Trudeau & Company

"Canada is leading by example to address the issue of gender equality in the G7 energy agenda. We will continue to engage key private sector and public sector leaders on this important issue and take actions to improve gender equality, particularly in the energy sector."
"We want to influence current and future leaders of Canadian industry to commit to meaningful action in the area of gender equality."
Minister of Natural Resources Amarjeet Sohi

"Canada's energy industry is gender-imbalanced. [The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau] has made gender a equality a priority for Canada's G7 Presidency."
Natural Resources Canada

Alberta mayors hold “Go East” signs in support of the East Energy pipeline project while Lisa Holmes, president of Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, left, takes a selfie with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley at a mayors’ caucus in Edmonton on March 9, 2016. Postmedia News

The current Liberal-led government identifying the most critical area of concern at the moment for the G7 to be energy is rather amusing, given that this Liberal government has been incapable of leading Canada to the point where its vast natural resources in energy have been so ill-managed that the one province that had always been depended upon for its wealth lifting other provinces into the great Canadian net of 'haves' now teeters in uncertainty.

A teeter-totter of inequity solved by confederation evoking a responsibility from the wealthy to even out social advantages for the entire population.

'Wealthy' Calgarians agreeing to ensure that Montrealers have equal access to social welfare as anyone living in Alberta, thanks to that province's oil bounty. Quebec spurns oil, its energy needs served by water power for electricity, but it still needs gas to operate vehicles and heat homes. Yet Quebec finds it offensive that a pipeline should convey oil as well as gas from one geographic area of the country to the other; better to rely on imported oil from unstable, human-rights-abusing Middle East countries.

Canada is open for business, Trudeau smiled ingratiatingly at international investors. And then he set about beefing up his environmental agenda, and his gender equity agenda, making doing business all the more complex to meet environmental standards and human rights' employment hurdles for potential investors for whom the red tape and the stalling became too fraught with risk. But Canada is special and under Trudeau has a mission, to bring the rest of the world around to his views on solving all social ills through manipulating safeguards for the vulnerable into trade and investment and energy development.

And that's kind of amusing, too. Since Canada has a global reputation through its expertise and wide investments in developing nations in mining, as a predator and a human-rights abuser of other nations' aboriginal populations whose heritage traditional villages happen inconveniently to be located just where those Canadian mining vultures are poised and set to begin their operations in contracts signed by the various governments with which they do business and share profits. Not too concerned over the environmental and human rights impacts abroad.

Now that the revolving presidency of the G7 has fallen into Justin Trudeau's ever-so-capable hands, he plans to guide his G7 counterparts toward accepting and implementing his very own virtuous gender-equality insights and programs having chosen "Climate Change, Oceans and Clean Energy" as his major theme for the Halifax G7 meeting in September. Climate change, oceans and clean energy cannot be addressed in the absence of gender equality, just as international free trade is a non-starter without gender equality and recognition of LGBTQ-2 rights.

Canada is leading the pack. This is the Canada incapable of bringing its oil and gas resources to world markets, safely and efficiently conveying those energy resources from Alberta to the B.C. coast, much less pipelining it to the rest of Canada in the east and efficiently to the U.S. to enable it to start charging the going price rather than the marked-down price to American refineries. Venezuela's vast oil resources haven't kept pace with the need to upgrade its infrastructure and refining capabilities and the country is imploding in poverty and social welfare backwardness. See any resemblance?

But the issue of Canada's clumsy inability to govern itself takes second place to Advancing Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in the energy industry. At the present time, women's representation in the Canadian energy industry stands at 24 percent. Rather than view that number as a voluntary representation in that women by and large are not represented in as great numbers as men because they don't naturally gravitate to the industry, Trudeau insists it is because they are deliberately shut out of the industry.

Which brings us to a summit of "gender equity in the energy industry" led by a government incapable of rising above its level of incompetence to solve the issue of opening up two pipelines summarily dismissed and paving the way for the TransCanada to finally get built, but that doesn't square with Trudeau's dedication to the "Path forward".

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks as the seat of US President Donald Trump sits empty during the Gender Equality Advisory Council working breakfast on the second day of the G7 Summit on June 9, 2018 in Quebec City, Canada.Leon Neal/Getty Images