It would be comforting to provide an uplifting message for the New Year. But Canadians need to be aware of a multifaceted project underway to transform our economy, the nature of our society and the role of government in both. Its ambition is so pervasive that Conservatives and middle-of-the-road Canadians without a strong party allegiance must confront it head-on, identify the dangers it poses and provide cogent public policy alternatives. Otherwise, only a serious crisis will move the public to start resisting policies that trammel its freedom and lower its standard of living.

Determined advocates for a progressive world view work all through government, the bureaucracy, environmental and other non-governmental organizations, academia and the media. They are not an organized cabal — a vast left-wing conspiracy, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton — but they do have overlapping agendas and share the twin convictions that a fundamental reordering of society is needed and that they know best how to achieve it.

Proponents include Liberals, progressives, socialists, hard leftists and crypto- marxists who support climate alarmism, globalism, big government, stakeholder capitalism, critical race theory and wokeism. The transformation they seek is already well under way. There’s even the danger that, like the frog sitting in the slowly heating water, the rest of us may realize what has happened only after it is too late.

Many environmental organizations, including Greenpeace — which the environment minister, Stephen Guilbeault, belonged to when he scaled the CN Tower — view humans’ impact on the planet as inherently destructive and bad. The declared goal of Stable Planet Alliance is “to stabilize and gradually, steadily reduce population and consumption.” One of the alliance’s members, Population Balance, draws “the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot, and their combined devastating impacts on social, reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice.” Actual culling of the population may be a bridge too far, but they are certainly no fans of childbearing.

In his book, Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein identifies this kind of thinking as anti- human. It helps explain why green groups seem indifferent to the harm their policies inflict, not only on the world’s most economically disadvantaged people, but also on the rapidly growing middle class that record numbers of poor people have been moving up into over the last few decades.

The most prominent environmental groups also oppose clean nuclear power, without which net zero is simply not achievable for the foreseeable future. As Europe’s brutal energy crisis demonstrates, rapid abandonment of fossil fuels and nuclear power leads to energy poverty, power scarcity, compromised national security, slower economic growth, capital flight, business closures and job losses. And, ironically, in spite of the crippling cost it does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions: the desperate need for any energy source to avoid freezing in the dark without food reduces most people’s aversion to coal and oil. Subordinating science and economics to ideological purity is a lose-lose strategy — unless, that is, you value Gaia (Mother Earth) and animals more highly than your fellow human beings.

The self-appointed progressive elite are morally certain they know what’s best for the rest of us. That certainty justifies their attempt to shift the “Overton window” of what policies are acceptable at any given time by scaremongering (about an impending climate emergency), silencing dissent from received wisdom (about COVID, climatology, or Canadian history) and peddling outright disinformation (about the supposed harmlessness of fiscal profligacy, high inflation and growing public debt).

Quasi-religious virtue-signalling dictates we reduce farmland, ban coal even in countries without affordable alternatives, rely predominantly on wind and solar in spite of their intermittency, stop eating meat, get rid of our pets, not fly (unless to international meetings on climate or social justice) and abstain from expressing “unacceptable” opinions. Yet our betters luxuriate in their own private jets, multiple homes and lavish consumables, all seemingly without a scintilla of embarrassment about their massive personal carbon footprint.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum, also has lofty ambitions. His “Great Reset” would use intrusive government and multilateral regulation to perfect society, a mission he promotes to Davos attendees by boasting “the future belongs to us” and that WEF participants have “penetrated the world governments.” Though Chrystia Freeland is a member of the Forum’s board of trustees and Justin Trudeau has been following its policy playbook, Liberals would have us believe the WEF’s influence on them is a wacky Conservative conspiracy theory.

Sustainable finance and stakeholder capitalism are two tools WEF activists want to use to transform society. Under them, companies and investors embrace environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals in addition to pursuing financial returns. That will inevitably undermine the free enterprise system, which has elevated billions of people from poverty, disease and hopelessness and, not incidentally, provided the economic growth that generates the tax revenues to fund generous social programs.

Can progressives’ momentum be halted and even reversed? Not without a concerted effort by Canadians who value freedom and prosperity and talk the language of common sense and national pride. Let 2023 be the year in which their influence begins to grow.

Joe Oliver was minister of natural resources and minister of finance in the Harper government.