For two months, we have been obsessed with the SNC Lavalin Crisis. But, Thomas Walkom writes that we've been focused on the wrong crisis:
The climate apocalypse is fast approaching. That’s the word from federal government scientists who Monday issued an alarming report on climate change in Canada.
They say that even in the unlikely event that the world meets its global carbon emission targets Canada is at high risk of extreme temperatures, drought and flooding.
The evidence keeps piling up, and our political leaders keep ignoring it. Justin Trudeau's carbon tax isn't enough to change the climate trajectory. But, with the exception of Elizabeth May, the other party leaders offer nothing:
The opposition Conservatives, joined by like-minded governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick, attack Justin Trudeau’s Liberals for imposing a carbon tax to deal with the global warming problem.
But they offer nothing plausible in its stead. Ontario Premier Doug Ford argues that he doesn’t need to do anything to reduce carbon emissions — that the decision of a previous government to shut down the province’s coal-fired electricity generating plants was sufficient.
Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, another vociferous critic of carbon taxes, says he’ll come up with ideas of his own — eventually.
If the Tories were serious about climate change, they wouldn’t criticize Trudeau for doing too much. They would attack him for doing too little.
By the federal government’s own reckoning, it is not on course to meet even the minimalist carbon emission targets it agreed to in Paris in 2015.
Wilson-Raybould has provided us with a bizarre distraction:
I say bizarre because ultimately, this is a story in which nothing much happened.
Last fall, Wilson-Raybould was pressed by those around the prime minister to consider offering a form of plea bargain to SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec engineering firm under indictment for bribery. She demurred and eventually was shifted to another portfolio before quitting cabinet entirely.
But SNC-Lavalin still faces criminal charges and remains without a plea bargain.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, climate change rolls along. The federal report predicts that if carbon emission growth continues unabated, sea levels on the east coast will rise by as much as one metre. In the St. Lawrence basin, water levels are predicted to rise half a metre.
Under the same scenario, the scientists report with medium confidence that, by 2100, periods of drought will become more frequent in the Prairies and the British Columbia interior.
It's an old saw, but it's true. As our forests burn, we can't see the forest for the trees.
Image: Hazlitt
