It says a lot about the sorry state of political debate in Canada on human-caused climate change that the two national parties with the least chance of winning the Oct. 21 election have the clearest, most consistent policies on the issue.
Fourth-place Green Party leader Elizabeth May (who, some polls suggest, is challenging Jagmeet Singh’s NDP for third place in voter support) and fifth-place People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, are at opposite ends of the climate debate.
But what they have in common is clarity.
Unlike Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, May actually believes there’s a climate emergency and acts like it, proposing measures consistent with that belief, as opposed to the virtue-signalling of the Liberals and Conservatives.
The dramatic greenhouse gas reductions she advocates — at twice the rate of Trudeau’s and Scheer’s targets, and at four times Trudeau’s carbon tax/price by 2030 — are consistent with what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world must do to avert imminent, catastrophic warming.
While optimistic about the eventual outcome, May’s honest about what this would take, the disruption it would cause to our way of life and the economic sacrifices it would require of Canadians — even with a genuinely revenue neutral carbon tax.
She likens what must be done to the sacrifices Canadians made in fighting the Second World War, putting aside their political differences against a common enemy.
May speaks for Canadians who believe human-induced climate change is the greatest threat we face, not just to our environment, but to global peace and security.
By contrast, Bernier speaks for those who believe there is no threat, or that it has been wildly overblown, or who believe Trudeau’s statement last fall in a rare burst of honesty, that, “Even if Canada stopped everything tomorrow, and the other countries didn’t have any solutions, it wouldn’t make a big difference.”
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(4) Provinces, feds meet to find path to better plastics-recycling plan
(5) Threat of Ontario teachers’ strike looms over Scheer’s path to victory
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