The threat of climate change demands something more than thoughts, prayers and excuses

As another Canadian summer brings another round of natural disasters — wildfires in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Newfoundland, flooding in Toronto and Quebec — there is a risk of the political responses to these calamities becoming rote.

Thoughts and prayers are offered. An official response is mounted. Support for reconstruction is promised. And then the political discussion moves on.

“The political pressure will disappear as soon as the fires do,” political strategist and pollster David Herle said near the end of a recent episode of his eponymous podcast that featured two wildfire experts. “It’s just easy in politics to forget about things that aren’t burning at the moment.”

It’s certainly possible that the latest disasters will soon recede from memory, at least for those Canadians whose homes and communities haven’t been flooded or burned. But as the effects of climate change become more and more apparent, it becomes harder to view these storms and fires the way we might have a decade ago — as singular “acts of God” that can be blamed on bad luck or unusual circumstances.

And the more these disasters happen, the greater the likelihood that voters will start asking governments what they could have done to mitigate or prevent them.

When that happens, political leaders will need to answer two questions. What are they doing to reduce the amount of unavoidable damage caused by climate change? And what are they doing to to prevent even more extreme climate change from happening?

In policy terms, these two approaches are known as adaptation and mitigation — adapting to a changing environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate future climate change.

In the wake of the Jasper wildfire last month, some asked whether federal officials should have done more to manage a pine beetle infestation that left behind swaths of dead trees across Western Canada. But experts suggested attempts to blame the infestation for the destruction are either misplaced or lacking.

“The condition of the forest after a century of fire exclusion followed by the mountain pine beetle infestation was an important contributing factor that created very high fuel loads over the entire landscape,” said Lori Daniels, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

“Equally important was the extreme fire weather conditions due to the severe, multi-week drought and heat dome that had been sitting over Western Canada. Ultimately, the heat and high winds drove the speed and intensity of the fire, making it impossible to suppress.”

It would be a mistake to look for scapegoats to avoid acknowledging the impact of climate change. But it’s not necessarily wrong to ask more broadly whether governments could be doing more to limit the damage caused by the fires and storms that are now commonplace.

Even though hundreds of Jasper’s buildings were destroyed, the fact that 70 per cent of the town was saved is being held up by some as a success story. That success is being credited, in part, to implementation of measures like the FireSmart program. Mike Flannigan, a wildfire expert at Thompson Rivers University, says the program should be mandatory in high-risk areas.

The Jasper fire has revived questions about whether Canada needs a federal emergency response agency; the Liberal government says it is actively exploring the idea. But Daniels says local communities also need to build up their research and expertise so that they’re better equipped to manage the forests around them.

The federal government released a national adaptation strategy in 2023 — the first such national strategy in Canadian history. It followed up with an action plan that includes 73 different measures. But it’s fair to ask how much more all levels of government could or should be doing.

Blair Feltmate and Anabela Bonada of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation recently wrote that, since 2015, the federal government has committed $42 billion toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and $1.9 billion to adaptation. The exact numbers might be debatable — the federal government claims to have committed $6.6 billion to adaptation since 2015 — but whatever the amount, it could stand to be higher.

A report prepared in 2020 by the Insurance Bureau of Canada and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimated that all three levels of government need to spend an additional $5.3 billion on adaptation.

“I think ultimately we are going to have to take a hard look at what governments have been doing about adapting to climate change versus the growing scale of the problem,” Ryan Ness of the Climate Institute said in an interview last month.

“A successful adaptation would mean flatlining or reducing climate related damage [in relation to the economy] as climate change proceeds, but we’re not seeing that.”

In the long term, investments in adaptation could pay for themselves many times over. The Canadian Climate Institute has estimated that a dollar spent today on adaptation could save between $13 and $15 in future costs. But governments still need to find budget room for that upfront spending.

How much more is the Liberal government willing to put up? And would a Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre, committed to reducing taxes and slashing federal spending, make room for larger investments in adaptation?

Feltmate and Bonada suggested that new money for adaptation could be freed up by reducing the amount of funding put toward reducing emissions — but that could make for a short-sighted trade-off.

When the Climate Institute conducted its analysis in 2022, it found that climate-related economic losses in Canada could be reduced by 50 per cent through either reductions in global emissions or adaptation. But in a scenario where global emissions were low and Canada took robust steps to deal with the impact of climate change, losses were reduced by 75 per cent.

In other words, everyone is better off when governments do as much as they can on both fronts. 

Emissions reductions have attracted the most political attention in the context of recent disasters. The Liberals, in particular, have linked their actions to combat climate change with the fires and storms that have upended numerous communities across Canada.

“People are being evacuated in the Northwest Territories,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said during a question period exchange in June. “What is the Conservative response? It is to let the planet burn. It is immoral.”

“The fanatical rhetoric of the extremist minister will not change anything, nor will his carbon tax change the weather,” Poilievre responded. “His carbon tax is not going to eliminate a single forest fire, a single drought or a single heat wave.”

Read narrowly — and perhaps charitably — Poilievre’s response could be understood as a criticism of the effectiveness of the Liberal government’s carbon-pricing policy.

Conservatives like to argue that the carbon tax doesn’t actually reduce emissions — but the Climate Institute has estimated that the federal fuel charge will be responsible for between eight and 14 per cent of projected emissions reductions between now and 2030. (The price on industrial emissions is expected to be responsible for a further 20 to 48 per cent of reductions.)

The climate change that is now making fires and floods more frequent and more severe is driven by decades of inaction on greenhouse gas emissions. Some amount of climate change is now unavoidable — it’s fair to say that a carbon tax now won’t stop a wildfire from happening next week.

But those who’ve seen their homes flooded or burned this summer might wish that previous governments — in Canada and globally — had done much more to prevent it from happening. And by reducing emissions now, it’s still possible to reduce the amount of damage done in the future.

Political pressure may ebb and flow. But there is still every reason to act to fight climate change, to both adapt and mitigate. And the more often fires and floods and droughts and heat waves happen, the more reasons voters will have to demand accountability from their political leaders.