Kevin Maguire

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

1983 conservative leadership convention. On the first ballot Peter Pocklington got 102 votes and Michael Wilson 144. Pocklington went over to Wilson, they had a discussion and then linked arms and walked over to Brian Mulroney. Pocklington and Wilson dropped out of the race and threw their combined political weight behind Brian Mulroney, ultimately helping him secure the leadership on the fourth ballot.
Maclean’s had an extensive article on the convention but never mentioned Pocklington.
Ever wondered why Pocklington could get away with so much like union busting.
Never read Maclean’s again.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@cbcwatcher There is $32 billion in the Alberta Heritage Fund. Put it to good use. Lend it to the new government.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@ronmortgageguy Canada has said it will moderize their tanks by 2035. I believe we have three or four still operational at this time. By 2035 tanks will be obsolete.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@WayneMathison Pipeline prediction:
Completion date - 2045
Final cost - $500 Billion

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@WayneMathison Why can every city, town, village, acreage, farm or cabin in Canada have water and sewage treatment except Indigenous communities?

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@WayneMathison The private sector produces wealth. The public sector consumes wealth.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@GadSaad I grew up in Edmonton, (1950s - 1970s) a few blocks from the Jewish School so many Jewish families lived in the area. We were Catholic. No one cared.
We all played together and our parents were friends.
What happened?

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@WayneMathison Canada suffers from an Excess of Management. I don’t think joining the European Union will help.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@VigilantFox The problem with any government - Excess of management.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@cnm5000 Alberta had a referendum to end transfer payments and over 60% voted in favour. Nothing happened. Time to leave Canada.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@wealthmoose Carney. All hat and no cows.

[Melanie In Saskatchewan @saskatchewan_in]

For the love of all things carbon!

Listen, @MarkJCarney, there are weeks in Canadian politics where ordinary people merely roll their eyes and carry on.

Then there are weeks like this one!

Weeks where the federal Liberal government unleashes such a blizzard of polished jargon, climate catechisms, managerial buzzwords, consultant dialects, and carefully rehearsed statesmanship that the average Canadian is left standing in the kitchen holding a grocery receipt like a battlefield telegram wondering what in God’s name these people are even talking about anymore!

Pipelines. Electrification. Industrial transition frameworks. Nation building. Strategic corridors. Carbon competitiveness. It's Malarkey! 

At one point the entire thing sounded less like a government announcement and more like a CBC panel discussion hosted by people who think inflation is caused by Canadians misunderstanding how fortunate they are.

Meanwhile out here in the less fashionable parts of Canada where we KNOW affordability is NOT the best its been in a decade, people are trying to figure out whether they can afford fuel, mortgage renewals, groceries, summer sports for their kids, or the increasingly extravagant luxury of owning both a vehicle and dignity at the same time.

So let’s translate what your government actually announced this week into language spoken by human beings instead of public affairs consultants.

You stood beside Danielle Smith and announced support for a potential West Coast pipeline capable of shipping over a million barrels of oil per day to Asian markets.

Now politically, that is a remarkable moment.

Because for years your broader movement treated pipelines as though they were giant steel climate crimes stretching across the countryside. Oil and gas workers were routinely spoken about with the same tone downtown activists reserve for offshore tax havens and people who don’t separate recycling properly.

Canadians questioning carbon taxes or energy restrictions were portrayed as backwards holdouts resisting inevitable progress. Entire sectors of the economy were moralized against by people whose understanding of "hard work" largely involves forwarding emails between catered conferences.

Then suddenly, after years of weak productivity, stagnant wages, capital flight, soaring debt costs, collapsing affordability, and an American economy aggressively pulling investment southward like an industrial vacuum cleaner... your government rediscovers oil.

Remarkable! 😲

It is rather like watching a man spend ten years denouncing cheeseburgers before quietly opening a steakhouse once the electricity bill arrives.

But here is where the performance begins collapsing under the weight of its own absurd contradictions:

There is no actual company officially lined up to build this pipeline yet.

Tiny issue there it seems. 🤔

That matters because announcing support for a pipeline and finding investors willing to risk billions inside Canada’s regulatory labyrinth are not even remotely the same thing. One is performative theatre. The other involves engineers, accountants, financing, timelines, permits, insurance, labour shortages, activist opposition, court challenges, and the lingering suspicion that Ottawa may simply change the rules halfway through construction because somebody at a climate summit gets emotionally hysterical.

And then came the truly Canadian flourish.

Your government tied the proposal to escalating industrial carbon pricing.

Mr. Carney, this is the part where ordinary citizens stop nodding politely and begin rubbing their temples vigorously. 

You are simultaneously trying to encourage massive energy investment while steadily increasing the future cost burdens attached to the very industry expected to build the infrastructure.

So what industry hears is: "Please invest billions while we continue making your operating environment progressively less competitive over time. At YOUR expense!"

That is not economic certainty.

That is not investor confidence.

That is Ottawa handing somebody a shovel while quietly pouring concrete around their boots.

And let us stop pretending your political coalition is united around this because it ckearly is not.

There is a schism, or as you like to say, a "rupture" forming inside Liberal circles whether your communications team wishes to admit it publicly or not. Half your ideological ecosystem spent years insisting fossil fuel expansion was morally indefensible. Net Zero timelines became less a policy goal and more a secular article of faith repeated with the intensity of medieval monks guarding sacred scripture.

Now suddenly your government is speaking the language of pipelines, exports, energy corridors, industrial competitiveness, and economic sovereignty.

To climate hardliners inside your own movement, this sounds suspiciously like backpedalling.

Because it is.

And honestly, one can almost sympathize with their confusion. For years Canadians were told there could be no compromise. No nuance. No balancing of economic realities against climate ambition. The rhetoric was thunderous and absolute. Civilization itself supposedly hung by a thread attached to suburban thermostats and pickup trucks in Saskatchewan.

Anyone questioning affordability, competitiveness, or energy reliability was treated as though they had personally clubbed a baby seal with a diesel generator.

And speaking of discomfort inside Liberal circles, Mr. Carney, you now have another rather entertaining complication sitting inside your own tent: Nate Erskine-Smith.

A man so devoted to climate orthodoxy and carbon taxation that if Ottawa ever proposed taxing sighs during exhalation, Nate would probably ask whether the levy was ambitious enough.

But Nate is also a wildcard. One of those Liberal MPs who occasionally wanders off script and votes according to personal conviction rather than whatever laminated talking points arrived from the PMO that morning.

And now, after his spectacular defeat in the Ontario Liberal nomination battle in Scarborough Southwest, the irony has become almost painful to watch. Because suddenly a politician who spent years inside a movement dismissing Conservative concerns about questionable voting systems and loosely regulated participation rules is now openly wondering whether the process was fair at all.

Funny how quickly "conspiracy theories" evolve into "serious democratic concerns" once your own political ambitions get run over by the Liberal voting machine. It seems Scarborough doesn’t care for your climate and carbon market mechanisms and schemes. If they did, Nate would have won. 

Conservatives spent years warning that poorly controlled voting systems, climate alarmism, temporary memberships, weak verification standards, and organizational manipulation could undermine confidence in political processes. They were mocked as paranoid, anti diversity, or "MAGA adjacent" for even raising the issue.

Then Nate loses by 19 votes and suddenly we are hearing concerns about irregularities, ID problems, questionable memberships, and whether the process itself was rigged.

Remarkable transformation. Almost biblical in speed.

And honestly, Mr. Carney, the shift is becoming impossible not to notice internationally as well. Even Bill Gates, who spent years treated as one of the patron saints of climate orthodoxy, has started openly acknowledging that the entire climate discussion was framed poorly for years.

Not that environmental stewardship does not matter. Not that pollution is imaginary.
But that the apocalyptic sermonizing used to fearmonger in election campaigns, #emissions absolutism, and economically detached policymaking created a political and practical disaster of its own. One we are living through in real time. 

Gates himself began warning that climate policy became too politically focused on ideological purity and rigid near term emissions targets while losing sight of development, affordability, resilience, poverty reduction, and actual human realities.

Which is politically awkward for governments like yours, Mr. Carney, because it becomes difficult to spend years treating skeptics of #NetZero timelines like backward heretics only to slowly start adopting their language once economic conditions deteriorate badly enough.

Funny how "dangerous misinformation" keeps evolving into "emerging consensus" about three years later.

Now suddenly your government sounds deeply interested in economic growth again because reality, stubborn old beast that it is, keeps barging into the conversation carrying invoices.

And then came the electrification announcement. Which somehow managed to sound simultaneously futuristic and completely detached from physical practicality.

Canada, we are told, must effectively double its electrical grid by 2050.

Double it!

Mark, this is the same country where replacing a bridge can take so long that half the politicians involved are either pushing up daisies or retired before the ribbon cutting. This is a country where #infrastructure projects disappear into environmental assessments with the same finality of medieval ships vanishing into sea fog.

Now Canadians are expected to believe Ottawa can coordinate the largest electrical transformation in modern Canadian history while people are already struggling under housing costs, grocery #inflation, stagnant private sector wages, rising taxes, and #hydro bills that increasingly resemble ransom notes. And somehow you expect us to believe we will SAVE money like we have a national collective IQ just north of a bedroom slipper. 

And every time somebody raises concerns about feasibility or cost, they are told this is all part of "the transition."

Always with the transition rhetoric.

Canadians are beginning to notice that the transition somehow always involves them paying more while government officials reassure them everything is visionary and historic between applause breaks and planes to climate conferences.

Electric vehicles require infrastructure. Heat pumps require reliable grids. Industrial electrification requires enormous generation capacity, mining expansion, transmission networks, skilled labour, maintenance, financing, and years of construction. 

Huge amounts of it. HUGE!

And none of it magically appears because a minister says "clean economy" into a microphone beside a backdrop printed on recycled cardboard while some rented cellist serenely plays beside a leisurely spinning wind turbine. 

Your daughter Cleo's expertise in strategic #mining for critical minerals needed for clean energy technologies for the great transition likely provides you some bargain basement insight no one else is privy to. 

But perhaps your greatest political problem, Mr. Carney, is this:

Ordinary #Canadians are beginning to realize they have spent years being governed by slogans masquerading as Liberal economic strategy.

You cannot spend years demonizing pipelines and fossil fuel development… then abruptly pivot toward "nation building" resource projects once the economy starts wheezing… without people noticing.

You cannot insist aggressive climate policies would lower costs and strengthen prosperity while living standards visibly deteriorate in real time… then suddenly rediscover #industrial competitiveness and energy exports… without Canadians asking why they were lectured for so long in the first place.

Because people are tired now.

Tired of being spoken to like children.

Tired of hearing that declining living standards are somehow sophisticated, modern, and our natuonal duty.

Tired of watching politicians announce trillion dollar transformations while ordinary households quietly drown under the cost of existential existence.

And right now your government is attempting to reassure climate activists, oil producers, environmental NGOs, investors, unions, struggling workers, and international green finance circles all at the same time.

That balancing act may impress people sipping sparkling water at conferences in Brussels, but out here in the real economy, people eventually want something much simpler.

Straight answers and certainty. 

Not another polished sermon about pathways and frameworks while the country slowly discovers that slogans, however elegant, cannot power an economy on their own.

Because eventually, Mr. Prime Minister, a country reaches the point where it can no longer survive on branding workshops disguised as leadership. 

Where citizens stop applauding announcements because they are too busy calculating what those announcements will cost them personally.

Where "historic transitions" start looking suspiciously like managed decline wrapped in designer vocabulary. And when that moment fully arrives, Canadians are going to ask a brutally simple question your government has spent years trying desperately to avoid:

If all these experts, summits, taxes, frameworks, consultants, climate sermons, and trillion dollar visions were truly signs of competent leadership… why does the country suddenly feel poorer, weaker, more divided, more exhausted, and less functional with every passing year?

Because at some point, even the most polished illusion collides headfirst with the brutal honesty of lived reality. And reality, unlike #Liberal political messaging, does not care how elegant the press release sounded.

You would do well to remember that before you continue your gaslighting campaign. 

Melanie

“The Pipeline That Comes Pre-Strangled” 👇🇨🇦
https://t.co/tofCgVv2kf
👇🏻
https://t.co/fYofZQOy7F
##cdnpoli #Carney #NetZero #CarbonTax #EnergyCrisis #Canada
(Image created with AI as if you cant tell🤦🏼‍♀️)

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

At least people treat their dogs better. From GROK - MAID deaths outnumber reported shelter pet euthanasias (especially for dogs, the most commonly compared category) by a clear margin. Including all private veterinary euthanasias would narrow or close the gap for total pets, but official tracked figures support the "more MAID than shelter pets" observation.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

The only thing that is guaranteed by the recent Alberta/Ottawa agreement is that the carbon price will increase. The carbon price increases shouldn't happen until the pipeline is built. It highly unlikely that we will ever see the pipeline. How many years is Smith willing to wait?

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

Kevin Maguire
@penguinworks7
The only thing that is guaranteed by the recent Alberta / Ottawa agreement is that the carbon price will increase. The carbon price increases shouldn't happen until the pipeline is built. It highly unlikely that we will ever see the pipeline. How many years is Smith willing to wait?

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@ABJeffBerube The only thing that is guaranteed by the recent Alberta / Ottawa agreement is that the carbon price will increase.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@CoryBMorgan The carbon price increases shouldn't happen until the pipeline is built. It highly unlikely that we will ever see the pipeline. How many years is Smith willing to wait?

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@WayneMathison I think the motto of Canada's mainstream media is 'Don't bite the hand that feeds you.'

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@LukaszukAB People who don't want to live in an independent Alberta are free to leave and live anywhere else in Canada.

[Kevin Maguire @penguinworks7]

@WayneMathison The problem is Carney will sacrifice Alberta to get a better deal for Eastern Canada.