For the past year Justin Trudeau has been at pains to demonstrate his capacity to listen, to conciliate, to empathize: qualities he is widely supposed to have inherited from his mother. In the months ahead he will have to show more of his father’s steel.
At stake in the coming battle over the Trans Mountain pipeline is not just the fate of the project, or his own political fortunes, but how Canada is to be governed. It is a conflict we have been avoiding until now, but now it is upon us, inescapably.
That is to say: Are decisions on resource use to be made by democratically elected governments, informed by impartial tribunals on the basis of scientific evidence and within a framework of law defined by independent courts? Or are we to be ruled, in effect, from the streets, in defiance of both law and democracy, under the ragged banner of “social licence”?
Andrew Coyne – National Post – December 1, 2016.
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