According to an article released today by The Canadian Press, one of our nation’s most ‘beloved’ (hated) politicians — Environment Minister Catherine “Climate Barbie” McKenna — who has long been the target of angry Twitter replies and private messages practically since her election, has more recently been subjected to verbal abuse while out in public; on some occasions, this has happened while she was accompanied by her kids. As the article reports:

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says she was recently walking outside a movie theatre with her children when a car slowly pulled to a stop beside them.

The driver rolled down his window and then he let fly.

“F…… you, Climate Barbie,” he shouted, as she tried to back away from his car and get her kids away from him.

Now, it should be explained for the non-Canadians that McKenna isn’t exactly admired by large swaths of the country: she is, among other things, one of the chief architects of our nation’s controversial carbon tax; she is well-known on Canadian Twitter for her horrendously tone-deaf takes regarding pretty much anything related to the economy, or the environment, for that matter; and on top of all this, her ministry has had a direct hand in the ongoing dismantling of our oil and gas sector, which has cost some hundreds of thousands of jobs over the course of her tenure, primarily in the province of Alberta where most of said jobs were located. So, one can imagine why she doesn’t have the biggest fan club. This much is clearly demonstrated as the article continues:

The incident at the movie theatre is just one of several times her kids have been with her when someone in public began to yell at her. She has been called the C-word, a traitor, an enemy and a “communist piece of garbage.” Her family’s safety has been threatened more than once. Some people have wished she and her children will get fatal diseases. She has received sexualized messages so hateful they could be enough to make even the hardest of hearts skip a beat.

At any rate, McKenna’s been feeling enough of the heat that she now feels it necessary to be escorted by a security detail while out and about, at least in some circumstances. Now, I can understand that this must be a less than ideal situation for her to be in, no less for her kids. However, I can also understand why this is happening — and it’s not, as McKenna appears to believe, simply because she’s a woman in politics.

Before we begin to dissect this, a big, fat disclaimer: I am in no way condoning sending McKenna threats of any sort, nor attacking her children (or even attacking her when she is with them in public). It’s not even about ‘optics’, really; all this kind of thing does is give the political establishment further justification for silencing the voice of the opposition. We should be spending what limited room we still have left to be heard by the greater public in a productive, level-headed manner; not encouraging the already-small window of “acceptable speech” to grow ever smaller.

Having said that — what did she think was going to happen? Did she honestly, seriously expect to be able to ruin the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians, not just in Alberta but across the country, and not have to deal with the predictable anger generated by her actions? Canadians may be an unfortunately passive folk, but we’re far from passive enough to take this kind of abuse lying down — honestly, I’m more surprised that this kind of reaction is only bubbling up now, a month before the election, than I am that it’s happening at all. Again, I ask: did she actually think that she could play such an active, enthusiastic role in destroying the financial security of so many individuals and families without being made to face some form of backlash over it? I mean… really?

Now, I’m not at all sure if McKenna believes her own bullshit: I’m tempted to say that, yes, she does genuinely think that “our planet is burning” and is justifying the disaster she has inflected upon helpless resource industry workers and their families as being necessary for some greater good; on the other hand, her infamous penchant for staged photo-ops leads me to believe that she may be aware, at least to some extent, of the true nature behind this mass hysteria-turned-pyramid scheme we call the “climate crisis” — at the very least, she is clearly no stranger to the art of deception. One way or another, the anger she is currently facing from members of the general public is in no way unique from that faced by any other politician who’s managed to piss off as many people as she has; the only difference here is that she’s trying to defer responsibility for the consequences of her bad decisions by declaring this vitriol to be grounded in her being female, rather than in those bad decisions.

It could be that, as a liberal-minded woman in 2019, McKenna really did expect not to face the same sort of personal attacks and public condemnation for being a corrupt politician as have her male, corrupt counterparts throughout the entire history of democratic government. It’s not a reasonable expectation, but I can see someone like McKenna having it — they don’t call her “Climate Barbie” just because she’s blonde and pretty, after all. But if this is the case, she seems to have forgotten how poorly the “female politicians are beyond criticism” card worked out for her former party colleagues, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Phillpot; the electorate, on the other hand, has not — maybe McKenna thinks she’s special. Or, she could be entirely aware that no one really gives a damn that she’s female and is simply desperate to curry favour and sympathy from the (hopefully) few remaining members of the public who do care — again, I’m not entirely sure.

I will admit to being quite biased in this regard however, sitting here, as I am, actively suffering from the holy decrees issued by High Priestess McKenna — and I don’t even work in oil and gas. Among those who don’t like to think about much of anything for terribly long, it appears relatively common to assume that the only people who’re really affected by the devastation of our natural resource sector are the sector workers themselves; moreover, the fact that some of those people once made a comfortable living for themselves leads the lazy-thinkers to demonstrate little to no sympathy for the entirely manufactured crisis that they now have to endure. Of course, the matter is much more complicated: as it turns out, if a large chunk of the population in a given region derives their primary income from a particular sector of the economy, and that sector is then actively undermined at every possible twist and turn, such that those people start losing their jobs due to large-scale capital flight toward safer operational waters, we can expect the following sequence of events to unfold:

• The people who lost their jobs will have to either find a different, likely lower-paying job, or they will have to move out of the region to find work — either way, they will be putting less money back into the economy than they were before, if any at all;
• If there’s not as much money flowing back into the local economy, there is less ability and incentive for businesses in the service sector to have as many staff on hand and/or provide the same level of service as before. Accordingly, workers in that sector are subject to pay cuts and layoffs of their own;
• Quite obviously, making less money tends to lead toward having less disposable income, which means — again — less money flowing back into the local economy. As people, businesses, and investors continue to flee the region, and there is no substitute employment available for the displaced workers to turn to, this cycle perpetuates itself near-infinitely. The casualties will continue mount up over time, and will come to include not only the original victims and the service industry, but as well those professional sectors that require having clients around in order to make a living — doctors, lawyers, real estate, the public sector, you name it;
• Ultimately, by the time you get to a situation akin to the one currently faced by Albertans, thousands of individuals and families, with incomes ranging from between $0 to over $100,000 annually, end up getting screwed over; irrespective of whether or not those individuals and families were directly employed by the sector targeted for destruction.

So you see, it’s not just the knuckle-dragging F150 drivers so despised by yuppy urbanites that are feeling the pain — it’s also all those people who effectively depend upon those “uneducated hillbillies” having money to spend in order to keep their own employers afloat, many of whom happen to be on the lower end of the pay scale. As such, while McKenna and her cronies rail against the Big Oil execs for supposedly destroying the climate, they fail to realize — or care — that the reckless decimation of this particular industry ultimately affects those executives at an absolutely miniscule level, in comparison to how it affects virtually everyone working beneath them. Rather than “fighting on behalf” of the working and middle class, she and her party have played an active part in destroying them both.

Adding insult to injury is how much McKenna, along with virtually the entire roster of the Liberal party, actively demean and look down upon anyone who complains about the consequences outlined above. Anyone familiar with her Twitter feed will be aware of how frequently she chastises any and all criticism of the government’s “climate action” as pushing “divisive” and “partisan” rhetoric, before turning around and sewing further division and partisanship with claims that a Conservative government will somehow destroy the economy even more so than she has. McKenna parrots her latest mantra — “It’s good for the environment, and it’s good for the economy” — ad nauseum, while at the same time turning her back on the thousands of citizens who have very genuine, very pressing concerns regarding being made to pay greater taxes while having less disposable income with which to do so. “We’ve got a real climate plan that reduces pollution and puts more money in your pockets,” declares Her Holiness from the pulpit, while households across Alberta and beyond wonder if they’ll ever see a dime.

So — is it unfortunate that Catherine McKenna has been accosted in public while her children were present? Yes. Is it perhaps a bit scary for her to have to deal with justifiably angry people, be it on social media or in real life? Sure. Have some of the things said by those people been a bit over-the-top, or even uncalled for? I suppose I could agree to that, too.

But do I feel bad for her? Not in the slightest. I do feel bad for her kids, who are being intimidated through no fault of their own; but as for their mother, I couldn’t care less. To a certain extent, I wish I could “be the better person” here and muster up some degree of sympathy for her, however minute, despite our “differing views” — but it’s really not about different views anymore, is it? After all, these views of hers have been translated into policies that have had a direct, unilaterally negative effect on thousands of households like mine, and I find it extremely difficult to care about McKenna’s troubles when she has never even once acknowledged the far more serious troubles she has inflicted upon so many of her fellow Canadians as a result of her decisions. Some people have even lost their homes, all on account of having had the misfortune to have been employed in a sector that became a target for politically-motivated interference; this, too, McKenna has actively encouraged. With that being the case, all I have to say to McKenna is this: I’m sorry to hear that you’re being yelled at on the street, but look on the bright side — at least you don’t have to sleep there.