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It was nice while it lasted, I guess. After a few days of flirting with the idea of hope, the Conservative Party of Canada and its pundit-class proxies have returned to their regularly scheduled fear-mongering. Its latest subject is a speculative report produced by Policy Horizons Canada, a federal government “foresight organization” charged with identifying and assessing potential threats in the future. The report in question was actually released in 2024, with a longer brief on the issue of declining social mobility published this past January, but it only seems to have caught the attention of the Conservative universe in the dying days of a failing campaign.
Desperate times, as they say.
Things are so dire for Poilievre, in fact, that he brought up the organization’s work on three consecutive campaign days, suggesting that it promised inevitable ruin if the Liberals were re-elected. "The report paints a terrifying picture of a spiral of economic depression and cost inflation," Poilievre said after releasing his party's platform. "What they are anticipating on the current trajectory is a total meltdown, a societal breakdown in Canada if we stay on the current track."
The pundit class was nearly as breathless. The National Post’s Terry Glavin suggested that “Canada’s doomsday scenario is already here,” while the Calgary Sun’s Rick Bell warned, “Canada is headed on the Highway to Hell.” Never mind the fact that the scenario being shouted about here was clearly not meant as a prediction, much less commentary on current government policies. What’s most striking are the other scenarios described by the same organization that Poilievre and the Postmedia pundits chose to ignore.
The “disruptions map” in the larger 2024 Policy Horizons report lays out 35 potential disruptions along three dimensions: likelihood, impact, and time horizon. Yes, declining social mobility is on there, but the three biggest risks in terms of likelihood and impact are a collapse in our biodiversity and ecosystems, the inability of the public to separate fact from fiction, and our collective emergency response becoming overwhelmed. One could easily see these as being related, given that our failure to better understand climate change — and the work of disinformation campaigns aimed at confusing us about it — is directly impacting our willingness to address it.
The report lays out a bleak future in a world of constant climate chaos, something that Poilievre has somehow yet to mention. “The human impact of constant co-occurring disasters in Canada could be severe,” it says, “with recurring loss of life and widespread destruction of infrastructure, property, and businesses. Millions of people may be displaced as weather conditions become intolerable and entire regions become uninsurable, preventing people from getting mortgages. The stress and trauma of these displacements, in addition to economic losses from collapsing real estate markets, could contribute to a worsening mental health crisis.”
Make no mistake: the financial challenge faced by younger generations, immigrants and those without access to housing wealth is a threat to our future, and it’s one the next federal government must address. But so too is the degradation of our informational ecosystem, the growing economic cost of climate change, and the prospect of more and larger natural disasters. If leaders like Poilievre want Canadians to take some of these forecasts seriously, then they have to take all of them seriously — including the parts that don’t automatically align with their pre-existing slogans and talking points.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Poilievre’s platform includes a promise to repeal the industrial carbon tax, eliminate the Liberal government’s other climate policies, and reduce emissions by — you guessed it — exporting more fossil fuels. Poilievre continues to promise the defunding of the CBC, which would turn the growing news deserts in Canada’s smaller cities and communities into digital Saharas. In other words, his government would exacerbate the two biggest risks in a report by an organization whose work he claims to take seriously.
That speaks to a risk that the report didn’t explicitly identify: cynical leaders that deliberately weaponize information for their own partisan purposes. If we’re going to address or avoid the 35 disruptions identified in the Policy Horizons report, we need political leaders who are willing to trade in the truth — even if it doesn’t serve their own immediate advantage. Voters, meanwhile, have to be more ruthless about punishing the ones who aren’t.
In part, that might be what this election is about. If the Conservatives manage to blow the biggest lead in Canadian political history, they’ll need to figure out how much of the blame belongs to Poilievre’s brand of populist politics. They’ll also have to decide if they want to double down on that brand or return to a style of leadership that’s less deliberately polarizing and provocative — something, perhaps, like Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston.
Either way, the judgment of the electorate is at hand. Its choice on Monday will go a long way towards determining whether Canada can meet the challenges that lie ahead — and which ones await Canada’s Conservatives.
Comments
What is troubling with the Conservative Party, is their refusal to acknowledge that climate change is real and Poilievre's determination to roll back all climate initiatives. With oil & gas being the biggest donor to the party, the party puts donors over the good of the country and Canadians.
One thing to keep in mind is that, all corruption and bribery aside, this troubling lack of social mobility that the study points to and that the Conservatives are trying to make hay from . . . was ENTIRELY CAUSED by small "c" conservative policies. Right wing politics is in the end all about creating and maintaining inequality. The point of low taxation, for instance, is not to put money in ordinary people's pockets, it is to put money in rich people's pockets and stop redistribution to ordinary people. The point of free trade was not to make the economy bigger and lift all boats, it was to make capital mobile so it could either move to low-wage locations or threaten to if its wage-reduction demands were not met. The "race to the bottom" was the main feature, not an unfortunate side effect. Union-bashing was about reducing wages, cuts to education made education expensive and put the non-wealthy educated in debt, the war on drugs and the whole right wing "tough on crime" schtick was about putting poor and racialized people in jail to keep them out of the middle class, and so on and so forth. Right wing politics is ALWAYS ultimately about class warfare against the non-rich.
So what's REALLY rich is Poilievre's Conservative party pretending they would do anything but drastically worsen the trends from that report that they're squawking about.
Fawcett: "given that our failure to better understand climate change — and the work of disinformation campaigns aimed at confusing us about it — is directly impacting our willingness to address it"
Disinformation …
Such as recommendations that the federal government axe the cap on O&G industry emissions? After arguing only four months ago in favor of keeping the O&G industry emissions cap as the price for a new oilsands export pipeline
Fawcett: "Mark Carney should axe the emissions cap" (Observer, 23-Apr-25)
Fawcett: ""Donald Trump might just make Canada great again" (Observer, 24-Jan-25)
Talking points lifted straight from CAPP in favor of the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline project?
Fawcett: "Should the government kill the Trans Mountain pipeline project?" (22-Feb-22)
The Observer's other "star" columnist also supported TMX.
Arguments for another new, taxpayer-funded pipeline on top of that?
Fawcett: "Danielle Smith and pipelines could save Canada. No, really" (Observer, 18-Feb-25)
Touting "national economic infrastructure like pipelines"?
Promoting the "inconvenient truths about the economics of pipelines", which, Fawcett says, simple-minded progressives fail to grasp?
Fawcett: "Jagmeet Singh's NDP is in deep trouble" (Observer, 29-Jan-25)
Fawcett: "The NDP needs more economic literacy" (Observer, 15-Apr-25)
Justifying the Liberals' decision to greenlight the Bay du Nord offshore oil project?
Fawcett: "Steven Guilbeault leads Canada through the hard choices on the road to net-zero" (Observer, 18-Apr-22)
Promoting false climate solutions like carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the oilsands?
Fawcett: "Steven Guilbeault leads Canada through the hard choices on the road to net-zero" (Observer, 18-Apr-22)
Fawcett: "Canada's oil companies won't do what they promise — instead, they bide their time, awaiting Poilievre" (Observer, 27-Sep-22)
Fawcett: "Suncor goes back to the future with its new CEO. Are its net-zero ambitions next?" (Observer, 22-Feb-23)
Advice not to get our hopes up for the rapid decline of fossil fuel production as dictated by the best available science?
Arguments against winding down O&G production in Canada, because OPEC would simply fill the gap? Recycling oil industry propaganda?
The same argument Conservatives make. The same arguments Canada's asbestos industry used for years. "If we don't sell it, someone else will."
The drug dealer's defence. "Why should I stop selling crack? Someone else will just take my place."
Fawcett: "Steven Guilbeault leads Canada through the hard choices on the road to net-zero" (Observer, 18-Apr-22)
Siding with the AB NDP and its reckless climate/energy policies and criticizing the federal NDP's more responsible, science-based stance against fossil fuel expansion and new pipelines.
Fawcett: "Rachel Notley's NDP is poised to win in 2023. There's just one problem: Jagmeet Singh's NDP (Observer, 24-Feb-21)
Max Fawcett's greatest hits.
If the former editor of Alberta Oil Magazine has a climate plan, it is a plan to fail.
Something the Liberals and Conservatives also have in common.
The IPCC warns that the world must nearly halve GHG emissions by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050 to keep warming below the danger limit of 1.5 C.
IEA's Net-Zero by 2050 report prescribes no new investment in fossil fuels after 2021 to limit global warming to 1.5 C.
No time for fossil-fuel expansion.
But Max Fawcett knows better?
Like the Liberals he supports, Fawcett talks out of both sides of his mouth on climate change. Alternately attacking the "cynical" Conservatives for their failure to take climate change seriously and advocating for fossil fuel expansion under the Liberals.
Who is cynical, again?
The new denialism. Just as delusional as the old kind but more insidious. And far more dangerous.
"The New Climate Denialism: Time for an Intervention" (The Narwhal, Sep 26, 2016)
Well done, Geoffrey Pounder.
The Observer's other "star" columnist also supported TMX:
Sandy Garossino: "There's an extraordinarily compelling case to be made for Trudeau's climate plan, and how the TMX pipeline fits into the bigger picture."
"The serious $70 BILLION climate plan you've heard nothing about" (National Observer, 2019)
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/06/21/opinion/serious-70-billion-…
Check out the scathing rebuttals in the comments section. CNO's readers were on the ball. CNO's columnists are a different story.
"Garossino: 'It was always going to be a tough slog for Rachel Notley to be re-elected. Yet had more environmentalists supported her bargain of a pipeline in exchange for a sweeping series of carbon concessions, Canada's climate plan might not be in such dire shape today. The costs of making the perfect the enemy of the good might be a lesson to remember come the federal election.'"
"Jason Kenney's shrewd canard"
www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/25/opinion/jason-kenneys-shrewd-canard
Is CNO really a climate media outlet? Or is its climate coverage merely a cover for op-eds promoting the Liberal party to readers?
Is CNO's real purpose to soften up climate-concerned Canadians for the Liberal's fossil-fuel expansion agenda? And at election time, to push readers to vote Liberal? "Because the Conservatives are worse."
That is what it looks like from here.
Adrienne Tanner's recent op-ed read like a Liberal Party campaign advertisement. Because that was its function:
"Carney's green dream team" (Observer, 03-Apr-25)
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/04/03/opinion/carney-green-dream-…
"If climate is your issue, you’ve got to take a good hard look at the Liberals."
Take a good hard look -- and then run in the opposite direction.
Max how about you write something on Blanchet and encourage him to leave politics. His latest is beyond insulting to all of us. He includes Smith in his little rant which means he sees them as two peas in a pod.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nova-scotia-premier-bloc-leader-commen…
"Either way, the judgment of the electorate is at hand. "
Electorates' judgement is -- gosh... which adjective to choose -- iffy at best. Last time I looked, a couple of days ago, the CPC still had about 40% of the vote.
I think that if we want an electorate that is less iffy, we need to address the increasingly influential sources of the iffiness. That would be, to a large degree, the Web and social media. If we don't rein in those sources and the message amplification they provide, the outcome of societal disintegration is, I think, foregone.
Aiding and abetting the caustic amplification is a Canadian electoral system that, increasingly IMO, drives electors to question the legitimacy of their governments. The recently departed had the golden opportunity to effect that change with almost 100% certainty.
I am also left to wonder as to the state of public education across the country. Is it as bad as current public commentary and engagement suggests? Are we at the stage where we should rename ourselves as Nincompoopians?