He is definitely colluding with the oil industry and against environmentalists.   
   You decide how this would affect Canada.   
   _____________________________   
   Analysis | October 2nd 2019   
      
   Will Andrew Scheer ruin Canada?   
      
   Standing in a forest of ash and birch trees about a 45-minute drive southwest   
   of downtown Calgary, the Azuridge Estate Hotel is a luxury resort replete with   
   fountains, waterfalls, gray stone façades and exposed wooden beams. It’s a   
   popular wedding    
   destination.   
      
   In a conference room at this verdant retreat on April 11, Conservative Party   
   Leader Andrew Scheer and his campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, were huddling   
   with a group of oil company CEOs along with Tim McMillan, president of the   
   Canadian Association of    
   Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Big Oil’s most powerful lobby group. All of the   
   CEOs present, in fact, are members of CAPP’s board of governors.   
      
   One purpose of this meeting? To strategize on how to defeat Justin Trudeau’s   
   government in the federal election this month. The agenda also included   
   discussions about how to silence environmental critics of pipeline projects   
   and the tar sands,    
   including suing them in court.   
      
   Scheer provided the keynote address, while Marshall spoke about “rallying   
   the base” by using friendly interest groups.   
      
   To some, this meeting at the Azuridge “gave evidence that, guess what,   
   things haven’t really changed a whole lot,” says Nathan Lemphers, an   
   Ottawa-based campaigner with Oil Change International, an advocacy   
   organization that fights the fossil fuel    
   sector.   
      
   “(The Conservatives) are still very cozy with oil industry interests and oil   
   money. We’ve seen what that’s done to Alberta politics and it was no   
   different with federal politics under the Harper government.”   
      
   CAPP disputes that the event itself was related to the election. But the fact   
   that Andrew Scheer and his inner circle were scheming with oil industry   
   executives to oust Trudeau comes as no surprise. After all, Scheer is widely   
   acknowledged to be a    
   creature of the house that Stephen Harper built — a party designed to serve   
   the energy sector’s interests at every turn.   
      
   Indeed, among the Tories’ key election planks is repealing the Liberals'   
   consumer carbon tax, rustling up as many pipelines to the oil sands as   
   possible, removing the ban on oil tankers off the coast of B.C., repealing   
   Bill C-69 (which limits how    
   energy projects are approved) and getting rid of the Liberals' new fuel   
   standard.   
      
   Meanwhile, the federal lobbyist registry shows that since he became Tory   
   leader in the summer of 2017, a battalion of oil industry lobbyists have   
   trooped through Scheer’s Ottawa office, including from energy companies such   
   as Imperial Oil, Canadian    
   Natural Resources Ltd., Suncor, Irving Oil, BHP Billiton Canada, Husky Oil, TC   
   Energy Corp, Enbridge, ConocoPhilips, Syncrude, Cenovus Energy, and lobby   
   groups like CAPP, the Pipe Line Contractors Association and Canadian Energy   
   Pipeline Association.   
      
   Does this suggest the 40-year-old Scheer is merely a more genial version of   
   Harper? “He’s a bit of an open book,” muses Duane Bratt, a political   
   scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary. Bratt, in fact, believes   
   Scheer was a “placeholder”    
   leader.   
      
   “I don’t think (the Conservatives) thought they were going to defeat   
   Trudeau when they had the leadership race (in 2017),” he remarks. “He was   
   the sort of compromise candidate who would last through the election and then   
   they would have another    
   leadership race...Canadians do not know much about Andrew Scheer when he ran   
   and I’m not so sure if they know much about him right now.”   
      
   But since last winter that political calculus has changed when the SNC-Lavalin   
   and blackface scandals suddenly soured Trudeau’s electoral prospects. Now   
   Scheer has a very good chance of becoming Canada’s next prime minister.   
      
   But what would that mean?   
      
   To some, not much — merely the continuation of the status quo. Alain   
   Denault, a sociologist at the Université de Moncton, explains that Canada has   
   a “two-party system” whose ultimate purpose is to allow foreign and   
   domestic corporations to extract    
   the country’s raw resources.   
      
   “The problem is that Canada, as such, has been governed like a colony since   
   1867,” says Denault. “This is the problem…The idea is that the   
   Conservatives propose a brutal relationship to power and the Liberals a smiley   
   one, while our regime    
   remains the same — ​​​​a staple colony organizing the exploitation   
   of raw materials by big corporations.”   
      
   Be that as it may, there’s much about Scheer’s agenda that should alarm   
   Canadians.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)