In disaster-stricken Okanagan, a conspicuous silence from Poilievre

Pierre Poilievre drew another big crowd when he visited British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley on Saturday: some three thousand people showed up, too many to fit inside the Penticton warehouse where the Conservative leader held his rally. The hundreds stuck outside were just as rowdy as those who made it in, cheering and chanting back the familiar lines peppered throughout Poilievre’s hour-long address.

“Who’s ready to axe some taxes?” Roar. “Who’s ready to build some homes that you can afford to buy?” ROAR.  

But underneath the noise was a silence just as deafening: the total absence of “climate change.”

That void is every bit as familiar as Poilievre’s slogans, but it’s especially glaring in the Okanagan. Extreme weather has hit this region harder in the past five years than almost anywhere else in Canada 

Last year, an unprecedented January cold snap obliterated the entire wine-grape harvest and some 90 per cent of the stone-fruit crop. That deep freeze came between worsening summer droughts that have sparked a chronic rise in pest infestations now hammering all manner of crops. Then there are the wildfires: “smoke taint” ruined up to 30 per cent of the wine produced here in 2021, and is now a perennial threat.

These are the kind of economic disasters Conservatives are supposed to be attuned to: agriculture employs 5,000 people in the Okanagan and generates $200 million in direct annual revenue. That pales in comparison to the vineyards, which employ 12,000 people and generate nearly $4 billion worth of wine and tourism a year.

Yet these economic threats fall short of the life-or-death impact of rising fires and floods. Two summers ago, the McDougal Creek wildfire forced 35,000 people to flee their homes, a third of them from the city of Kelowna. Two years before that, the atmospheric rivers that destroyed BCs rail and road infrastructure left the Okanagan temporarily cut off from the outside world – a brief but terrifying reminder of the region’s dependence on supply chains that lead through Vancouver and Calgary.

In spite of all this, climate change remains effectively banned from the Conservative lexicon. Any attempt to address this existential threat to people’s lives and livelihoods is itself, in Poilievre’s telling, the real existential threat.

Barely a minute into his press conference earlier in the day, Poilievre laid into “the radical environmental agenda of Mr. Carney’s minister Steven Guilbeault, the guy who … climbed up the CN tower and crawled onto the roof of the premier of Alberta to block energy development.” This conflation of “energy” with fossil fuel is standard Conservative rhetoric, a subtle thrust of misinformation; as minister of environment and climate change, Guilbeault dedicated himself to tripling Canada’s renewable energy production. 

But for Poilievre, Guilbeault embodies a radical desire to grind economic progress to a halt. “If you think anything is going to get built under these Liberals,” Poilievre warned, “then you haven’t been following the last, lost Liberal decade.”

I lost track of how many times I heard “lost Liberal decade” that day. But that “lost” decade brought completion of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which unleashed over half a million barrels a day of oil production in Alberta, all of it going straight to precious tidewater in Vancouver for export. After 10 years of federal Liberal governance, Alberta is pumping more oil than it ever has. There’s also LNG Canada, the behemoth of a liquified natural gas facility on BC’s north coast, and the accompanying Coastal GasLink pipeline; the first LNG tanker just pulled into Kitimat on April 3 – another fossil fuel megaproject approved and built under Liberal leadership. 

These projects, and others like them, cost the Liberals immense political capital among environmentally-minded supporters. Seen in that light, Poilievre’s caricature of his opponents as a haven of environmental radicalism could end up being a great gift to the Liberals.

That didn’t seem to be a concern at Poilievre’s afternoon rally, either on or off the stage. At every mention of “unleashing the power of our resources” or “repealing the anti-development, anti-pipeline law C-69," the crowd broke into raucous, heartfelt cheers. These weren’t paid actors; these are true believers. 

In conversations I had with supporters afterwards, I asked how they felt about climate change – did they believe it was real? “Yes!” they invariably replied. “But the climate’s always changing” – eerily, every single one repeated the phrase, word for word, as though it was one of Poilievre’s slogans. 

But they also all expressed legitimate concerns that Poilievre spent most of his oratory sympathizing with: housing, inflation, poor-paying jobs and the unbearable accumulation of bureaucratic red tape that has indeed made every type of development expensive and time-consuming. These are real problems. Unlike floods or fires, they endure 365 days a year.

Still, I found it striking that so many people living on the frontlines of climate disaster could ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears. They weren’t just saying they had bigger problems, or that climate change is too big a problem for them to solve; they were denying that anything was amiss in the first place.  

Poilievre has fueled and capitalized on that denial. His cloak of silence extends to his relationship with the press. Poilievre has broken with tradition by refusing to let any journalists embed with his campaign. At press conferences, he only allows four questions, and turns each answer into another short speech full of familiar slogans. All political campaigns do their best to control the message, but the discrepancy between Poilievre and Carney here is enormous: according to a report from the Globe and Mail, Carney has allowed almost five times as many questions at his pressers as Poilievre. And despite killing the carbon tax, Carney – like many in his party – has spent his career urging the world to take the threat of climate change seriously.

In three weeks, we’ll find out which of those strategies pays off. As many of his supporters made sure to point out, the boisterous scene in Penticton painted a very different picture of Poilivre’s odds than the national polls, which consistently show Carney in the lead. 

That’s got a lot more to do with Trump than climate policy. But whether they talk about it or not, climate policy is absolutely on the line.