Canadian elites have declared war on ordinary people.

Greta Thunberg, aged 16. Screen cap from National Post, Sept. 2019 (click image)

Here in Canada, our elites are brazenly anti-democratic.

Politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, and academics don’t see public life as a conversation, a negotiation between different communities who care deeply about different issues. It’s their way or the highway. Alternative perspectives are unacceptable. Denunciation fills the airwaves.

The largest, most respectable brands in Canadian media promote the idea that those who don’t follow government COVID-19 vaccine advice should be treated more harshly than drug addicts and convicted criminals. The unvaxxed should be jailed, denied healthcare, left to die.

Anyone with 90 minutes to spare is invited to consult this grim essay: A Comprehensive History of the Persecution of the Unvaccinated in Covid Era Canada.

Turns out Canada isn’t a civilized nation in which bodily autonomy and informed consent actually mean something. Turns out Canada doesn’t believe individuals should make their own medical decisions in confidential consultation with their family doctor. Turns out medical privacy is a joke. Cashiers at burger joints demanding proof of your medical status is the punchline.

Turns out Canadian society in the year 2022 isn’t much different from the Canadian society of the early 1940s. Remember when we considered it immoral that Japanese Canadians were subjected to curfews, had their property seized, and were loaded into trucks for transport to remote internment camps?

The Canadian elites who’ve dominated the conversation for the past two years are not tolerant. They are not kind. They are not respectful. They have absolutely no interest in your side of the story. In their universe you aren’t just wrong, you’re despicable.

Mainstream media outlets on the government payroll have now completed their journey to the dark side. They’ve become full-blown government propagandists. They enforce conformity and compliance. They bully, demonize, and marginalize. In bed with the government, they wage war on ordinary people.

Canadian journalists applauded when the government trampled peaceful protesters with horses and violently arrested truckers. Canadian journalists applauded when the bank accounts of protesters were frozen – an act that eroded trust in our banking system, and shocked immigrants who thought they’d landed in a country where the state can’t punish you unless you’ve first been charged, tried, and convicted.

A few years ago, Greta Thunberg – the Swedish climate activist too young to vote in this country or her own – was granted a private audience with Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister. That same Prime Minister refused to meet with the truckers. His own citizens. Hard working taxpayers who’d driven thousands of miles across the country at their own expense in the middle of winter.

No dialogue took place. No courtesy was extended. Trudeau displayed not an iota of decency. Instead, he hurled insults and lies – which were then duly amplified by his lapdog media. Rather than comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, journalists ran a weeks-long smear campaign against working class Canadians who simply wanted to be heard.

In my early twenties, I helped organize and took part in many downtown Toronto protests. I thought I knew what less-than-friendly media coverage looked like. But I’ve never witnessed anything like the hostile, spiteful, shamefully dishonest treatment the truckers received at the hands of Canada’s pack-animal journalists. We’re talking an absolute betrayal of the public trust.

That’s not OK. And it cannot be unseen.

The Canadian trucker protest of 2022 changed history. Those involved deserve credit and respect. I’m now writing a book about these events. Having spent a week in Ottawa during the protest talking to truckers and taking thousands of photographs, my primary mission over the next few months will be to document the untold stories. To collect the numerous, heart-warming anecdotes. To give those who participated a voice. To give those who supported the protest a voice.

Stayed tuned. Further details will be announced here, on this blog, on Easter Sunday.

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I’m not the only Canadian journalist who’s dismayed. In this video, Anita Krishna is a firecracker who indulges in a bit of profane language. The video was recorded in early February, while the trucker protest was still in Ottawa. Formerly a Global News television producer, Krishna lost her job after she began asking the wrong sorts of questions.

She’s addressing a freedom rally in Vancouver and, near the beginning, points out that the event in which they are participating won’t make it onto the evening news. It will simply be ignored. Because it conflicts with the dominant narrative, journalists will pretend it didn’t happen.

At 2:50 minutes, Krishna says the mainstream media “has spread so much misinformation that my heart is broken.” At the 7-minute mark, she calls out another journalist:

I would like to cite a specific example. The other day, I saw CTV Ottawa. I saw a woman interview a trucker. This trucker, his name is Jeff Gaudry. He drove from Vernon, across the country, to get to Ottawa [4,000 km, 2,500 miles]. And CTV did an interview with him.

This woman that did the interview, her name was Annette Goerner. It was the most appalling, insulting interview I’ve ever seen in my life…She grilled him, and nailed him. And she’s like, “What are you doing here? Why are you here? Oh, we heard you.”

I would like to apologize to Jeff Gaudry, as someone who has been a broadcaster for my whole life, for that appalling interview. CTV, you owe Jeff an apology, too.

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I have been expecting a shakeout in the RE industry for some time because in Australia more and more providers are feeding into a static market. In recent years the demand in the grid has possibly even declined due to the flight of power-intensive industries although the demand for power is projected to increase a great deal in future due to population growth and the anticipated explosion of numbers of electric vehicles (not to be confused with the explosion of the EVs themselves.)

I think the inflated projections of the rise of EVs are rubbish but that is another story.

RE developers in Australia are frustrated by delays in connection due to inadequate infrastructure (poles and wires) and they want the taxpayers to kick in $20 billion of capital expenditure to get them out of trouble. According to our planners in AEMO and associated lobby groups this will pay for itself many times over in a decade or two. In their dreams. Long before that the industry will implode when the impossibility of the transition becomes impossible to conceal when Liddell and Eraring go off line.

The big news about the travails of the wind industry overseas is the increase in construction costs which could be as much as 30% over the last year. At first, it was a supply chain problem due to the pandemic, now the supply chain issues are aggravated by the war and worse is to come as the inflation rate in the economy at large flows into the wind industry. Worse again is the pinch on lithium and other rare earths that will also get a great deal worse.

Even before the latest round of inflation the offshore wind industry in Britain was in trouble. Inspection of the books of the leading wind providers found that the costs of deep-water construction and maintenance were much larger than expected.

All in all it is a fascinating time to watch the end game of the RE fantasy playing out although it has some way to run due to the amount of capital that the woke finance industry and people like Twiggy Forrest are prepared to commit – with some help from the taxpayers of course.

All of this is playing out against the background of the brutal realities of the geopolitics of energy and mineral resources. Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.

Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.

He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal. This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.

While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.

Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.

The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic.

Read the whole story, it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.