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This week, the Green Party’s Elizabeth May gave a charmingly considerate lecture to the oil and gas workers of Canada, Marthas and Henrys all of them. She is going to “transition” them out of the work they are pleasantly (if they still have work) and professionally engaged in, and which at this very moment actually exists; the work that they have been trained for and built up experience in, and for which they receive real and present pay cheques. They are going to be transitioned into a new line of work because Ms. May thinks it is better for them.

They are going to be transitioned into a new line of work because Ms. May thinks it is better for them

I must explain that word transition. In the context of Ms. May’s vision, it means that all work in the oil and gas industries — and the hundreds of industries and services reliant on it — will come to a halt. It must stop. Alberta (mainly) under her vision is killing the planet. So we can have no argument about the premise. But the highly considerate Green leader wished to emphasize that “workers in fossil fuel industries and fossil fuel-dependent communities not fear for their future.” (Which, let me note, they would not be if every environmentalist and Green on the planet hadn’t been trying for two decades now to put them out of business.)

She is not “at war” with the fossil fuel industry, she claimed. (At that statement it is reported the Rockies — all of them — crumbled from the wit of it. The Three Sisters are now a pile of laughter-collapsed dust, sands on a Prairie landscape.)

Not to worry. All the oil and gas people are going to be transitioned and retrained and upgraded and relocated, take courses in the Man of La Mancha, sent out to clean up, refurbish, insulate everything in their path. They will take donkeys to their worksites, gnaw on vegetarian burgers to keep their strength up … and “all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”