Justin Trudeau, author Radio Television Malacañang (RTVM), source Wikimedia.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Auditor General Michael Ferguson has complained to the Canadian Parliament that the finance ministry refused to hand over documents required for him to complete an audit of Canadian fossil fuel subsidies.

Canada blocked climate change audit: official

May 16, 2017 by Michel Comte

Canada’s auditor general blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government Tuesday for effectively blocking an audit of efforts to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies in the fight against climate change.

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But Ferguson said the finance ministry, which was tasked with identifying subsidies, refused to hand over key documents for analysis, citing cabinet confidentiality.

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“We found that Finance Canada still had not defined what an inefficient fossil fuel subsidy was, nor could the department tell us how many inefficient fossil fuel subsidies there could be,” Ferguson said in prepared remarks.

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Prime Minister Trudeau is big on climate rhetoric, and frequently accuses his opponents of not taking climate change seriously, but his curious climate lapses have led to formerly enthusiastic climate activists attacking his government’s policies.

Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet

Bill McKibben

Donald Trump is a creep and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite when it comes to climate change.

Donald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away – especially now that he’s discovered bombs. But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything. Don’t believe me? Look one country north, at Justin Trudeau.

Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over.

But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington.

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Prime Minister Trudeau has also been criticised for his extravagant lifestyle, his personal carbon footprint.

Normally greens seem to overlook the carbon sins of their leaders, for example greens never really kicked up a fuss about Al Gore’s $30,000 / year home electricity bill.

But Prime Minister Trudeau has taken blatant environmental hypocrisy to a new level – his utter disregard for his supporter’s sensibilities has really tested the limits of green tolerance for their carbon swilling leaders.

PM’s use of jet for family vacation emitted as much CO2 as average Canadian per year

Josh Dehaas, CTVNews.ca Writer

Published Friday, January 20, 2017 5:48PM EST

The use of a military jet for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s two-week family vacation on the Aga Khan’s private island pumped about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the average emitted per capita in Canada each year.

Trudeau’s use of the Challenger to fly his family and a nanny from Ottawa to Nassau, Bahamas over the New Year holiday and back consumed about 9,100 litres of jet fuel, according to the Department of National Defence.

Christopher Surgenor, who runs the environmental aviation website GreenAir, calculated that the trip would have therefore created about 23.3 tonnes of CO2.

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In a way all this is funny – watching Trudeau in action is like watching an out of control laboratory experiment, one of those weird chemical reactions which ends up fizzing all over the bench.

But in a broader context the rank hypocrisy displayed by politicians like Trudeau damages faith in democracy, and potentially undermines the stability of the Canadian state. I utterly disagree with many of Trudeau’s political positions, at least his stated positions, but Canadian voters should have received the government they thought they were electing. There is no point in voting, if you believe none of the politicians on offer will keep their promises.