Greenhouse gasbags

Last Wednesday I went to see a session of our provincial parliament. Nationally, we have two political parties strong enough to form a government, the Conservatives and the Liberals. The NDP, a coalition of big government unions and gay, environmental and statist activist groups are a distant third. There is very little difference between the Liberals and the NDP except the Liberals are stronger in big business circles. Former Liberal prime minister Jeqan Chretien is married into one of the wealthiest families in the country. In that respect the Liberalism in Canada resembles fascism, a system where the state allies itself with monopolistic business interests and buys off the public with bogus social programs: in other words a queer combination of Marxism and mercantilism. The Bloc Quebecois, devoted to the secession of Quebec from Canada, also has a strong presence. Here in BC the choice is between the NDP and the Liberals. Especially on Vancouver Island, once an important source of coal for the steamship lines, we have had a strong history of militant trade unionism modeled on the British pattern. As the coal mining industry waned the forest industry waxed. Also an industry requiring large investment in machinery and processing plants, it was also congenial to the large woodworking unions. Forestry is still our largest producer of wealth in spite of the best efforts of Greenpeace and the rest of the econazi crowd but has declining in relative importance to other sectors. The NDP has largely been taken over by public service unions who have little understanding of economics and see the taxpayer as a cow to be milked. You know, capitalism is the Great Satan and all that while Big Brother knows what's good for you. Big Sister, to amend Orwell slightly.
For the last few years we have had a Liberal government and our economic picture has improved dramatically. But the local Liberals are by no means conservative...with the one exception that they understand the importance of private investment to economic prosperity. However, they are not really opposed to big government. The main difference between them and the NDP is that they understand that if they are going to have programs with which to buy off the public with illusory programs then they need a functioning economy to pay for it all.
What prompted this long preamble is one of the issues du jour, global warming. I'll save my opinions on that subject for a future post. I will only say here that anyone with the brains of a coelecanth who looks at the evidence has to see that the global warming hysteria is the biggest hoax so far of this young century. Assuming that all politicians are not idiots, then they have to know. Yet they feel compelled to fall all over themselves to show how diligently they are fighting this fictitious menace.
No surprises that such a situation leads to absurdities. The NDP, the most sanctimonious of our political parties, is deathly afraid of the Green Party and has tried to outflank them on the eco front. Yet an NDP member calls for a statutory cap on the price of gas. In other words, while he is against global warming and wants to reduce so-called green house emissions, he wants to be able to drive his greenhouse gas belching dually around his riding without paying the world price for fuel! It looks to me as if he has stumbled over his shibboleths. In the NDP demonology pantheon, global oil companies are a greater evil than global warming...especially if it comes out of his pockets. Meanwhile, the Liberal goverment has felt compelled to deliver a major constellation of legislation devoted to energy policy which, we are assured, is proof of the government's committment to reduce emissions. The NDP is livid because one of the provisions is an incentive program for industry to develop new technologies to combat this bogey man, and if there is anything that gets the NDP in a lather it is big business.
The result in the parliamentary debate I watched was almost comical, although it is surprisingly easy to get drawn into the game. I enjoyed it. But I wish we had a true conservative party that had a policy of butting out of people's lives and concentrating on getting government back to doing the things they are supposed to be doing, like enforcing the laws so we don't have squadrons of drug dealers infesting the streets of my beautiful city.
It's funny how a post runs away on you. I had intended this one to be about some books I've been reading lately, but here I am back on the dreary topic of politics.