Take Time for this Minister

Catherine McKenna was on Evan Solomon’s CTV show and Evan asked a slightly difficult question about her carbon tax and its opponents.

“”I have no time for folks who are like, you know, ‘We shouldn’t take action,'” she said. “I don’t have time for politicians that play cynical games about climate action.” and “”I have time for Canadians who disagree with me, and I have conversations with them all the time…. But I don’t have time for politicians that pretend that climate change isn’t real.”

There are really only three questions which the Minister and the rest of the Liberal Government should be asked:

1. How much will the proposed per tonne price on “pollution” reduce the emissions of this “pollution”?
2. How much will this reduction – if any – reduce global temperature in, say, 50 years? (And with what degree of certainty?)
3. How much will the “price on pollution” effect the Canadian economy?

Now these are basic questions and make no assumptions about the reality or unreality of “climate change”. They are certainly questions which a competent Minister proposing a significant tax should be able to answer. Now the answers will, necessarily be qualified: plus minus 10% is a reasonable standard. But the Minister has to be able to attach numbers to her proposals.

Otherwise she really will deserve the nickname “Climate Barbie”.

Climate Barbie and the denier slur

Nasty Rebel Media refers to Canada’s Environment Minister, Catherine McKenna as “Climate Barbie”. Pretty mean. Ms. McKenna is well credentialled, has a real record of accomplishment before politics and can’t help that she’s blonde.

But the Climate Barbie nickname has its roots in the fact that McKenna, like a wind-up doll, insists on calling those of us who disagree – usually on rather well-founded grounds – with the climate change consensus “climate deniers”. Which is as insulting as it is idiotic.

As Sheila Gunn Reid of The Rebel suggested – having coined the nickname – we’ll stop calling McKenna Climate Barbie when she drops “climate denier” from her lexicon. There is plenty of room for reasoned debate and dissent from the climate change consensus. A non-Barbie Minister would recognize that fact and stop slagging the people who take climate change seriously enough to question mainstream data, models and prescriptions. Repeating, by rote, “climate denier” whenever confronted with disagreement puts McKenna firmly in the Barbie camp.

Now, she asks that we stop calling her that because her young daughters might hear and that would be a bad thing. In fact, her daughters, on hearing their mother referred to so pejoratively might ask why their mother seems content to mouth platitudes rather than digging into the positions on both sides of the question.

McKenna is not an idiot. However, for the moment, her role as the all in spokesperson for an increasingly untenable, model based, scare story which is designed to justify massive tax increases for ordinary Canadians, forces her to sound like one. Just like Barbie.