32 seats. The Dodge Ram and GMC Sierra are also big sellers in the Quebec backwoods, the sixth- and seventh-best sellers in the province, respectively.

Thankfully, torrents of oil pour into Quebec to power those trucks and to keep the Quebec economy moving. Much of that oil comes from countries where you’ll be severely punished for saying the wrong thing, kind of like on Sportsnet. Much of it comes up the St. Lawrence in tankers, the same kind of tankers that are banned from taking Alberta oil off the north coast of British Columbia. Quebec’s biggest source of oil is the Alberta oilsands. It travels to refineries in Montreal via a long tube known as a pipeline.

Quebec’s gasoline consumption is second only to Ontario’s and is growing

That oil is then turned into gasoline and it’s a good thing, too. Quebec’s gasoline consumption is second only to Ontario’s and is growing. In 2013 Quebec drivers consumed 25,000 cubic meters of gasoline every single day. By 2018 that was up to 26,300. Remember, 70 to 80 per cent of GHGs in the fossil fuel transportation value chain are created by vehicle combustion. The remainder you can pin on producing and transporting the oil. It turns out that in this world of hard facts, in almost every respect, Quebec is itself an oil state, even if Quebecers let other jurisdictions produce the oil that they then burn in their trucks and SUVs.