Twenty-five years ago, when I first met with a senior federal Liberal politician about the urgency of action on climate change, this person replied: “Of course people in Canada want political action in favor of the climate, but they don’t really want it. Can you really imagine someone getting arrested for that? »
That’s where we are, in our opinion.
On February 15, I went to the constituency office of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, with eight other people, including one person who was not even born when I first met with a senior federal official. I was kicked out of the office by the police and fined for trespassing.
We went to protest because we saw how the Liberal government’s climate action was softening in the face of an aggressive campaign by oil and gas lobbyists and Conservative Party of Canada politicians to reverse or delay phase-out measures. fossil fuels causing climate change.
After seeing wildfires drive more than 160,000 people in Canada from their homes last year, drought is now threatening water supplies on the Prairies, and January broke heat records in the world and in Quebec. These very real impacts of climate change remind us of the importance of fiercely defending the progressive introduction of green energy solutions in order to protect people and the planet.
We were at the office of the Minister of Finance to send a clear message in the fight against climate change: the time for action is now.
Obviously, we knew that Minister Freeland might not be in her constituency office, especially because she is busy writing the 2024 federal budget. So we left behind a few gifts, including a giant photo of Patrick Michell, former chief of the Kanaka Bar First Nation, and his wife, Tina Grenier, in front of their burned home in the devastating 2021 wildfires that destroyed the town of Lytton, British Columbia, along with a charred object from this same fire. We also left Minister Freeland with a copy of Fire Weather. The Making of a Beast (Knopf Canada), John Vaillant’s masterful account of the 2016 Fort McMurray Town Fire and our collective inability to act against the climate change that made this disaster possible.
We were also at Minister Freeland’s office to amplify the voices of the hundreds of members of her constituency who wrote to her asking her to use her authority as Minister of Finance to regulate the banks so that they make their contribution to finance the climate solutions. We asked her to make this commitment in the budget she is currently drafting, because while public investments are important, it is also important to align private financing with our climate goals.
On this subject, we (almost) found an unlikely ally in RBC, Canada’s largest bank, which recently said that corporate finance for climate action would need to “increase exponentially” for Canada to be on track to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Fine words in themselves, except that RBC is the fifth largest financier of fossil fuels in the world and only provides 37 cents of funding for clean energy for every dollar it spends on fossil fuels (one of the worst ratios among the world’s major banks).
These numbers explain why we need to regulate bank-financed emissions the same way we do pollution from tailpipes and chimneys. As Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland is the person who can do it. There is already a bill, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act, currently under review in the Senate, which it could use as a starting point.
Mme Freeland is also deputy prime minister, meaning only Mr. Trudeau has more influence in the cabinet. We therefore wanted to submit our requests directly to Minister Freeland. We must stop delaying or weakening long-promised regulations aimed at cleaning up our electricity grid, moving from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles, and capping carbon pollution from the oil and gas sector.
Minister Freeland is not someone who speaks with much passion on the issue of climate change. Climate change isn’t even mentioned in his most famous book, Plutocrats. The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin Press), which explains how the super rich are undermining the same systems that made them rich and powerful.
Fire Weather de Vaillant is a perfect complement to Plutocrats, because it shows how the insatiable thirst for fossil fuels is destroying the earth’s life systems on which everyone depends. I sincerely hope that Minister Freeland — and everyone else in politics in Canada — will learn this lesson.
When it comes to climate action, the time for action is now.