Collision of the mad and the maddening By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 20, 2019

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/09/2019 (2183 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the news business, there are rare days when two separate events collide to produce a more profound, more impactful story than either would have produced on their own. Friday was one of those days.

Winnipeg youth join world protest with 'die-in'

Posted: 5:27 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 20, 2019

For seven silent minutes, the bodies of school children were slumped on the crowded steps of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

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First, the ongoing federal election campaign. Obviously, any time we have an election, it’s an important event. This time around, it has also become quite macabre, thanks to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s penchant for ill-advised theatrical makeup.

Second, at the same time Trudeau was attempting to apologize his way back into the race, millions of protesters — most of them too young to vote — were gathering for a full week of protest to demand, and plead, for immediate action to address climate change.

The youth invaded public squares, packed the front steps of legislatures and municipal halls and the occasional royal palace, invaded central business districts and blocked major transportation routes. And for anyone who saw the images, it’s clear the youth of the world are angry.

They are angry about politicians who insist on whistling past the climate change graveyard. They are also angry many of them are not old enough to vote to do anything about it. For the record, their anger is not misplaced.

This is where millions of anxious and angry youth collide with a federal election. Frankly, as the adults in this equation, voting-age Canadians should be mortified about the pathetic climate change response from Canada’s political leader.

On the one hand, the Liberal party has introduced a carbon-pricing plan that is as controversial as it is ineffective. Even when the tax is fully implemented — if it is fully implemented — it will still won’t put a sufficiently high price on carbon to force Canadians to change our climate-changing ways. Combine that with Trudeau’s decision to buy an oil pipeline to ensure an expansion gets built, and you have a governing party that takes as many steps backward as it does forward.

Even so, the Liberals look like environmental warriors next to parties on the right side of the political spectrum.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has committed his party to killing the carbon tax, arguing “affordability” is more important than saving the planet. People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier is in full denial, arguing carbon dioxide is actually a good thing because (wait for it) we all emit it when we breathe out.

That is not to say there aren’t politicians advocating action. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has already outlined a climate change policy that calls for Ottawa to declare Canada is in a climate emergency, and immediate action to start reducing the economy’s dependance on fossil fuels.

The Green party has also been offering some bold but still achievable ideas. Green Leader Elizabeth May has outlined her party’s “Mission Possible,” an ambitious and detailed plan to make fossil fuels a thing of the past and make the nation’s electricity grid renewable by 2030.

Lamentably, neither the Greens nor the NDP figure to be much of a factor in the 2019 election. That means Canadians are more likely to end up with a governing party that is afraid to make the tough decisions necessary to address climate change, or one that would rather ignore the problem all together.

If that’s not enough to make the youth in this country angry, then all they have to do is look around the world to see Canada is not just failing to make progress on addressing climate change, it is regressing.

New studies have discovered air travel is generating increasing amounts of carbon dioxide as airlines hone business models to rely on a proliferation of discount carriers, the advent of cheap domestic travel and burgeoning tourism industries world-wide that are putting more people in planes than ever before.

Increases in jet emissions could backfill all of the carbon reductions achieved by promoting lower-emission automobiles.

In the United States, President Donald Trump is waging an unrelenting war on the climate change policies of his predecessor, Barack Obama. This includes opening up new and ecologically sensitive regions to oil and gas development, expanding the use of coal and rolling back requirements on automakers to reduce emissions — even as the automakers indicate they want to produce more lower-emission vehicles.

It’s not hard to see why the youth are mad. The adults should be mad, as well.

There is something quite moving, and also quite maddening, about millions of people who have no power to change the climate future taking to the streets to encourage those who do have the power to do something, anything, to stop the pending environmental disaster.

On a day when a story of desperate hope collides with another story of cynical inaction, one can only hope the earth remains habitable long enough for all those angry, motivated youth to get a few years older and finally grasp the levers of power.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

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Dan Lett
Columnist

Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986.  Read more about Dan.

Dan’s columns are built on facts and reactions, but offer his personal views through arguments and analysis. The Free Press’ editing team reviews Dan’s columns before they are posted online or published in print — part of the our tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.