Photo: Smoke from the Jasper Wildfire Complex, August 2, 2024. Source: Parks Canada
Top of the news for many this August 2024 is the devastation of Jasper National Park including the iconic Maligne Lodge. But nowhere in Canada is immune – we are experiencing the impact of climate breakdown: more temperature extremes, more frequent restrictions on outdoor activities as haze blankets the continent, longer droughts, and more frequent intense storms, lightning strikes and wildfires that leave billions of dollars of damage and increased health risks in their wake.
Canada is now losing forests to fire faster than Brazil. There are more than 1000 active wildfires burning across Canada, with hundreds in BC.
Check https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ to see what is happening in your area.
Our focus must be on protecting all of nature and biodiversity. Without this focus, political actions will be meaningless. Indigenous peoples are stewards of more than 80% of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Canada urgently needs to learn from and incorporate Indigenous wisdom – shift away from a purely extractive approach, to working with nature and protecting biodiversity.
It is time for Canada to become a climate leader with meaningful, aggressive climate policy. We need to vote wisely in the coming federal election, and if progressive parties cooperate, we won’t see ridings lost to the CPC due to vote splitting. The majority of Canadians will be heard and represented, and it will also help ensure we don’t face many more summers far worse than this one. Under the leadership of ‘axe the tax’ Poilievre and the CPC, meaningful, aggressive climate policy will not happen.
If there ever was an opportunity to cooperate for Canada, it’s fire season. Six years ago, the NDP, Greens and Liberals did just that – Elizabeth May (Greens), Nathanial Erskine Smith (Liberals) and Guy Caron (NDP) came together in October 2018 to call an Emergency Debate on the UN Report on Climate Change. That same year Premier Ford cancelled 700 renewable energy projects in Ontario, (at a cost of $230 million). And the following year, the United Conservative Party of Alberta cut its wildfire staffing budget and scrapped its $1.4 million Aerial Rapattack fire service team…
Conservatives tweet while Canada burns…
What have the Conservatives done? While Alberta Premier Danielle Smith fought back crocodile tears in the face of this devastation, Poilievre continued rage-farming. Merely days after the wildfire devastation in Jasper, Poilievre accelerated his ‘axe the tax’ campaign with a rally in Elmwood–Transcona in Winnipeg (where a by-election is taking place Sept 16th). Some will recall 2023 CPC MP Tracy Gray (Kelowna-Lake Country)’s Poilievre-style tweet ‘while Canada burns’ performance, decrying the carbon tax – as the McDougall Creek wildfire in West Kelowna was exploding to more than 10,000 hectares, incinerating an unknown number of homes and buildings. Around this same time Pierre Poilievre gave a press conference in Prince Edward Island where he repeatedly attacked the the carbon tax, then in an ironic plot twist his team postponed his Aug. 24 “axe the tax” rally in Whitehorse due to the wildfires. Apparently, the only thing that can stop Poilievre’s attacks is actual wildfires. Weird.
Flame Wars in social media…
And the right more generally has chosen to mount an extensive disinformation campaign focusing exclusively on human negligence and lightning strikes as the cause of fires. In Flame Wars, digital experts from McGill and Carleton Universities have tracked the surge of disinformation that has amplified “content from fringe users that claimed arsonists, not climate change, caused the fires” and as concerns about wildfires accelerated, as they note: “these ‘alternative explanations’ included full-fledged conspiracies linking wildfires to the “climate agenda” and use of emergencies as a pretext for government overreach.”
In the weird world of Poilievre there is no climate plan…
If the Conservatives were to be elected, what happens after PP ‘axes the tax’? What is their plan?
Instead of promoting an emissions cap, Poilievre is actually advocating for more pipelines: “We’re going to clear the way for pipelines. Pipelines south, north, east, west.”
Poilievre has opposed a range of solutions that would reduce greenhouse gases:
- opposes the caps on oil and gas sector emissions
- supports more gas furnaces
- disparages EVs
- portrays any regulations promoting clean fuel and electricity as an additional carbon tax
Should this surprise us? It’s not that he and the Conservative Party simply have no credible plan to tackle the climate crisis, in his 20 years in parliament, Poilievre has voted against policies protecting the environment and addressing the climate crisis more than 400 times. This includes “voting “nay” to bills crafted to hold mining companies accountable for environmental damage, to move Canada closer towards achieving its climate targets, to create high-quality jobs in low-carbon industries nationwide and to align Canadian laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, an international framework also known as UNDRIP.” His voting record tracks a path of destruction against environmental protections: ‘no’ to giving Indigenous peoples more say over their lands and waters (2004), ‘no’ to a mandate to implement the Kyoto accord (2005), to repealing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (Bill C-38), and to attacking water protections and Indigenous sovereignty (Bill C-45). Despite being very critical of lobbying in his speeches, The Narwhal revealed that lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry met with Poilievre’s office and communicated with Poilievre dozens of times in the 12 month period that ended June 2024, and also allowed lobbyists to pay to attend his fundraisers.
More Scientists Muzzled…
What would a Conservative victory mean for Canada? If the history of the Harper government is any indicator, a Conservative government in power would not only lead to inaction but threaten the very science needed to model, anticipate and respond to potential devastation. Under the Harper government, according to Thomas Pedersen, a professor from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, and Chair of the Canadian Climate Forum, Harper’s funding decisions “resulted in a decline in climate-research support of nearly 50 per cent nationwide.” In addition to funding cuts to climate research, a 2018 report on the investigation by Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault concluded that Canadian scientists were muzzled by the Conservative federal government, forbidden to speak specifically about the results of taxpayer funded research on climate change.
The truth behind the carbon tax…
And while Poilievre is campaigning on “axe the tax”, the truth is that with tax rebates the average consumer has a net income gain from this policy despite paying more at the pumps. As the Suzuki organization explains:“Rebates are based on family size. Around 80 per cent of households get more back than they spend on the levy. Rural residents receive an additional 20 per cent rebate. This helps address economic hardships for lower-income households.” In addition, the separate industrial carbon pricing system is projected by the Canadian Climate Institute to be the biggest single driver of emissions reductions in Canada by 2020, as it provides an incentive for industries to green their operations.
As one of the world’s 5 ‘petro-states’ we need progressive parties to come together and push for comprehensive climate action.
The influence of foreign big oil…
Canada must eliminate the influence of big oil on the government. This takes political will. As Gordon Laxer reported in a recent study, as members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, foreign owned oil companies are provided a loophole allowing extremely large sums of foreign oil money to influence energy and climate debates in Canada. And by listing their headquarters in Canada, they can act as third parties to fund election activities. Laxer states “no major oil corporation operating in Canada has been majority domestically owned since Suncor Energy took over Petro-Canada in 2009.” In 2020 the 20 largest oil producers in Canada were foreign-owned, including the “big three”: CNRL, Suncor and Cenovus.
Our opportunity…
The rising awareness of the climate crisis provides us with an opportunity to convince our friends, our neighbours, local riding associations, and our progressive political parties of the need to come together. A recent Abacus poll showed that 86% of Canadians want to stay the course on our climate policy or do even more. We know this won’t happen under conservative leadership. We must tell our progressive parties that we need them to take a page from 2018, and again cooperate for climate, cooperate to block a CPC majority, to cooperate for Canada.
We have the means to turn things around. In Carbon Minefields – a recent report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, lead author Olivier Bois von Kursk states “Canada, is “high capacity, low dependency” country, meaning it need not exploit its large hydrocarbon reserves because it has the “financial means, the technology, [and] the diversified economy that puts the onus on it to really lead the way in the transition.” What we need is the political will.
If you haven’t already, please sign and share the letter to federal party leaders. You can also visit our resources page where you will find helpful reference articles, sample letters, talking points and toolkits for writing letters to the editor, contacting your local MP and/or riding associations and having these challenging conversations.
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