Canada became a little freer this week. In the midst of corruption and obstruction of justice questions circling against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office, Trudeau’s top aide and close friend Gerald Butts resigned on Monday.
If Butts stays true to his word, and will no longer be advising Trudeau, Canada will be a freer, stronger, more united and more prosperous country.
Butts is best known for being Trudeau’s brain-trust as well as a raving ideologue and radical environmentalist. He’s also known for his snide partisanship on social media, where he obnoxiously pushes Liberal talking points while talking down to Canadians and desperately trying to shape a media narrative.
Perched from the most powerful position in government, Butts punched down, belittling working Canadians and smugly name-calling those with whom he disagreed. His petty vitriol was sometimes aimed at writers here at the Sun. Butts seemed to despise our paper, and the people who read it.
But he didn’t just call us names. He imposed his fanatical ideology over all of us. With the fervor of a religious zealot, Butts was willing to kill jobs, destroy our economy and cut the lifeline of our civilization in order to address an abstract, theoretical global conundrum.
Rather than taking a cautious, pragmatic approach to an incredibly complex problem, Butts, convinced of his own intellectual and moral superiority, seemed to believe he had a blank cheque to erase Canadian industry and re-write the laws of economics in pursuit of his utopia.
Even his resignation letter — about his role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal — couldn’t resist the opportunity to virtue signal and lecture us about his obsession with global warming.
This isn’t Butts’ first kick at the can. Fifteen years ago, he was the architect of the Ontario Liberal’s Green Energy Act, which shut down the province’s coal industry, gave lucrative green energy contracts to Liberal insiders, and put Ontario on track to become the global poster-child of why green energy schemes fail.
Ontario’s program was lauded by all the fancy environmentalists, but even on the surface, the plan made no sense. It relied on risky energy sources — wind and solar — that quickly proved unreliable for the power grid.
The Liberal government resorted to building new gas plants, which they then canceled in the middle of an election campaign for entirely partisan reasons, leading to billions in debt and a Liberal staffer sentenced to jail.
The costs kept piling up and Ontario ratepayers were stuck paying inflated prices for failing energy sources. The government plunged the province further into debt, borrowing at high interest rates to give ratepayers a subsidy on their own energy bills.
Ontario became the most indebted sub-sovereign government in the world.
After doing irreparable harm to Ontario’s economy, racking up ungodly amounts of debt and bankrupting thousands of homeowners who could no longer afford to pay their electricity bills, Butts was at it again, this time with all of Canada in sight.
He blocked pipelines, changed the regulatory environment, unilaterally imposed a tax on carbon and destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.
The likes of Butts apparently know how to restructure the entire global economy and adjust the earth’s climate hundreds of years from now. Talk about a God complex.
Butts is gone, for now.
Good riddance, now let’s get back to work and try to build some pipelines.
