The new Carney administration is composed primarily of people, including him, who seem to agree with almost everything the old Trudeau administration did right down to a freeze on protestors’ bank accounts using massively excessive emergency powers that were subsequently ruled illegal. Now they’ve put on a remarkable Twister performance by moving to ram through a sweeping Bill C-5 that would suspend a bunch of laws and give cabinet the power to suspend any others that it felt like, in the name of the “national interest” and getting infrastructure projects built. Which is very much in the spirit of Henry VIII, and not in a good way. But having thus crafted a law to prevent any outside groups from being able to veto favoured projects they then forced their own Justice Minister to grovel and eat his words because he said, correctly but politically incorrectly, that First Nations do not have a veto in such matters. The obvious implication being that First Nations will have a veto that will be exercised according to unwritten rules that change as needed to prevent anything from happening.

Which certainly seems to be the view of many of those who speak for them according to those same rules.

If that problem weren’t bad enough, the Carney administration babbled about oil and gas projects requiring 100% consensus, which is obviously impossible (the Prime Minister’s words were “we must have a consensus of all the provinces and the Indigenous people” which is false as a matter of Constitutional law), and when questioned his same muddled Environment Minister blathered “The most important part is that we work in unity in this moment”.

This remark is double gibberish because in the first place we already aren’t, with the Premier of B.C. openly offside on pipelines, and in the second, the most important part is what we do when we don’t get unity. Apparently the plan is ram projects down everyone’s throat with their consent or something. Like producing a focus-grouped list of desirable attributes and thinking it means anything.

The frivolity of their approach is especially worrisome. In an appearance before Canadian senators about the infamous Bill C-5, longtime minister Dominic LeBlanc, a close Trudeau friend and now Carney’s Intergovernmental Affairs minister, had this miserable exchange with former broadcaster and now Senator Pamela Wallin:

“‘Will you grant provinces veto over projects?’ asked Senator Wallin. ‘Whether we give a veto to a particular province, I get that people are looking for absolutes and they want absolute answers to hypothetical questions,’ replied LeBlanc. ‘Is that a veto?’ asked Senator Wallin. ‘Veto is the aggressive word you can use,’ replied Leblanc. ‘Vito’s is also a restaurant on Mountain Road in Moncton.’”

If this performance is them getting serious, Canada’s in a heap of trouble.