Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized to residential school survivors. We approved. He offered recompense to criminally mistreated LGBTQ Canadians. We applauded.
But today, those accomplishments are akin to painting the living room while your house is on fire. Nationally, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions have been hovering around 700 megatonnes per year. That’s the status quo, and it’s strangling us all.
The thickest sea ice in the Arctic – composed of ice ridges 20 metres thick – fractured for the first time in recorded history recently. And here, today, right now loving North Shore parents can’t tell their children to go out and get some fresh air.
There will always be doubters who protest that forest fires are part of a natural cycle. It’s true we’ve always had fires, but if climate change hadn’t coaxed the pine beetle north and deposited dried-out brush on forest floors across the province, we wouldn’t have yearly infernos.
One of the most striking images of this year’s forest fires was taken in Prince George. In mid-morning the city’s street lamps shed light on an oppressive darkness that had settled over the town. It’s almost impossible to imagine a better metaphor for living in the dark ages.
We’re aware other world leaders have been just as myopically sluggish and have displayed equally depressed survival mechanisms, but Canada’s failure is coming at a time when success is increasingly synonymous with survival.
We hope someday soon we’ll be able to open our windows and cheer real action from our government. But today, we’d settle for being able to open our windows.
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