Trudeau's injustice minister reveals new National Energy Program

Federal Injustice Minister and Attorney General David Lametti is well-known for enunciating the secret policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

When Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to stomp on the Freedom Convoy protest, Lametti asked about using tanks to suppress the demonstrators.

When Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland froze the bank accounts of people supporting the Freedom Convoy, Lametti was up to bat for her, suggesting that people supporting a “pro-Trump” movement “ought to be worried” about their savings being seized by the federal government.

Now the attorney general – unwittingly or not – has enunciated what might be phase one of Trudeau’s National Energy Program 2.0 – the seizure of natural resource ownership from Canada’s prairie provinces.

Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, started an energy war with Alberta in the 1970s by trying to force Alberta to sell its oil for a “made in Canada” price that was far below the world price of petroleum.

Lametti recently mused about taking away provincial rights to natural resources – including the billions of dollars in the Alberta oil sands – after hearing a complaint from indigenous leaders that they aren’t being consulted about the energy sector and that legislation from the 1930s should be repealed.

"I obviously can't pronounce on that right now but I do commit to looking at that," he told the Alliance of First Nations. "It won't be uncontroversial, is the only thing I would say, with a bit of a smile."

Those remarks have produced a plethora of rage from the premiers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, who provided the following statement to The Post Millennial:

“The Prime Minister needs to tell Canadians today that his Justice Minister was not speaking on behalf of the federal government when he said he would look at rescinding the 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Agreements with the prairie provinces and stripping away their constitutional authority and control over natural resources.

“These agreements recognized that the prairie provinces have the same rights over resources that all of the other provinces already had. Those rights have been fundamental to the people and the economic autonomy of Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba for nearly 100 years.

“The federal government cannot unilaterally change the constitution.  They should not even be considering stripping resource rights away from the three prairie provinces.

“The Prime Minister needs to immediately retract these dangerous and divisive comments by his Justice Minister.”

University of Calgary Prof. Tom Flanagan, an expert on Canada’s Constitution, told me Tuesday that Lametti is way out of line. 

“Lametti is dreaming in technicolor if he thinks the federal government can unilaterally change these arrangements,” he told The Post Millennial.  “It is beyond irresponsible that a federal minister of justice would speculate in public about unilateral amendment.”

Flanagan noted that “the three prairie provinces received ownership of their natural resources through separate Natural Resource Transfer Agreements between each province and Ottawa.  Each agreement was passed into law by a combination of provincial and federal legislation.  They were then made part of the Constitution by British statute.”

That status was “reaffirmed by the Constitution Act” of 1982, Flanagan said.

So what is Lametti up to? Just the usual authoritarian sword-waving that we have come to expect from the Trudeau government. This is an administration that has little respect for law or democracy and brought down the full force of the police against peaceful protesters in Ottawa, including running over a woman using a walker. The Trudeau government is committed to censoring the internet and cleansing it from anything it deems to be “misinformation.”

This is a government that is working against Western Canada’s energy sector with a national carbon tax and a fanatical devotion to “fighting” climate change. It has recoiled from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s support for and successful passage of the Alberta Sovereignty Act. 

Clearly, it has sent Lametti out to once again use the rhetoric of demagoguery while Trudeau will furnish the policies.