As the summer of 2026 wraps up, if you haven’t concluded that the climate crisis is fully upon us, here and now, then you’ve placed yourself firmly into the denialist camp with the crackpots and resource extraction execs. If you find yourself saying that the current El Niño events are just recurring weather patterns that occur naturally over the course of time regardless of human contributions, you’re intellectually lazy, empathetically deficient or a paid shill. Maybe a combination of all three. If you’re pursuing public policy that comes with the admission that your country’s greenhouse gas emissions are going to rise over the short term for the sake of national security and prosperity, your country deserves neither.

On August 26th, a great glacial chunk broke off and fell some 4000 metres, hitting a spot in a Himalayan valley below with such impact that it initially registered as a 5+ earthquake on the Richter scale. The resulting floods and landslides killed 1300+ people, left 5300+ others still unaccounted for and caused untold damage and destruction throughout Tibet and Nepal.

“These floods happen all the time,” said Mike Searle, earth sciences professor at Oxford, “but not at this scale.”

Natural environmental phenomena juiced by anthropomorphic climate change.

“The whole thing is combining to form these catastrophic disasters that we are now seeing at a regular basis.”

Or, as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in response to a bleak environmental assessment made by the United Nations Environment Program in a report last week, “Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe.”

A couple days later, the Canadian government released (and promptly buried just before the Labour Day long weekend) a similarly dire report, that Environmental Defence noted “… confirms the climate crisis is no longer a future risk: Canada has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average, and the Canadian Arctic has warmed three times as fast as the global average.”

“Requests to interview federal Environment, Climate Change and Nature Minister Julie Dabrusin were declined,” according to a CTV news report, going on to say, “A statement from her office says in-part that: ‘Our government is moving with urgency to fight climate change, while working together to build the energy security, industrial capacity, and strategic autonomy that will define this century for Canada’.”

None of those words or sentiments fit together.

As our country burns and cities flood, Mark Carney’s Liberal government believes that our biggest threat remains the belligerent noise-making emanating from the south by our former best buddy and trading partner, and to best protect ourselves, our sovereignty, our prosperity, we must redirect our oil and gas exports toward the global market, flexing our energy superpowers to a world that can no longer afford to buy what we are selling.

As befuddling a maneuver as it is unexpected, coming from the former green banker who touted environmentalism as one of his Value(s) before his ascension to public office.

While it is easy and entirely on the mark to dub the United States currently as an enemy to international order, Canada is lurking in the shadows cast by America, playing climate villain and punching above its weight in contributing to the increasing disorder. Nothing to be beating our national chests about.