Will the Third World Be Our Miner's Canary?

When it comes to the climate emergency, Canada is 'all hat and no cattle.'  We're just not up for it, not yet. Sure we talk a good game and do some gestural things here and there for appearances but, by and large, we treat it as a concern, a worry, but definitely not an emergency.

Winston Churchill defined the critical difference between a concern and an emergency when he said, "Sometimes it is not enough that we do our best. Sometimes we must do what is required."

It's easy to point fingers at Justin Trudeau or his predecessors, especially Stephen Harper. The last environmentalist prime minister Canada had was, wait for it, Brian Mulroney. Every one since BM has been a dud, Jean Chretien very much included.

In their defence, however, the public has shown little appetite for tackling the climate emergency head on. Doing "what is required" is not, for several reasons, palatable to the public. No, I think we would give that a pass and punish any party bold enough to think otherwise at the ballot box.

It's not that we aren't worried about the climate emergency. Most of us are concerned. Most of us want something done about it, just not something that costs much and certainly not something that might impact the economy and all that perpetual exponential growth stuff.

We lack motivation. Canadians are pretty good at "riding to the guns" but this threat, while probably greater than any we've ever faced, is different. There'll be no regiments mustering on some Halifax pier before sailing off to the strains of "Farewell to Nova Scotia." There'll be no Kaiser, no Mr. Hitler to defeat this time. No noble crusades.

So, what's it going to take to shift public opinion? In my humble opinion it is going to take a decade, certainly no more than two, before we're clamouring for urgent action from Ottawa and our provincial legislatures.

It's going to take a few years of watching climate carnage sweep across the Third World and the developing economies, those nations of the tropical latitudes, to remind us that this emergency is real, it is inescapable and that we're next. Someone is always next.

The downside to this scenario is that, by the time the Canadian public have their epiphany, they'll have to deal with conditions as they are then which are likely to be a good deal more challenging than they are now. There's a price to be paid by the tardy.  That's doubly true when we just keep digging our hole deeper and deeper.  Not every problem is going to be fixable forever.

Another factor is that even if climate carnage first ravages the poorest and most vulnerable countries hundreds or thousands of miles distant, we will not be immune to the knock on effects. We're woven into this tightly integrated global economy with its long supply chains. It's powerful yet it's also very brittle, susceptible to disruption. We've already seen some of that emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic. If the climate emergency destabilizes just a couple of nations critical to those supply chains, globalism could be irreparably damaged. Then what?