The Rebel is, as usual, blathering in probably intentional ignorance, ridiculing things with half-complete facts so as to make their opponents look stupider than common sense.
Greenhouses of course already exist in many places in Canada – even cold places where it snows a lot and winter daylight is short. The Canadian Space Agency, together with the University of Guelph and Com Dev, have been conducting experiments in cold-weather greenhouses for a number of years. From the first link:
Devon Island is, of course, far north of Winnipeg, the example used by Rebel to show that the Minister must surely be too stupid to know what she’s talking about.
In particular, there is a synergy between technologies for growing vegetables with solar power on Mars, and for doing the same in remote northern communities. Food security is an important concern in these communities, dependent as they are on expensive air shipments of food or annual sealift of non-perishables. And renewable energy is a big part of that security, given the typical dependency on expensively-shipped diesel fuel for electricity.
But hey, maybe those ‘Gotcha!’ journalists at the Rebel are smarter than McKenna, the rocket scientists at CSA and Com Dev, and the lab full of environmental scientists at Guelph, combined. In which case, go ahead and choose to believe she’s an idiot, but please disabuse yourself of the notion that a woman with a degrees in law, economics, and international relations, who’s been a senior negotiator for the UN, got the job out of affirmative action.
