Current crises demand united action

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/05/2022 (996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Now that the masks are off, so too are the gloves. Welcome to Canada’s pugilistic, polemical, post-pandemic politics. Rants trump reason and fiction fills in for facts.

There is danger ahead. An inability to get along is one thing; an unwillingness to even try will undermine our ability to do what matters as a nation.

When you’re driving and you see a road sign saying, “Dangerous Curves Ahead,” it’s normal to want to slow down. Yet, on the three biggest problems we face — war, COVID-19, and climate change — the opposite is what we must do. Speed is our friend, apathy our enemy.

The reasons are twofold: first, the obvious threat to human life each poses, and second, the acceptance that only concerted, collective action by as many as possible will make a difference.

COVID-19 proves it. Delayed action in shutting down transmission vectors allowed the virus to spread more easily and stay longer. It took one month in 2020 from the first domestic COVID case to be diagnosed before all our borders were closed. Cases rose to 1,000 in that period before exploding.

Manitoba was one of the last provinces to register COVID-19 cases. But the cases that began in this province were imported, just like everyone else’s. No one province or country was immune to the virus taking root and replicating where we lived. Manitoba needed everyone else to lock down if its own lockdown was to work. Speed and collective action were the two critical ingredients for success.

The same is proving the case now in checking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And it is required for effective climate change action.

Any hope Russian President Vladimir Putin had of a “fait accompli” seizure of Ukraine fell apart against determined Ukrainian assistance but, more importantly, against a determined show of economic and military support from the West. Fast, collective action by the NATO countries has punished Russia’s military and economy. Putin’s reckless revanchism has stalled and even been reversed in areas.

No one country, not even the U.S., could have had this kind of impact alone. Certainly not Canada, even with the largest diaspora of Ukrainians on the globe. We have never gone to war alone. Canada’s national security is based on collective international security. We have neither the might nor the means to assert vital national security interests on our own. That is why Canada helped create NATO to protect Western Europe and NORAD to protect North America.

Acting in concert with like-minded countries is how we keep Canadians safe, secure our borders, and grow our economy. It is also the only way to combat climate change.

Canada accounts for only about one and a half per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. That statistic is cited as the main reason why we should not bother reducing our own carbon footprint because what we do, or not do, does not really matter much. We could reduce our emissions to zero, so the argument goes, and as long as the world’s top two emitters — China and the U.S. — keep polluting, we simply penalize ourselves economically and make very little difference to reducing global warming. Let others do the heavy lifting, not us.

Trouble is, climate change doesn’t differentiate between one country’s carbon over another’s. More frequent flooding, higher coastal sea levels, longer heat waves, or once-in-a-century storms are occurring in Canada from carbon produced mostly elsewhere. That still costs us. A lot.

Damages to cities, forests, farming, and infrastructure from these extreme events will only rise. Worldwide, insurers paid out a record $100 billion in climate-related claims in 2018; not quite half of the actual total economic costs of $215 billion. If your insurance rates are going up, blame climate change. Last month, the Institute for Sustainable Finance released a report that calculated the total value of capital output lost in Canada due to climate change could range from $2.7 trillion (that’s right, trillion!) by the end of the century, to almost double that amount at $5.5 trillion if global warming rises to 5 degrees Celsius.

The only way to avoid this is to get all countries to reduce their emissions causing climate change damages here. Canada cannot expect action by others that escapes us doing our own part. Just as we are contributing to stop Russian aggression in the Ukraine, we have to do the same to check climate change.

But populist, nativist politics offers no space to nuanced arguments and complicated policies needed for tackling tough problems. When it’s all someone else’s fault in a winner-take-all dialectic, the incentive to see something positive in what others are trying to achieve disappears.

A new political reality is upon us. Populism and nativism resent the very institutions and processes necessary to accommodate and broker solutions. Supercharged by conspiracies and disinformation, alienation and grievance politics risks turning our focus inward at the very time when we need to be looking outward.

Reconciling these forces inside Canada will be essential to act purposefully outside Canada.

David McLaughlin was Clerk of the Executive Council in the government of Manitoba in 2020-21. He was campaign manager for the PC Party of Manitoba in the 2016 and 2019 elections.