Liberal chill when climate plan criticized
For a time this week, Environment Minister Catherine Mckenna had blocked Climate Strike Canada — which describes itself as “the overarching network of students, young people, activists and allies, which connects all of the climate action surrounding the Canadian school strike movement” — on Twitter.
Mckenna later pleaded ignorance and apologized. It’s certainly not impossible to block someone by accident. But in the meantime it was entirely believable at face value. As determined as Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is to be seen on the leading edge of the world’s battle against climate change, certain of its members have very thin skin when it comes to people noting the gaps between their rhetoric and their achievements — especially if they do so a bit impolitely.
And especially if they do so without paying the proper respects to the Liberals’ efforts as compared to the Conservatives’.
This tweet, from Climate Strike Canada to Mckenna earlier in the week, might irk them, for example: “How dare YOU lie to us over and over again about your commitment to the crisis. #seperateoilandstate.” ( The student activists see a contradiction in the government buying the Trans Mountain pipeline when its environment minister routinely says things like “our planet is burning.”)
Kids aren’t interested in splitting the difference on much of anything, let alone the future of the planet they live on, which people like Mckenna and Trudeau insist over and over again is severely imperiled. “( Greta Thunberg) represents simple plain common sense that only a young person that hasn’t been disciplined enough to toe the line can bring,” Ben Clarkson of the climate advocacy group La Planète s’invite au Parlement told Global News this week.
Thunberg is the sort of figure in whose reflected glory Trudeau must dearly wish he could bask. It’s what he was born to do. Whatever one thinks of Thunberg as a phenomenon, the sight of her face twisted in righteous anger at the United Nations on Monday, jabbing her finger at world leaders and asking “how dare you?” was utterly compelling — a richly deserved rebuke to those failing to solve a problem they describe as a looming global catastrophe.
Liberals will picture politicians like Andrew Scheer, Stephen Harper, Doug Ford and Jason Kenney at the business end of Thunberg’s jab. But young people tend to loathe hypocrisy above all else, and Trudeau evinces no less than the aforementioned conservatives.
Canada is not on track to meet its 2030 emissions targets — the targets the Liberals deplored as too timid when Harper’s government set them. Mckenna has hinted at what she hopes will fill the gap — planting trees, investing in public transit — but the fact is we don’t know. This week in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, Trudeau promised not just to exceed those targets, but unveiled vastly more ambitious ones for 2050 under the “net zero emissions” banner. He provided almost no details whatsoever on how that would be achieved beyond the striking of an expert panel.
“Do we have all the details? No,” Mckenna said at an Ottawa press conference. “We’re going to figure this out, but the first thing we need to do is we need to get through this election.”
Whenever he’s pressed on these questions — where are the details? Why should Canadians trust you? —Trudeau inevitably falls back on a ballot proposition rather than a principle: Sorry, folks, it’s either me or Andrew Scheer. “That really is the core of the choice that people are facing,” he said Wednesday morning in Delta, B. C. “A Conservative party that refuses to admit that climate change is a problem that needs real action, or a Liberal party that has recognized that we have done a lot on fighting climate change but we need to do much more.”
One can’t help be re
ELECTORAL REFORM WOULD HAVE CHANGED THAT.
minded, whenever he says this — which is several times every day — that electoral reform would have changed that ballot proposition: Both the NDP and the Greens have much more ambitious climate change proposals that are much more in keeping with the Liberals’ climate- emergency rhetoric. It’s precisely because of issues like climate change that so many Canadians, especially younger ones, are so desperate for electoral reform, in hopes they can break free from the middle- ground tyranny of the Liberals and Tories. Now Trudeau rubs their face in it daily.
It sure would be intriguing to see Trudeau show up at one of these climate marches. There is still a lot of goodwill for him out there, including among some young people. But Thunberg and her followers have taken the dire warnings of politicians like Mckenna and Trudeau to heart; they see the yawning chasm between those warnings and the solutions being proposed; and they seem distinctly uninterested in being told, “trust us, we’ll figure something out.”
As they should be. Because they almost certainly won’t.