AUBUT: When ideology replaces truth, persecution follows

  https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-when-ideology-replaces-truth-persecution-follows/70636

The enemy-making instinct behind totalitarianism, cancel culture, and political violence.

 

Published on: 

25 Jan 2026

 

Every ideology that seeks to reorganize society from above must identify an enemy. This is not a rhetorical accessory. It is the structural requirement of all collectivist systems. A population cannot be unified under a single project unless it becomes convinced that someone stands in the way. The enemy provides focus, urgency, and emotional fuel. Without one, the ideology loses its ability to demand obedience. With one, it can suppress dissent, justify coercion, and claim moral necessity. As with a poisoned apple, the poison works only when the apple is held high enough to be admired and the enemy is held low enough to be despised, such that the victim willingly bites the treacherous fruit.

The pattern is embedded in political history. Those who hold out the poisoned apple present themselves as caring and empathic while hiding convictions built on shaky moralizing. Lenin blamed the failures of Russia on “class enemies” and insisted that any resistance to Bolshevik rule proved that the saboteur class still lurked in the countryside. Stalin transformed entire groups into targets through manufactured labels such as “kulak,” a word that originally described relatively prosperous farmers but soon expanded to include anyone the state wished to punish. Mao condemned broad categories of citizens as “rightists,” “bourgeois elements,” or “counterrevolutionaries.” These terms were intentionally vague. Their purpose was not accuracy but flexibility. A regime that governs through ideological purity needs the ability to criminalize anyone who challenges its narrative.

Hitler’s system operated on the same logic. Jews became the universal explanation for every German problem. They were blamed for inflation, unemployment, moral decline, and military defeat despite the lack of causal links. Once the narrative took hold, evidence no longer mattered. The enemy had been identified. The regime did the rest. Pol Pot exemplified the pattern in its most brutal form. His government’s defining belief was that Cambodia needed to be purified by eliminating educated and urban people. The result was a genocide conducted by untrained zealots who viewed intelligence as treason. The enemy was not discovered. It was designed.

The mechanism has not changed in the modern era, even if the vocabulary has. Some political movements that describe themselves as progressive or humanitarian use the word “Nazi” not as a historical category but as a rhetorical weapon, a slang term for National Socialist perverted to imply the opposite. The aim is to convert disagreement into moral crisis. Once someone is defined as a Nazi, there is no need to listen. There is only a need to act. The insistence that all political opponents are fascists or extremists is not an accident. It is a strategy that makes persuasion unnecessary and violence permissible. It is the contemporary form of Orwell’s two minutes of hate. The target shifts, but the instinct does not.

This dynamic exists because collectivist ideologies function on emotion rather than argument. Emotion requires contrast. Narratives require villains. Images and symbols travel faster than facts. A movement framed as a moral struggle can justify policies that would otherwise be indefensible. It can label censorship as protection, repression as compassion, and force as justice. What begins as a campaign for fairness transforms into a crusade against those who stand in the way of fairness. The motives may sound noble, but the results are destructive. The poison is effective precisely because it tastes sweet.

Free societies do not operate on this foundation. They rely on institutions that assume disagreement. Parliament exists to mediate conflict. The courts exist to apply the law impartially. Markets exist to coordinate decisions that no government could possibly centralize. A free press exists to expose mistakes. The entire structure of a democratic republic is based on the premise that no group holds a monopoly on truth. The common good emerges from balancing competing interests, not eliminating them. This is why free societies rarely produce organized political violence. They have mechanisms that allow disagreement without destruction.

Collectivist systems cannot tolerate this. They require unity but cannot obtain it voluntarily. The state must therefore identify those who obstruct progress. Once this begins, the logic becomes self-reinforcing. Criticism becomes disloyalty. Dissent becomes sabotage. Skepticism becomes complicity. The ability of a society to correct its own errors is slowly replaced by the political need to preserve the narrative. The poison spreads because it feels righteous. Few recognise the danger until it is too late.

This psychology has resurfaced in various forms across the modern world. The convergence between radical Islamist movements and segments of the contemporary left provides a current illustration. Both define their identity by opposition. For both, the Jews once again serve as the universal scapegoat. This is not because of any coherent political programme but because the Jewish example undermines key ideological claims. Ashkenazi Jews, in particular, have a long history of academic and professional achievement. Their success contradicts the narrative that all inequality stems from oppression. In collectivist frameworks, counterexamples cannot be tolerated. They must be redefined as enemies or removed from view.

This is why competence becomes a threat in collectivist systems. People with expertize undermine ideological certainty. They expose flaws and reveal falsehoods. They provide evidence that contradicts slogans. Consequently, they are among the first to be targeted when ideological purification begins. The Soviet Union imprisoned engineers and scientists who challenged unrealistic quotas. China humiliated teachers who resisted indoctrination. Cambodia murdered people who wore glasses, spoke French, or displayed signs of education. The presence of intelligence was viewed as proof of treason. When ideology governs, truth is the enemy.

It is a mistake to assume this behaviour requires clinical pathology. No political movement relies on a population of psychopaths. It relies on ordinary human traits that exist in all societies. Ambition, envy, and resentment provide the emotional catalysts. Moral certainty provides the justification. Centralized power provides the mechanism. When these traits combine within a system that rewards ideological loyalty over competence, outcomes become predictable. Collective violence becomes an expression of collective virtue. The poison flows through the social bloodstream because people believe it is good for them.

The free society erodes when this process becomes normalized. The change is rarely immediate. It begins with small concessions. People adjust their language to avoid censure. Institutions alter their priorities to avoid controversy. Laws are interpreted through new moral categories. Public debate becomes ritualized. Emotional narratives replace evidence. The enemy-making process becomes routine. The apple looks even more appealing. By the time the poison takes effect, society has lost the ability to recognize what has happened.

This is the core reason why collectivism, in all its forms, cannot coexist with sustained liberty. The issue is not only economics or governance. It is psychology. Systems that require unity must impose it. Systems that impose unity must identify an enemy. And once an enemy is identified, the logic of repression becomes unavoidable. The poison becomes the point.

The path forward begins with recognition. A society must first understand the mechanism before it can resist it. Citizens must recognize when they are being encouraged to hate abstract groups rather than examine concrete issues. They must notice when slogans replace arguments and when moral language is used to silence debate. They must see that unity built on hostility corrodes every institution that depends on trust. A society that identifies the poison can avoid biting the apple. A society that refuses to see the poison will eventually lose the freedom to choose.

There is no single solution that can be imposed from above. The antidote to collectivist psychology cannot be administered by decree. It emerges from a return to the habits that sustain a free society. Truth must be allowed to challenge fashionable narratives. Debate must be protected even when uncomfortable. Institutions must be led by people chosen for competence rather than ideology. Law must restrain authority rather than empower it. Citizens must be encouraged to think rather than instructed to obey. These disciplines preserve self-government.

The first step is always the same. A society must recognise the enemy-making instinct and refuse to accept it. Only then can an appropriate plan be formulated. Only then can a free society remain free.

 

 

AUBUT: The divergent paths of liberty and loyalty, comparing America and Canada

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-the-divergent-paths-of-liberty-and-loyalty-comparing-america-and-canada/69949 

 How Canada chose order over freedom and became a nation of subjects while America became a republic.

 

Published on: 04 Jan 2026

The year 1629 marks the quiet divide that determined the fates of two nations. In the south, the English colonies that became the United States were founded by literate settlers who sought not comfort but freedom. They brought with them the conviction that faith and conscience were their own, that government was to be distrusted and restrained, and that their destiny depended on their own labour and judgment. 

North of that line, what would become Canada was conceived in commerce, not conviction. It existed first as a marketplace for fur, fish, and timber — chartered, regulated, and owned by monarchs and monopolies. The difference was moral before it was political. One society was founded by independent minds; the other by indentured hands.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, granted its royal charter in 1670, made Rupert’s Land a commercial empire under a single corporate crown. Its men were employees, not citizens. Theirs was a world of ledgers, not legislatures. The French voyageurs and coureurs de bois who roamed the interior were hardy and self-reliant, yet politically neutered — subjects of the clergy and traders alike. 

Education, debate, and self-government were not their concerns. Their independence was physical, not philosophical. The contrast with New England could not have been greater. By 1636, Harvard College was already training a new generation of Puritans in theology, logic, and self-rule. The seeds of a republic were sown in classrooms; Canada’s future was measured in pelts and cargo.

This divide finds its philosophical reflection in the English thinkers who framed the modern West. Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, envisioned the state as a Leviathan — a necessary monster that protected men from chaos at the cost of their liberty. Order required submission; survival demanded obedience. John Locke answered him a generation later with a vision of natural rights: life, liberty, and property as gifts not of the state but of the Creator, and therefore beyond repeal. Adam Smith completed the trinity by explaining how the invisible hand of voluntary exchange could order society more justly than any government decree. 

The American colonies internalized Locke and Smith; Canada absorbed Hobbes. The result was predictable. The United States built a constitutional republic where power flowed from the people upward. Canada built a managed colony where authority flowed from the Crown down.

The American Revolution was not simply a tax revolt. It was the political expression of literacy and faith in self-government. When the colonists declared independence in 1776, they invoked Locke’s philosophy almost verbatim: that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Canadians, by contrast, remained bound to the idea that legitimacy flowed from monarchy, not from men. The Quebec Act of 1774, which allowed the Catholic clergy to retain its authority in exchange for loyalty to the British crown, sealed that bargain. While Americans fought for liberty, French Canada traded obedience for stability. When the loyalists fled north after the war, they reinforced the habit of deference. The fusion of French clerical control and English loyalism became Canada’s political DNA — a society that prized order, conformity, and politeness above individual conviction.

This heritage shaped not only politics but culture. Where the American mythos celebrated the rebel and the pioneer, Canada’s national symbols praised diligence and virtue within bounds. The beaver became the emblem of a people industrious, compliant, and cooperative. The Mountie — epitomized by the cartoon figure Dudley Do-Right — embodied honesty, kindness, and service to authority. 

These were admirable qualities, but they were the virtues of servants, not citizens. Canadians once took pride in them, seeing in such characters their own decency. Only later did it become clear that these traits, left unbalanced by a spirit of liberty, form the psychological foundation of a managed state.

Over time, both nations drifted from their origins. The United States, despite its revolutionary birth, allowed the creeping advance of bureaucracy and collectivism. Canada, never having known a revolution, mistook government management for moral progress.

Socialism took root by redefining compassion as compulsion. It promised a classless society but delivered a uniform one — equal only in dependence. Canada embraced this earlier and more completely than its southern neighbour, dressing the old Crown paternalism in modern bureaucratic language. Free enterprise survived, but only as a licenced privilege. The state decided who could build, who could sell, and who could speak.

The pattern is as old as Hobbes’s Leviathan and as predictable as Smith’s invisible hand. When power centralizes, the hand disappears, and coercion replaces consent. The socialist ideal claims to elevate the collective, but it merely replaces the priest with the planner and the monarch with the minister. The moral inversion is complete when labour itself becomes property of the state. Canadians are told they “own” their labour, yet nearly half of its fruit is confiscated before it reaches their hands. Property ownership, too, is an illusion: under Crown law, all land is held in “fee simple,” a perpetual lease from the sovereign. The Magna Carta promised that even the king was subject to the law, but in Canada that principle stops at Parliament’s door. Legislators stand above the rules they impose. The law binds the governed, not the governors.

This condition is not fascism in the cinematic sense — there are no jackboots in Ottawa — but it meets Mussolini’s definition precisely: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” That merger defines modern Canada. Its banks, media, and energy sectors function as extensions of government policy. Its universities echo official ideology. Its elections change the faces but never the fundamentals. The parties differ in slogans but share a conviction that the citizen exists to be managed. Canadians mistake civility for freedom because they have never had to fight for either.

Ayn Rand, writing from the vantage point of exile, warned that socialism is the politics of envy disguised as virtue — the systematic sharing of misery. Her prophecy has been realised not only in the obvious failures of Marxist states but in the slow suffocation of societies that thought themselves immune. Canada’s bureaucratic socialism is more polite than Soviet communism but no less corrosive. It rewards conformity, punishes excellence, and flatters dependency. The bureaucrat becomes the new aristocrat, immune from consequence and rich in moral pretence. The citizen, conditioned to gratitude, confuses servitude for security.

The United States, for all its flaws, still contains remnants of its Lockean soul — a reflexive suspicion of authority and a belief that rights are inherent, not granted. Yet even there the infection spreads. The welfare state, born of compassion, now breeds resentment. The Leviathan that Hobbes envisioned to keep men safe from each other has re-emerged in digital form, watching, measuring, and managing in the name of safety. Both societies now stand at a crossroads where freedom survives only in rhetoric. Canadians have reached that point first because their political structure was designed for it. When you begin as subjects, you end as managed assets.

A truly democratic society requires more than ballots. It requires that those who vote bear the cost and consequence of their decisions. Locke’s concept of property was not merely material — it was moral. Ownership confers responsibility; responsibility produces restraint. When those without stake outnumber those with, democracy becomes an auction of stolen goods. Adam Smith’s invisible hand ceases to function because the market is no longer voluntary; it is coerced through taxation and regulation. 

Socialism thrives in that soil because it promises equality through the redistribution of responsibility. The result is predictable: the capable withdraw, the incapable demand more, and the state expands to mediate the misery it created.

Canada illustrates this with clinical precision. Its citizens, convinced of their moral superiority to the brash Americans, have allowed the state to absorb every function once left to families, churches, and associations. The promise of universal welfare has produced universal dependency. The child is raised by bureaucrats, the elder sustained by subsidies, and the worker trapped by taxes. The reward for honesty and diligence — the very traits once celebrated in the national character — is to subsidize the indolence of others. The invisible hand has been shackled, and the Leviathan smiles.

Yet none of this was inevitable. The same human capacity for self-government that built one half of the continent exists in the other. The difference lies in what each society chose to believe about itself. Americans, at least at their founding, believed they were free men capable of governing themselves. Canadians believed they were good men who needed to be governed. That single assumption still defines the boundary between liberty and loyalty.

Today both nations stand in moral debt to their own origins. The American experiment survives only so long as its people remember that freedom is not granted by law but limited by it. Canada will remain trapped in the Crown’s shadow until its citizens reclaim the spirit of Magna Carta and apply it not to kings but to their modern equivalents in government, media, and bureaucracy. The lesson is eternal: when authority ceases to be answerable to those it governs, it becomes tyranny — whether draped in robes, uniforms, or business suits.

The hope, faint but real, is that enough Canadians will rediscover what freedom actually means. It is not the right to obey different masters every four years, but the refusal to be mastered at all. The path back begins where it always has — with truth spoken plainly, property defended fiercely, and government restrained ruthlessly. Anything less is submission by another name.

Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.

 

 

AUBUT: Trudeau, Freeland, and Carney turned credentials, identity, and symbolism into substitutes for governing competence

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-trudeau-freeland-and-carney-turned-credentials-identity-and-symbolism-into-substitutes-for-governing-competence/69817

 The death of merit and how Canada lost its compass.

 

Published on: 26 Dec 2025

  

The decline of merit is the story of modern Canada. It began as a slow corrosion under Justin Trudeau, whose rise was fuelled by name recognition and emotional politics rather than achievement. It deepened under Chrystia Freeland, who turned fiscal management into performance art. And it has continued under Mark Carney, whose credentials might suggest competence but whose actions have proven the opposite. These are not isolated examples; they are milestones on a national journey away from merit and toward mediocrity.

Meritocracy is not a privilege but a safeguard. It ensures that those entrusted with power can understand and manage the systems that sustain a country. In the private sector, failure leads to replacement; the incompetent are fired, not re-elected. In politics, failure now often leads to promotion. A government cabinet should resemble a company’s board of directors — people with relevant skills able to provide the guidance needed for success, not failure. A functioning democracy depends on one principle above all: that responsibility should be earned, not gifted, and that credentials without competence are as dangerous as charisma without integrity.

Trudeau’s tenure marked the point where Canada began to confuse representation with qualification. His vision of a cabinet “that looks like Canada” was framed as progressive but in truth marked a rejection of merit as the standard for leadership. Diversity of identity replaced diversity of thought. In practice, appointments were made not to balance skill but to project inclusivity. The results were predictable: ministers unable to defend their portfolios, unprepared to handle crises, and uninterested in learning. Policy was replaced by messaging; economics by emotion. Canada’s productivity stagnated, debt ballooned, and the federal bureaucracy expanded without direction. Trudeau’s personal background — thin, theatrical, and devoid of economic or managerial experience — set the tone for an administration that treated governance as an extension of performance.

Chrystia Freeland’s rise within that system symbolised the triumph of narrative over knowledge. A journalist by training, with no formal education in economics or finance, she inherited the most demanding portfolio in government. Her experience in storytelling became a substitute for technical skill. A nation’s budget was treated as a moral tale rather than a balance sheet. Deficits were reframed as “investments,” and fiscal restraint as cruelty. The result was a sustained pattern of overspending that eroded competitiveness and tied the central bank’s hands. During the pandemic, Freeland’s ministry blurred the line between fiscal and monetary policy to the point that the Bank of Canada became a financier of government priorities. Inflation — predictable and predicted — followed.

Freeland’s defenders argue that she is intelligent and articulate, which may be true. But intelligence is not expertise, and articulation is not understanding. Her tenure revealed the cost of political appointments untethered from meritocratic principles. The Finance Minister’s job demands analytical rigour, quantitative discipline, and a grasp of trade, credit, and capital markets. It is not an internship in storytelling. Freeland’s decisions reflected ideological alignment with Trudeau, not economic competence. Canada’s debt load, productivity decline, and regulatory paralysis were symptoms of a government that did not understand how economies grow.

Mark Carney’s ascent was supposed to be the correction — the moment when expertise returned to Ottawa. On paper, he is the ideal candidate: a Ph.D. in economics, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and a veteran of international finance. In practice, his leadership has been technocratic, insulated, and disappointingly familiar. He inherited the Trudeau playbook and followed it faithfully. His government continues to expand spending beyond revenue, entrench overregulation, and subordinate private enterprise to ideological compliance. For all his credentials, Carney has governed like a bureaucrat, not a reformer. His approach to trade, particularly with the United States, has been reactive and ineffectual. His handling of Canada’s fiscal imbalance shows the same disregard for market reality that defined his predecessor’s tenure.

The irony is sharp: a man trained in economics appears not to grasp its simplest law — that prosperity cannot be decreed. Regulation without productivity, spending without growth, and taxation without restraint lead inevitably to decline. Carney’s government has doubled down on the regulatory burdens strangling Canada’s resource sectors, from forestry to energy to mining. These industries once anchored the national economy. Now they are treated as environmental liabilities rather than strategic assets, killing the golden geese that sustained prosperity. The result is visible in stagnating investment, job losses, and regional alienation. An economist who understood comparative advantage would work to restore competitiveness, not bury it under red tape.

What unites Trudeau, Freeland, and Carney is not ideology but detachment from consequence. None have been required to live by the results of their decisions. Trudeau was insulated by privilege, Freeland by narrative, Carney by institutional pedigree. Each rose through systems that rewarded image, loyalty, or credentialism — not performance. Their governance reflects that insulation. Canada is ruled by people who have never had to run a business, balance a budget, or endure the market consequences of failure. Without that grounding, abstract ideals replace empirical judgment.

A true meritocracy selects for competence, not conformity. It does not ask what a person looks like or believes but what they can do. Its test is objective: performance. Canada once upheld that standard. Its civil service, universities, and industries were led by people who earned authority through results. That ethos produced both prosperity and stability. But over the past generation, merit has been redefined as privilege, and excellence treated as exclusion. The result is a governing class that apologizes for success while mismanaging the very institutions that once embodied it.

Reversing this decline requires more than new leaders; it requires new rules. Merit must be measurable. Cabinet appointments should be subject to objective qualification reviews, including professional and academic assessments relevant to their portfolios — much like the rigorous vetting process required for US cabinet nominees. Public accountability must shift from rhetoric to results, with clear, quantifiable performance metrics for ministers and departments. Parliament must reclaim legislative authority from the courts by defining, in law, the boundaries of judicial interpretation. The bureaucracy must be downsized—not for ideology’s sake but to restore responsiveness and competence.

The private sector can no longer be treated as an enemy. Economic sustainability depends on productive capacity, not moral posturing. Canada’s resource industries, once the foundation of its wealth, have been throttled by regulation justified under the guise of “sustainability.” In practice, this has meant exporting opportunity while importing energy, moralizing at home while investing abroad. A government grounded in merit would distinguish environmental stewardship from ideological paralysis. It would recognize that only prosperous societies can afford to protect nature, and that growth and conservation are not enemies but partners when governed by reason.

The re-establishment of merit also requires cultural change. Citizens must again expect competence, not charisma, from those who seek power. Elections must become contests of ability, not contests of identity. That will not happen until voters themselves value knowledge and discipline as civic virtues. The decay of political literacy has enabled the rise of leaders who cannot lead. Rebuilding a culture of meritocracy means rebuilding a public that demands it.

Some may point to Canada’s courts or indigenous policy as separate examples of the same drift. Judicial activism has expanded constitutional principles like “the Honour of the Crown” beyond their legal origins, creating parallel systems of entitlement unmoored from accountability. These are not isolated judicial errors but symptoms of the same failure of governance. When legislatures abdicate their duties to define policy clearly, judges fill the vacuum. The result is the same: power without accountability, decisions without measurable success.

Meritocracy is not elitism. It is fairness in its truest form — the assurance that opportunity follows ability, and that leadership is earned, not inherited or imposed. It is the antidote to both the tyranny of ideology and the chaos of populism. Canada cannot rebuild its economy, its institutions, or its unity without rediscovering that truth.

Just as the Leviathan in myth was meant to guard the depths but eventually turned on them, so too has the modern state grown from protector to predator. Hobbes’s artificial man was built for security, yet through its swelling power it now resembles the dragon from which it once promised shelter. The creature that once guarded order now devours it.

But dragons can be slain, or at least tamed, by citizens who remember that government is their servant, not their master. Restoring merit is the first step in reclaiming that order. Canada’s decline is reversible, but only if its people insist that competence once again be the measure of authority.

When nations forget that principle, decline is inevitable. When they remember it, renewal begins. Canada still has that choice. It is time to make it.

Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.

AUBUT: Why affordable energy matters more than ever

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-why-affordable-energy-matters-more-than-ever/69847

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, politics — not technology — is making energy scarcer, pricier, and less fair.

 

Published on: 20 Dec 2025

I recently spoke with Dan Sutton, CEO of Syntholene Energy Corp. He had read my earlier article Oil Is Not What You Think It Is and reached out right away. Our conversation showed me how synthetic fuels fit into the long history of energy and how each shift in energy technology has changed the world in ways most people never notice.

His company is working on synthetic kerosene, the type of fuel modern aircraft use. The work is still early, but the potential is real. Because synthetic fuel contains no sulphur or other contaminants, it has a higher energy density than kerosene refined from petroleum. It behaves the same way synthetic motor oil does in cold weather: cleaner, more stable, and better performing. Canadians understand why that matters.

Our discussion then moved into the long story of how new energy sources have shaped civilization. When petroleum became widely available, whale oil collapsed almost immediately. At the time, whales were being hunted so aggressively that many species were close to extinction. Cheap and abundant kerosene replaced whale oil and saved those species just in time. It also made it possible for poverty to fall at a pace never seen before.

Almost four years ago, I wrote about this and referred to Martin Ravallion’s book The Economics of Poverty. Around the year 1800, roughly 80% of the world lived in poverty. Today, that number is under 20%. This dramatic shift was not an accident. It came from the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, which itself was powered by inexpensive, portable energy. Oil lubricated machines, fuelled engines, and made it possible to run large factories. Capitalism allowed buyers and sellers to meet in open and competitive markets, which meant prices reflected real supply and demand. As goods became cheaper, more people could buy them. Workers earned wages, spent those wages, and helped expand the entire economy. The cycle of growth fed on itself because energy was affordable.

Wood was the first widely used portable fuel, but it has a low energy density. As the chart shows, green wood provides only about 2.5 kWh per kilogram, and even dry wood gives just 4.4. Coal, especially coking coal, contains far more energy per kilogram, which is why it replaced wood so quickly once mining methods improved. Coal was easier to transport, cheaper to produce, and delivered over twice the usable energy of wood. That jump in energy density helped launch the Industrial Revolution and made large-scale industry possible.

Cheap energy was the foundation. England had large and accessible coal deposits. New steelmaking methods reduced the cost of fuel even further. Coal replaced wood for heat, which helped poorer families stay warm and healthy enough to work. Coal gas, once a dangerous waste product in mines, became a new energy source when people learned to capture it. City streets lit by coal gas allowed businesses to stay open after dark. All of this came from finding ways to lower the cost of energy.

The pattern is clear. Human progress speeds up when energy becomes cheaper, easier to move, and more concentrated. Wood stores little energy per kilogram. Coal stores more. Petroleum stores even more and is far easier to transport because it is a liquid. That single advantage transformed transportation, manufacturing, and daily life. Liquids do not require the bulky storage that coal does, and they do not lose their volume through breaking or crushing. When large oil fields were discovered, civilization leapt ahead again.

The decline in poverty over the last two centuries reflects this shift. People whom we call “poor” today commonly own vehicles, televisions, and mobile phones. These were once luxuries available only to the wealthy. This change happened because energy became cheaper and more abundant.

Today we are experiencing the first major reversal of that trend. Policies pushed from the left side of the political spectrum, both in Canada and elsewhere, are raising the price of energy. Higher fuel costs increase transportation costs. Higher transportation costs raise the price of imported food. Heating costs rise. Manufacturing becomes more expensive and less competitive, which reduces jobs. As jobs decline, opportunity declines. Poverty begins to rise again.

Governments are also pressuring people to replace low-cost vehicles with electric vehicles that many cannot afford. This may suit the wealthy, but it harms those who live paycheque to paycheque. It forces people into choices they cannot realistically make. This is not progress. It is a step backward that erases the conditions which lifted billions of people out of poverty.

For the first time in two hundred years, we are on a course that could undo everything gained from cheap and accessible energy. If this continues, poverty will increase. There is no other possible outcome.

The core issue is not energy. It is government. When a government grows beyond its proper limits, it weighs down the entire economy. When it becomes Hobbesian in nature, meaning a state that exists mainly to preserve its own power and expects citizens to obey without question, it begins to govern for itself rather than for the people it serves. In that kind of system, the public becomes secondary. A society cannot thrive if drained by the institutions meant to protect it. A host cannot survive if its own protector becomes a parasite.

The answer is simple and peaceful. Elect leaders who serve citizens instead of ideology and who understand the critical role that affordable energy plays in national prosperity. The alternative is the kind of upheaval seen in the past, which no reasonable person supports. The better path is renewal through informed democratic choice, rooted in facts rather than fear.

Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.