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The distant future is a politician’s most useful friend — it is where every good and noble thing they promise actually happens. It is where the clutter of present events and the roiling fortunes of this busy harsh and confounding world do not impinge on their their wildest wishes.
For example, under Ontario’s green ambitions, we are given to understand the goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by a full 80 per cent by 2050. This is Premier Kathleen Wynn’s pledge, a commitment that will take merely 35 years to be tested — a generous breathing space by any standards for a political commitment, and which happily just might be the identical term it takes to learn all there is to know about the infamous billion-dollar cancellation of a couple of Ontario gas plants a couple of elections ago.
We have long since learned, and from a thousand examples, that the promises of most politicians barely survive the time it takes to make them. Antiques like me remember the bitter mocking Pierre Trudeau once gave Robert Stanfield on the latter’s promise to introduce wage and price controls — “Zap! You’re frozen!,” said the wily Trudeau — only to pirouette mere days after an election to introduce … wage and price controls.
Pledges three, four or 10 decades out are perfect vapourings. To call them useless is to elevate their dignity. To build present-day policy under the umbrella of such projections is to blend fantasy and irresponsibility.