Alberta Had a Bad Case of ‘Guilbeault Derangement Syndrome.’ Now What?

Who will be demonized by Alberta Conservatives as this province’s official Bond villain now that federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault has announced he’s quitting politics?

Guilbeault made his announcement Wednesday. It wasn’t exactly a bombshell. It’s been expected for a while. A lifelong environmental activist, he obviously sees Prime Minister Mark Carney’s volte-face on the environmental policies Guilbeault championed as Justin Trudeau’s environment minister from October 2021 until last March as a sellout, and he’s probably right.

He said on social media that he’ll be resigning his Laurier–Sainte-Marie seat in Parliament later this summer, but that he’ll stick around as a member of the Liberal caucus until then. He promised to “pursue my fight for environmental protection and the fight against climate change in a different way.” So watch out! He’s unlikely just to fade back into the greenery.

Guilbeault as lightning rod

Guilbeault adopted a diplomatic tone when he spoke to journalists, although he pointedly criticized the memorandum of understanding on a pipeline to the West Coast that Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed last fall.

“I wasn’t opposed to the idea of signing a memorandum of understanding with Alberta, but we shouldn’t do so at the expense of our plan to fight climate change,” he said.

This doesn’t sound like the wild-eyed boogeyman in an orange jumpsuit almost inevitably depicted by Alberta politicians and media every time he had something to say about the environment. But something about Guilbeault just drove Alberta politicians nuts, and not just the Conservative ones. Quite a few New Democrats succumbed to Guilbeault Derangement Syndrome too.

There was more to this than just his policies, which the oil industry hated and therefore Alberta politicians were willing to line up to publicly get hysterical about.

Maybe it was those dark Rasputin eyes. Maybe it was the memory his ill-considered pre-politics stunt, showing up uninvited in 2002 with a Greenpeace “crew” to install solar panels on the roof of then-premier Ralph Klein’s Calgary house.

His talents and conviction notwithstanding, this kind of history probably should have made Guilbeault ineligible for the post of environment minister. It was just too easy to paint the guy as a cross between Spider-Man and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The fact Trudeau assigned him the environment portfolio in 2021 was a lapse of judgment not atypical of the former prime minister.

As former UCP premier Jason Kenney said of Guilbeault in 2021, “His own personal background and track record on these issues suggests someone who is more an absolutist than a pragmatist when it comes to finding solutions.” Ironically, the same thing could be said in almost the same words about Kenney’s successor, Smith.

Who’s the divisive one?

But most of all, I believe, what made Guilbeault such a lightning rod was the fact he actually had some power to make what he advocated come to pass. He was prepared, in other words, to do what no other Canadian environment minister can be accused of doing — he actually acted as if the principal purpose of the environment portfolio was to protect the environment and not merely piously greenwash profitable pollution.

Other prominent environmentalists like David Suzuki and Tzeporah Berman had the ability to drive Alberta politicians over the edge now and then just by saying stuff. But even Kenney couldn’t quite elevate them to the Bond villain status Guilbeault developed out here in Wild Rose Country.

Consider Smith, reacting in 2023 to Guilbeault’s plan to get more Canadian drivers behind the wheels of electric vehicles.

“In another show of total disregard for the well-being of Canadians, the federal government has unilaterally imposed an unconstitutional edict with a bizarrely impossible timeline that will result in massive increases in the cost of vehicles and utility bills, vehicle rationing and wait lists, increased costs to businesses and elevated difficulty and safety risk for hundreds of thousands of Albertans and Canadians just trying to get to work and family activities in our unpredictable, and often cold, climate.”

Seriously, this is unhinged.

Her statement went on: “No legal or moral authority to tell Albertans what vehicles they can and cannot buy… disaster… trying to force increased demands on the electricity grid… delusional timelines… freezing with their families in minus 30 C on the side of a rural road is not an option… destructive virtue-signalling….”

Well, she was right about one thing. The timelines were almost certainly delusional. But — gee whiz! — take a breath, premier!

Naturally, when Guilbeault made his announcement Wednesday, Smith’s response was surly and self-righteous. “I think that he has done more to damage national unity probably than any other politician,” she harrumphed.

There is at least one other candidate for that title, of course. Y’all know who I mean. According to that standard, I doubt Guilbeault is even in the running.

Be that as it may, Smith and her political brain trust are going to miss Guilbeault.

Who else can they paint as a supervillain?