Climate change is part of this election whether voters know it or not

Climate change may not be a top election priority for Canadians as economic concerns reign supreme, but an increasingly hotter planet threatens that issue like never before. 

The Canadian Climate Institute says the country’s economy is “highly climate-sensitive,” and economic risks from the climate crisis threaten to significantly undermine prosperity. 

“By 2030, GDP will be $35 billion lower than it would have otherwise been — by 2055, it will be $80 to $103 billion lower,” according to the organization. “Emissions reductions and proactive adaptation measures, taken together, are the most effective means of reducing costs.”

Those economic impacts are set to only get worse as the planet warms. By the end of the century, the Canadian economy could take a $5.5-trillion hit, according to Queen’s University’s Institute for Sustainable Finance.

Günther Thallinger, chairman of insurance giant Allianz’s sustainability board, said on social media Wednesday that intensifying extreme weather is a systemic risk that threatens the foundation of global finance. Heatwaves and floods wreck homes, roads, power lines, railways, ports and factories, and the value of assets are already degrading in real time, he said. 

“The economic value of entire regions — coastal, arid, wildfire-prone — will begin to vanish from financial ledgers,” he said. “Markets will re-price, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”

The economic risks are understood by experts, but the climate impacts are on full display for everyone. In the past four years, a heat dome over British Columbia killed over 600 people in 2021; Hurricane Fiona battered Atlantic Canada in 2022; the record-breaking wildfires of 2023 cloaked the country in smoke and forced Yellowknife residents to evacuate; and Jasper burned down last summer. 

The science is clear. Two years ago, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said to prevent catastrophic warming, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut approximately in half this decade. If they’re not, the planet will continue to bake and is more likely to hit dangerous tipping points that, when crossed, lock in major, irreversible damage.

Despite this, responding to climate change is taking a back seat with voters, according to polls. 

On Tuesday, polling firm Leger said 36 per cent of Canadians see responding to President Donald Trump as the top priority, compared to 33 per cent who say the top issue is picking a leader to change the country’s direction. At the same time, about a quarter of Canadians think the most pressing issue is strengthening and growing the economy. Taken together, the results are clear: protecting Canada from U.S. trade aggression and related annexation threats, is a major concern for the public.

Netflix or Blockbuster?

Those concerns from the public are shaping the major parties’ platforms in the election, even where they overlap with climate.

Faced with the U.S. threat, Liberal Leader Mark Carney has pitched pivoting to Europe by strengthening ties with trading partners, like France and the U.K., and for Canada to be a leader in both fossil fuels and clean energy. He has endorsed industrial carbon pricing and capping oil and gas pollution, but would pair those policies with further support for controversial carbon capture technology. 

Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, on the other hand, has attacked key emission reduction policies, like industrial carbon pricing, capping oil and gas pollution, and clean electricity regulations, while promising to boost fossil fuel production by building new pipelines and export terminals. 

For Dr. Joe Vipond, a Calgary-based emergency doctor and past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), the choice for voters is whether to align Canada with the energy transition or with the pro-fossil fuel agenda of the United States. 

Because burning fossil fuels leads to a hotter planet, and a hotter planet means worsening and increasingly frequent extreme weather, like the recent megafires that engulfed Jasper and torched Los Angeles, Canadians need to consider the economic impacts of climate change, he said. 

“Think of a boxing match: if you have one good blow every few minutes, you can recover and go on to fight, but if you have pounding after pounding to your head in quick succession, you're going to lose,” he said. 

Vipond said the energy transition is underway, and it is unrealistic to expect the Canadian economy to prioritize burning unabated fossil fuels indefinitely. Like the transition from horses to tractors, the energy transition is inevitable, he said. But Vipond is also concerned that Carney has said Canada should be a leader in both fossil fuels and renewable energy, effectively hedging his bets.

“Do we want to be Netflix, or do we want to be Blockbuster?” he said. “I don't think we can play both sides.”

Vipond said he was very worried about Poilievre’s plans to scrap environment and climate- related policies to unleash increased oil and gas production. But he also took issue with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh for retreating from the consumer carbon price and defending the move by “parrotting misinformation from the far-right” about how it was making life unaffordable. 

“Elections are really key moments in a country's history because it's when the players have to define themselves to the electorate to try to garner their vote,” he said. “Canadians understand the climate crisis is an existential one … and that we need good policy to do that — this isn't going to be dealt with through recycling — it's going to be dealt with through policy.”

Climate stakes

Poilievre’s pitch to voters is not just pro-oil and gas; it’s anti-climate. By promising to repeal industrial carbon pricing, environmental assessments, pollution reduction requirements and more, Poilievre is indicative of a leader listening to his base at the expense of broader public support, experts say. 

Martin Olszynski, an associate professor at the University of Calgary, said the Conservative Party’s base has long been “antagonistic or at least dismissive of climate change as a real problem,” but the party’s previous leader Erin O’Toole believed the path to forming government was broadening the party’s appeal and that meant having a climate plan.

But Poilievre is not the same. In an interview with right-wing influencer Jordan Peterson earlier this year, the Conservative leader said he believes the best path to victory is staying aligned to an enthusiastic base rather than watering down his vision by moving to the centre. 

For Olszynski, Poilievre’s rise to the top of the polls and subsequent collapse after Trudeau resigned, suggests his popularity may have had much more to do with Trudeau’s unpopularity than carbon pricing. 

That “is consistent with the theory that actually a majority of Canadians do care about climate action, and while it certainly isn't top of mind as much right now, I don't think a majority of Canadians are interested in the hard-core deregulation agenda that is obviously taking place in the United States and that appears to be on offer with Mr. Poilievre,” he said. 

“It isn't in our best interest, in the medium to long term for sure, to shred all of our climate policies and double down on oil and gas, because there's no question that climate change is going to cost us dearly,” he said. “If we are genuinely committed to building a future economy that's resilient and that supports our sovereignty, then we would go beyond fossil fuels and we would look at building a low carbon economy.”

Laurie Adkin, professor emerita in the University of Alberta's political science department, told Canada’s National Observer that, so far, none of the major parties have demonstrated they understand the stakes of the climate crisis and are failing to link the threat of climate change to the top-of-mind concerns Canadians have. 

“There's no way of addressing any of the issues that have to do with Canadian economic security, self sufficiency, or political independence from the American empire, without thinking this through from the point of view of ecological economics,” she said. 

Carney is the only candidate “that seems to be cognizant” of the climate crisis, but his market-based approach that envisions financial institutions pumping more money into green funds “is completely inadequate to the nature of the crisis,” she said. 

So far, Carney’s major campaign announcement is a middle class tax cut his party says will save two-income families up to $825 a year. Not to be outdone, Poilievre announced a tax cut he says will save a dual-income family $1,800 a year. 

“Watching Carney and Poilievre, both of them competing over who can cut taxes more than the other, is like watching a couple of kids having a fight on the playground while the school is burning down,” Adkin said. “It's so small-minded in the face of the crisis that we are facing.

“This crisis with the U.S. is an enormous opportunity to bring in some pretty radical reforms that the country badly needs instead of just going with the usual economic nationalism that seems to now be about protecting free trade,” she added.

John Woodside / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer