Fred Youngs is a former executive at CBC News, Canada’s government sponsored TV network which pretends to be devoted to the Truth while being little more than a vehicle of Leftist propaganda. The Jan. 20 edition of my local newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, featured a piece by him entitled “Poilievre’s far-right flirtations continue.” Pierre Poilievre, recently elected the head of Canada’s Conservative Party, is a devout “conservative” unwilling to compromise his principles as such. He is therefore predictably being greeted in the mainstream press with the same degree of scorn as that directed at Donald Trump.
Exposing Poilievre’s sympathy for the far-right, Youngs assumes, will surly compromise his chances in our next federal election. But every example of that affiliation cited in his article ironically only serves to highlight his own far-left dementia, a perspective from which any “conservative” value or position seems “extremist.”
Youngs indicts Pollievre for addressing a Winnipeg based think tank called The Frontier Center for Public Policy. It frequently rails against “wokeism,” he claims, a childish, self-centered, irrational addiction to hurt feelings with which he is apparently comfortable. As evidence of the Center’s extremism, he cites its recent publication of 2 essays, the first entitled “Canada More Socialist Than Scandinavia,” the second, “Climate Change Dogma has more in Common with Fundamentalist Religion Than Science.”
I cannot possibly exhaust these two subjects in this space. The Center’s article on Scandinavia dared suggest: “All 4 Nordic nations have vigorous, dynamic free market economies, and vibrant stock and bond markets.” In contrast, it noted: “A Swedish health expert who visited Manitoba in 2006 wryly observed that Manitoba’s government-owned car insurance monopoly reminded him of East Germany in the 1970s.” In Sweden, you may not perhaps know, private health care is allowed to co-exist with the public system. The notion that Canada, with its carbon taxes and plethora of other intrusions into the private sector, is more “socialist” than the Nordic nations, is hardly an outlandish, far-right piece of propaganda.
Nor is skepticism with the notion that human activity is primarily responsible for changes in recent weather patterns! I guarantee you I have read significantly more on this topic than Mr. Youngs and the vast majority of people who simply, mindlessly, submit to the narrative fed them by the anti-Western, anti-Capitalist, Neo-Marxist Left. The anthropogenic narrative is fraught with unanswered questions which make it no more than a hypothesis rather than a scientific fact. That it is consistently portrayed by the media as unequivocally true is literally absurd. That anyone questioning its legitimacy is immediately denounced as a “denier” comparable to those fools who deny the fact of the holocaust, is disgusting.
[Just in passing, Whoopi Goldberg recently denied the holocaust had anything to do with racism because its several million victims were all White! To my knowledge, this racist simpleton is still on TV.]
The geological record shows unequivocally that the earth’s temperature has been fluctuating throughout history. A multitude of facts suggest man may be but a minor player in this dynamic. I am in no way endorsing an irresponsible indifference to our possible impact on climate. But I do think policies which imperil the well-being of millions across the face of the planet by jeopardizing their access to food and energy, need to be tempered by a rational appraisal of their real world impact. Does it make any sense here in the “progressive” West to deter further exploration for fossil fuels while at the same time asking nations with no environmental conscience whatsoever [Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.] to increase their production? Are the policies of the present governments of both Canada and the U.S. rooted in Reason or the same sort of irrational, religious mania which led the hypocritical Victorians to officially declare their disgust with human sexuality, even as they engaged in orgies behind closed doors? Is the Frontier Center’s characterization of the environmental movement as a form of religious fundamentalism worthy of consideration or merely a bit of far right silliness? Youngs leaves little doubt as to his opinion, suggesting the fact that Poilievre dared even associate himself with that group means he is clearly a right wing extremist.
Thousands of accredited scientists have put their names to manifestos questioning the sanity of the Western World’s approach to climate issues and indeed the legitimacy of the anthropogenic theory. Dismissed as mere puppets of Big Oil by the media, the latter persists in the lie that 97% of the scientific community fully supports its mainstream narrative. This fascist tendency by those on the Left to “cancel” any p.o.v. which does not suit them is painfully evident in the history of Judith Curry, climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She left her position there, she says, when it became apparent that her fellow “scientists” were in no way interested in an open discussion of the complexities of their subject and that funds for further research were basically unavailable to anyone who did not toe the party line. Academia, apparently, is no more interested in an honest exchange of ideas than is the mainstream media and, indeed, Fred Youngs.
In one further attempt to destroy Mr. Poilievre’s credibility, Youngs cites his approval of Canada’s Freedom Convoy to which he brought coffee and doughnuts in a show of support. A topic far too complex to exhaust here, I will say only that anyone who insists it was a violent threat to Canada’s democracy must be truly demented given the hundreds of videos available showing its participants singing, dancing, playing street hockey, barbecuing, feeding the homeless, etc., etc.. Yes, there was a Nazi flag amongst the protesters but no one to this day has ascertained whether it was a statement on the Nazi-like policies of our Prime Minister or the fascist sympathies of its owner. The Freedom of the Individual is a key element of the “conservative” agenda and it was no doubt that value that led Poilievre to Ottawa. But to the pathologically biased Youngs, his simple presence there a clear expression of his “far-right” fanaticism.
I am reminded of the Aug., 2020 report by CNN’s Omar Jiminez who declared a Black Lives Matters’ protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin to be mostly peaceful, even as buildings could be seen engulfed in flames behind him. Such is the level of objectivity evident in Fred Youngs’ attempt to destroy the political career of Pierre Poilievre.