Canada so ripe with green activism old-fashioned employment has gone out of fashion – by Rex Murphy (National Post – August 4, 2017)

http://nationalpost.com/

Has there ever been a single energy project — just one — in British Columbia that has not faced protest and demonization?

It’s more than a touch odd or distressing how a project with an overall budget of some $36 billion — billion! — can get cancelled these days, and not kick up as much interest or internet play as, say, Justin Trudeau showing up on the cover of (the much diminished of late) Rolling Stone.

Yet this appears the case with the Pacific Northwest liquified natural gas (LNG) plant in British Columbia, undertaken by the Malaysian company Petronas some years back, and now, despite early expenditures of some billions, cancelled for good.

I don’t suppose there’s any need to point out that all the jobs, technical resources, local development and industry that would naturally follow from an expenditure of this magnitude are good things. Or that Canada hasn’t become so new-age, so ripe with green virtue-signalling as a surrogate for policy, so prideful of its climate change sanctimoniousness, that jobs, employment, old fashioned working for a living has gone utterly out of fashion.

Yet there we are. A great energy project, with the promise to put B.C. and Canada into a renewed natural gas market, having won support even from Indigenous supporters, has the plug pulled a bare week after the arrival of the Horgan-Weaver government.

An absolutely huge and necessary industrial project gets cancelled and more people are talking about Justin’s fanpics in the Rolling Stone, or Justin and his absurd worship of the West Wing, than the massive loss of jobs and industry.

For the rest of this article: http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-canada-so-ripe-with-green-activism-old-fashioned-employment-has-gone-out-of-fashion/wcm/c8b0f283-2568-4bd9-b74f-400137a98e82