This post originally appeared in the Western Standard.

If you were trying to develop a detailed policy program to get Canada back on track, you could do worse than looking at the proposals of the new NDP leader, and self-described ‘Eco-Socialist,’ Avi Lewis and doing the exact opposite.

Lewis advocates for a rapid shift away from hydrocarbon energy by means of a Canadian “Green New Deal,” which he says is both a moral imperative and an economic opportunity.

He is opposed to building any new fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, offshore projects, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals. And he believes that “investing” 2% of Canada’s GDP — roughly $65 billion — on “climate action” will create more than a million high-paying unionized jobs installing solar panels and heat pumps. This is the so-called “just transition” which will protect our oil and gas workers from losing their jobs even as the industry that employs them is dismantled.

He argues that if we pour tax dollars into wind and solar projects, we will be able to create a coast-to-coast “clean” energy power grid, and thus a “Clean and Green” Canada.

All of this, along with a guaranteed taxpayer-funded income for all, national rent control, government-run grocery stores to combat rising food prices, and on and on.

Best of all, says Lewis, “the money is there!” All the government has to do is take it. That is, by taxing the daylights out of, well, everyone, but especially our oil and gas companies and other job creators.

It seems needless to say — though apparently it still needs saying — that this grab-bag of Neo-Marxist bromides would be disastrous for Canada.

Like it or not — and Lewis and the NDP don’t like it — the oil and gas sector is the backbone of Canada’s economy, our “golden goose” (in the memorable words of economists Philip Cross and Jack Mintz), which bolsters employment within the energy industry and beyond, drives exports and manufacturing, and supplies government revenue. It contributes around 15% of Canada’s GDP.

And it’s worth noting that Canada is in rough economic shape at the moment — we’ve lost more than 100,000 jobs since the start of the year, and young Canadians in particular are suffering from the scarcity of jobs. Our productivity has stagnated, even as productivity in the United States has reliably increased. Industrial investment has declined precipitously. Our purchasing power has collapsed along with the Canadian dollar.

What’s with Canada’s economic nosedive? A decade of ‘Eco-Socialist’ policies initiated by the Trudeau-Carney Liberals.

After all of those years of cutting off our nose to spite our face, our economy has all the vitality of a damp rag.

But Avi Lewis looks at all of this and says, “Please, sir, may I have some more?”

He seems completely unaware of, or uninterested in, the fact that if his “leave it in the ground” activism were to succeed, we wouldn’t have the money to pay for basic government services, let alone the extravagances laid out in his 2015 “Leap Manifesto,” or his more recent platform.

If we want to turn things around, what we need is expanded pipeline infrastructure, increased oil and LNG export capacity, less red tape, and the scrapping of net-zero policies like the Industrial Carbon Tax and the so-called “Clean” Fuel Standard. We need a laser focus on energy affordability. Instead, we’re driving up prices with our obsession with “renewables” like wind and solar.

It’s all so nuts that it’s hard not to laugh at it. And that impulse was amplified by all of the zany videos of the NDP’s convention that elected Lewis, which floated around social media all weekend. They were even picked up by the American media. 

They’ve gone so far to the Left that you’d need the Hubble telescope to find them.

But the drift of the NDP strikes me as a serious matter. The NDP have long put leftward pressure on the Liberal Party. I can’t help but notice that today’s Liberals are more or less in line, policy-wise, with the NDP of fifteen or twenty years ago. And I worry that the magical utopian vision proclaimed by Lewis today will be embraced by the Liberal Party in a few years.

So there is a cost to Avi Lewis and the NDP embracing the delusion that we can strangle the resource sector while continuing to fund lavish government programs and spend and mandate our way to a glorious “Green” energy future. That cost will be paid in lost jobs, declining living standards, hollowed-out public services, and a diminished Canada. 

It is important that everyone reject this fantasy and look the cold, hard reality of this moment straight in the face, so we can start the process of turning things around and rebuilding this great nation.

We’ve had more than enough magical thinking.