One minor oddity in this week of haywire global politics was the contrast between the Liberal leadership debates in Montreal and the chainsaws ripping through Washington, D.C. One debate topic, in particular, would have gotten the pounce and purge from Donald Trump’s White House.
Forbidden words were said. Transcripts would have to be wiped from the web. The blaspheme “climate change” was uttered — a clear case of crimethink.
“Ungood,” George Orwell’s Newspeak censors would have ruled. “Doubleplusungood,” in fact, because the banned term was not merely voiced but “climate action” was chosen as one of the four main themes of the Liberal leadership debates.
We should acknowledge that Orwell would probably have winced at “climate action.” It’s one of those clunky, abstract phrases that fill the vocabulary around climate change — itself a bloodless and feeble term. But no one seems to have come up with a better shorthand and it is, at least, language that points towards physical reality and the work we need to do to align with it.
It was a surprising decision by the Liberal organizers. Surprising, because no pollster in the country finds climate action ranked among the top four pressing concerns of the electorate these days. Political pundits, even former Liberals, are more likely to encourage politicians to avoid the topic altogether, rather than lean into it.
But apparently there still are reality-based decision-makers out there, stubbornly trying to keep climate change on the political radar. I’m reminded of one of your fellow newsletter readers who recently commented that “Of course we should be talking about climate change. Doesn’t Donald Trump prove that words matter? Why else would he be deleting every mention of climate change.”
And so the candidates who would-be-PM found themselves in a climate action segment this week, albeit the last theme of the debates (and with very little mention of the climate itself).
We’ll come back to those debates in a moment but it’s worth pointing out another oddity of our chaotic moment — it seems likely that we’re headed for a period where Donald Trump’s government, with its vicious assault on all things climate, could be capped to the North by a prime minister who is a former UN envoy on climate change and, to the South, by a president who is a bona fide climate scientist and a former member of the panel that was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to safeguard our future.
But let’s get back to those debates. Frankly, the best that can be said about them, already has been — that climate action was on the agenda. Until that final “climate action” segment, only Mark Carney touched any related topic: three plugs for clean energy and once asserting that “the two big drivers of productivity going forward will be the energy transition and AI.”
The content on climate action was underwhelming. Two questions were teed up by the moderator and the public debate is painfully stuck in a time loop — gimme the usual: carbon tax, with a heaping side of pipelines.
Only Karina Gould stuck up for the consumer carbon tax itself, promising to stop the rate from increasing this year but offering a spirited defense of the policy, and the rebates. As you have surely heard by now, the other candidates have all pledged to cancel the carbon tax on consumers and small businesses.
The consensus has congealed around statements like “Big polluters will pay.” And broad agreement about coaxing individuals with “incentives” while the country pursues an all-of-the-above strategy, maximizing every form of energy, “clean and conventional.”
It’s not Newspeak but, to borrow again from Orwell, it does function “to limit the range of thought.” Nothing in the segment on climate action had anything to do with the climate itself. You couldn’t have deciphered that the Earth is currently hotter than the internationally agreed safe limits and has been on an alarming temperature trajectory for well over a year. There was no mention of fires, extreme weather or their impacts on people.
Nor was there any check-in on the state of “climate action.” You wouldn’t have gleaned that Canada’s climate pollution shrank less than one per cent over the last year for which we have any data. Or that Canada is the only G7 country (notably including the U.S.) still spewing more carbon pollution since the whole global target-setting enterprise got going.
But you can understand why politicians would want to limit the range of thought at the moment. As recently as 2023 Canadians’ top priority for energy policy was “reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment.” Since the election of Donald Trump, that sentiment has tanked, while the priority on “creating economic growth” has almost doubled. Getting in the way of a pipeline must seem as enticing as an offer to sing the Star Spangled Banner in a hockey arena.
But there’s still a stark divide underneath the Canadian electorate. Expanding crude oil extraction is enormously popular with people who voted Conservative last election (86 per cent support). Among past Liberal voters it’s just 35 per cent, and 23 per cent among NDP voters. Similarly, even amidst Trump’s tariff threats, non-Conservative voters continue to place five times more importance on reducing carbon emissions and protecting nature, than those who voted Conservative in 2021.
In other words, climate action may not be a public priority at the moment, but those debate organizers were onto something. The broad majority of Canadians know climate change is a looming threat, they just don’t see it as the most immediate one we’re facing. Only a small faction actively supports a sneering, dismissive approach. A smart politics is one that keeps it on the agenda.
