On Tuesday here in Toronto it was the heat, the unbearable hellacious inferno heat. Unrelenting in its hold on you. Stultifying to the degree that it wasn’t comfortable sitting outside even after the sun went down. You want to stroll out for some ice cream? In this weather?! kind of heat.
Then Wednesday morning, before the oppressiveness returned, throw open the bedroom doors to let in some fresh—relatively speaking—air. Immediately I’m struck by the smell of, what is that? burnt rubber? Olfactory acuity not being my strong suit. No. It’s smoke, wildfire smoke from northern Ontario, spreading out over a 1000 kilometres, according to the news. There are currently 37 active wildland fires in the Northeast Region, from an Ontario government website yesterday at 10ish a.m. Of these fires: 5 are not under control, 3 are being held, 1 is under control and 28 are being observed.
Or, how about this visual representation:
Our morning skies:
Look,
and I think we all know where this is going,
the climate crisis isn’t coming, it’s not poised just around the corner. It’s here. Now. It’s upon us. We’re living it. We’re living in it.
And to try and argue otherwise is simply climate change denialism. Worse still, to acknowledge it, to accept the fact that our climate is worse for wear, is indeed undergoing deleterious anthropogenic change, but then to try and argue that as a threat, it ranks down a hierarchical list of existential threats, well, that’s madness. In the full beauty of the British use of the word.
This is exactly what our Prime Minister and all his unflagging, clapping seal loyalists are trying to pull here.
Sure, the climate crisis is real. Sure, it poses a serious danger to our well-being and to the future well-being of our children and grandchildren. But… But… More immediately, Trump. Russia. The international order. Our economic prosperity.
So, to combat all that, Canada must find more markets for our natural resources, our oil and gas specifically, in order to decouple from our dependence on our largest and increasingly unreliable and volatile trading partner, the United States.
“I promised you I wouldn’t sugar coat tough messages,” our prime minister informed us last month. “The changes we have made will mean that our emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan.”
Those changes?
More pipelines.
Fewer environmental regulations.
More untested environmental mitigation strategies.
Decreased support for alternative, non-nuclear renewable energy sources.
What we’re being told is that, in order to secure both our national sovereignty and security, we must amp up our efforts to further burn the planet to the ground.
That’s not madness. That’s sociopathic.
And coming from a guy, Mark Carney, who auditioned for the job of prime minister riding in on the coattails of a green jacket.
“Climate change is the ultimate betrayal of intergenerational equity,” he wrote in the introduction of his 2021 book, Value(s). “It imposes costs on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentives to fix.”
Or how about,
“Firms that align their business models with the transition to a net-zero carbon economy will be rewarded handsomely; those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.” Cease to exist! he warns.
But wait! There’s more, and we’re just ten pages into the tome:
“When social needs—such as climate change—are tackled with a profitable business model, the answers to many of the most deeply rotted problems we face became scalable and self-sustaining.”
Of course, Carney defenders tell us that was way back in 2021, when Trumpism had receded and Trump 2.0. wasn’t even a thing yet. That was then. This is now. The world’s changed. The man himself said as much. “The certainties of the world of 2015 are long gone,” he informed us in June.
Yeah but, as I look out my window, the only change with the climate since 2015 is that it’s got significantly worse, he writes through itchy, irritated eyes.
Against my better judgment, I might buy into the Liberal argument that Mark Carney is simply playing the hand he was dealt when he assumed power last year. But those cards were on the able when he took the job. Trump was president, rattling his saber northward, ripping up trade agreements, basic chaos agenting. Our new prime minister knew exactly what he was getting into, and either he assumed that he could smart his way around the bedlam or… or… he had plans that he wasn’t as forthcoming about with Canadian voters besotted with his Elbows Up! catchphrase.
As the heated soared and fires burned, the prime minister appointed former president and country chair of Shell Canada Limited, Susannah Pierce, Canada’s consul general in New York. Setting aside the label ‘climate villain painting Big Oil green’ that Environmental Defence tagged Pierce with back in 2023, doesn’t this appointment send up a great big red flag that Canada isn’t getting out of the still profitable resource extraction business any time soon? Sure, ‘climate change is the ultimate betrayal of intergenerational equity’, as Carney wrote just 5 years ago, but it’s better to be on the net positive side of that betrayal. If you can see the positive side through all the smoke.
More and more it’s feeling like Mark Carney didn’t come back for us, as the old Conservative slight against another egghead returning home from the British shores suggested. He didn’t seek the office of prime minister to help charter Canada through these roiling Trumpian waters. No, he came back to ensure his type of people profited as people of his type often do in trouble times. Mark Carney became prime minister because he wanted to erase any progressive trace, even as progressive-lite as it may have been, of his immediate predecessor. To finish the job his natural political forebearer, Stephen Harper, started.