Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is desperately trying to recharacterize his own words since he let his mask slip with candid comments about road infrastructure and electric vehicles.
How else are we to interpret what the minister said?
He wants to hinder the development of any new road infrastructure within Canada.
Municipalities and provinces have the responsibility for building and maintaining roads. However, they are dependent upon federal government transfers for a significant part of their budgets.
Is there already an informal policy to not fund new roadways in place within Ottawa?
Canada is bringing in record numbers of immigrants. It is expected that all forms of infrastructure will need to be expanded to accommodate millions of new Canadians in the next few years. That infrastructure should include roadways.
How can cities handle so many more people without having new roads built?
Welcome to the concept of 15-minute cities. Ideologues like Guilbeault may not use that term for it, but that’s what they envision in the utopian society they are trying to force into creation.
Guilbeault imagines a world where everybody lives in high-density communities and where travel isn’t required. Through regulation and legislation, neighbourhoods will be designed where people can theoretically access all they need by walking or on public transit. He sees personal automobiles as a luxury that citizens don’t deserve, whether they are emission-free or not.
Authoritarian ideologues have always disliked the personal automobile. Personal autos empower individuals and empowered individuals are a threat to collectivism. When a person can simply hop into a car and work wherever they please, visit whomever they like, or move to new areas on a whim, that person is difficult to control. If a person lives in a high-density community and doesn’t have ready means to travel at their disposal, they theoretically will remain in one spot and have a minimal environmental impact on the environment.
When people like Guilbault become critical of even emission-free travel in personal vehicles, it becomes clear their issue isn’t with emissions. It’s with individual mobility.
Rather than being so bold as to issue permits for movement, governments are now simply delaying or refusing permits for expansion. Municipalities often fight outward development and label it with the pejorative term “urban sprawl” while reducing available parking in cities. The federal government now appears to be stepping up to the plate by cutting transfers for new road construction. They won’t mandate people moving into high-density neighbourhoods. They will just systematically stop the construction of lower-density expansion of towns and cities. They hope to cork the bottle and force upward construction. All it has managed so far has been a housing shortage as real estate prices continue to escalate.
Guilbeault and others who have wrapped themselves in what they feel is a righteous eco-crusade can’t be reasoned with. They will continue to jet-set around the world to stay in lavish resorts for environmental conferences while telling the rest of us we must stay within 15 minutes of our residences.
We should be ever vigilant of the direction our policy-makers are taking us, and act before it’s too late.
