Bribe Me With a Tree

With Canada sleepwalking into the election that nobody wanted except the one who called it, perhaps the last thing you want to hear about is a tree. But it’s a very important tree.

You see, not only Canada, but the whole world is in the early stages of ecological and climate disaster, and it ain’t pretty. And in the midst of deciding who will govern us for the next four or five years, not a peep about climate change. Well, except for the Greens, and they self-immolated before the election was called.

Justin Trudeau, Erin What’s-His-Name, and Jagmeet Singh tiptoe cautiously around “issues”, hoping to find the one which resonates without annoying, each hoping to be less unattractive than the others. Gah!

Not one of them has the courage to be bold about the number one issue which is clearly impacting our lives, our budgets, our borders, our external relationships, and our children. “We intend to bring bold and courageous leadership to the environmental file” is about as concrete as it gets. The kind of intensity one brings to a debate about naming the next national park.

It’s twenty years too late to “bring bold and courageous leadership to the environmental file”. It’s time for now-or-never action. Yet climate change is a peripheral issue in this campaign.

Meanwhile, British Columbia is burning, crops on the Prairies are dying in the fields, and the sea creeps in to inundate Sackville, New Brunswick. Do we have to wait until Nova Scotia becomes an island before we turn our minds to some contingency plans for the environment?

You want my vote? You want to break me out of my Tweedledee and Tweedledum disinterest? Then bribe me with these promises:

1. Appoint a Minister of Climate Change at a senior level, equivalent to Finance, Defence, and External Affairs, and give the post to your best candidate. Buy them a pair of steel-toed boots, and let them raid all the other departments for their best and brightest, as well as calling in the stars of the private sector. Think C.D. Howe.

2 Get a plan in place to meet and exceed the Paris Accord, and a plan for heads to roll for those who try to dodge it.

3. “Grow a pair” about environmental tax policy. If provincial premiers whine about a carbon tax, kick sand in their faces and ask them what they plan to tell their kids when the planet becomes uninhabitable. Enough with the whining, already!

4. Shamelessly subsidize green energy and energy conservation. Get rid of the cutesy bait and switch stuff we currently have, and give Canadians real dollars for meaningful environmental upgrades. Bribe me to put panels on my roof and to leave the car in the driveway.

5. Make the use of throwaway plastic packaging prohibitively costly, not just a mild annoyance. And pass the cost directly back to distributors and manufacturers– the marketplace will soon figure that out.

6. Stop talking about intercity high speed trains and just build the damn things. Other countries seem to have figured them out.

7. Fund smart Canadian scientists to sort out how to reduce and eliminate carbon inputs in industrial products and processes such as steel-making, concrete, and other building materials. While they’re at it, some of them can get a handle on carbon recapture. Didn’t we use to have an internationally recognised National Research Council?

8. Have a short, sharp plan to get internal combustion engines off the road, and stop whining about how it hurts. We sound like little kids in the dentist’s office.

9. Let Alberta and Saskatchewan know that we will all share the cost and the pain of winding down petroleum extraction. Tangibly.

10. Grow and give away a billion trees. I’ll take a thousand. Enlist the Scouts and the Guides and Miss Robinson’s kindergarten class.

We can do this. Who’s in?