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The former PM’s speech featured a lack of historical context, presumably because it would have been too embarrassing
Brian Mulroney’s speech earlier this week to Canada 2020 – a “progressive” group of PR/government advisory types who pretend to chart the country’s future – presumably involved walking a fine pipeline. Progressives tend not to be great fans of Canada as an “energy superpower,” and no fans at all of Stephen Harper, that notion’s main proponent.
However, energy superpower-dom was essentially what Mr. Mulroney was promoting, so he leavened his recommendations with an attack on Mr. Harper’s leadership on energy and climate issues.
I’m not sure how far that spoonful of vitriol helped the medicine go down, but Mr. Mulroney’s speech, while it contained a great deal of obvious good sense and some inevitable blarney, also featured a lack of historical context, presumably because it would have been too embarrassing.
Mr. Mulroney suggested that Canada lacked a “coherent plan” to harness its vast resources, but shouldn’t the man who dismantled the National Energy Program be a little more skeptical about grand strategies?
The blarney turned even more problematic when it came to Mr. Mulroney’s recommendation of a “new North American accord on carbon emissions” as part of an energy partnership with the U.S. He suggested that his own promotion of free trade might be a model, with a special envoy who combined the tenacity of Canada’s chief negotiator, Simon Reisman, with the sensitivity of a Jim Prentice or Bob Rae.
This super-composite would run something called the Resource Development Office, “that would have special power to counter interdepartmental turf squabbles, set clear priorities, streamline regulatory reviews and move beyond a chronic penchant to ‘boil the ocean’ with analyses and consultations.”
If only. Meanwhile free trade was child’s play compared with the Gordian knot of energy and climate policy.
Mr. Mulroney concluded his speech with a rather obscure quote from Reinhold Niebuhr: “Nothing fine or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.” Whatever that might mean, it at least brings up that issue of historical context, into which Mr. Mulroney’s noble aspirations and more or less subtle criticisms need to be put.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/04/10/peter-foster-brian-mulroneys-green-gaul/