Sad to say, climate change and politics in the worst possible sense are inextricably linked. Even as we face the defining crisis of human existence, the question remains one of optics. The Star's Susan Delacourt wonders whether ordinary Canadians can be sold on climate change.
On the one hand are people like Stephen Harper who, in his new book,
warns that standing up for the environment makes for bad politics, especially in a populist age when parties are looking for the votes of “ordinary” people.On the opposite polarity is Green Party Leader Elizabeth May:
“Political parties, including mine, have won elections just by opposing a carbon tax,” the former prime minister writes in the newly released “Right Here, Right Now.” “The reason is simple. It is ordinary voters who pay carbon taxes.”
In a speech to her party’s convention in Vancouver last month, May said ordinary Canadian voters are more than ready to hear the truth about the climate crisis in the 2019 campaign.Given the latest doom-laden but all-too-real Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, May says the time is right:
“We really do need to level with Canadians,” May said. “If the one issue is survival, it’s kind of the issue.” She intends to build her campaign around the idea that Canadians are ready, even eager, to have politicians telling the truth to them, and climate change is a perfect entry into that discussion.
“We’re no longer talking about future generations,” May said in an interview yesterday. “We’re talking about the life span of our own children, who are alive right now.”May's historical allusion is a good one, but it ignores something vital: with Dunkirk, a sense of national purpose was instilled by a strong leader, Winston Churchill, in response to an immediate threat, a threat that was all too real to the British people.
May wonders why the IPCC report cannot become the Dunkirk of the current generation — a call for citizens and government to work together for a common aim. In the “darkest hour” of the Second World War, she said, people came together to fight a common enemy. May believes that citizens are ready to hear the same message when it comes to saving the planet within the next dozen years.
So far, we haven't sufficiently personalized the threat posed by climate change. Will it take a series of Canadian catastrophes similar to what is happening in the United States and other parts of the world before our leaders, and our people, find that sense of purpose? Were the Western forest fires this past summer, the 2016 Fort McMurray conflagration and last month's tornadic destruction in the Ottawa area not sufficient foretaste?
If we are waiting for more dramatic destruction on our home soil to move us, it will, in all likelihood, be far, far too late, and the earth will continue on its current course of ridding itself of a good portion of its greatest affliction - the human species.
