Alberta deserves a climate election

Well, so much for spring in Alberta. After a few days of unseasonably warm temperatures that melted the last pieces of ice and snow, the bill came due in the form of wildfire smoke settling over Calgary, Edmonton and most of the rest of the province.

It provides a useful reminder of what’s really at stake in this provincial election. Yes, properly funding and running our health-care system matters. And yes, having the right mix of tax policies is important. But at the end of the day, these are secondary concerns, ones whose importance will continue to fade with the passage of time. Whether Albertans like it or not, this is a climate change election, one where the outcome will determine whether we (and by extension, Canada) try to move ahead with ambitious climate policy or bury our collective head back in the tar sands and continue ignoring the change that’s so clearly afoot.

Part of the problem is the NDP’s unwillingness to clarify the stakes for voters. From a purely tactical perspective, it probably makes sense to focus all of their energy on Danielle Smith and her litany of gaffes, goofs and outright knee-slappers. The UCP leader’s bizarre opinions on everything from the pandemic to policing are rich grist for the NDP’s mill, and they’ve done well to remind Alberta voters what they’d really be getting with four years of a Smith government.

That’s the safe play, anyways. But as the latest batch of polling shows, it still isn’t moving the needle far enough toward the NDP in places like Calgary. For whatever reason, there are a lot of voters who seem to be OK with the things Smith’s said in the past if it comes attached to a tax cut and the promise of low taxes to come.

The riskier approach, but perhaps the one with more political upside, involves telling Albertans the truth. By failing to take the climate crisis seriously, and pretending it can either be avoided or ignored, today’s voters are effectively imposing a tax on future citizens — including their children and grandchildren. Perhaps the NDP could show Albertans what that might look like and how it could be avoided.

They could also tell the voters about the economic upside associated with riding the wave of technological change that keeps building around the world. There are jobs to be had, businesses to be built, and wealth to be created in the work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and scaling up the alternatives. In the process, we might even be able to clean up the mess of unreclaimed oil wells and tailings ponds that’s been getting larger and larger, one that could employ thousands of people for many, many years. We could even turn some of those old wells into new batteries for renewable energy, as one company has proposed, or pull lithium out of the briny water that’s pooled in the province’s depleted oil reservoirs.

It would be nice if we could actually have a proper conversation about this. In a more perfect world, we’d have an entire televised debate dedicated to a discussion of climate policy, with experts at the ready to fact-check any statements that run afoul of reality. Instead, we might get a question or two in tonight’s debate — if we’re lucky.

This is one of the fundamental problems with our politics right now, and it extends well beyond Alberta’s borders. For all the time, energy and emotion people pour into political debates, they’re rarely discussing the things that actually matter. Instead of a meaningful conversation about foreign interference in Canada’s democracy, whether it’s from China or other malign actors like Russia, we get the rending of garments over a new passport and the images that are — or aren’t — inside its pages. And instead of talking about the enormous impact a changing climate and the global response to it will have on Alberta’s very way of life in the future, we get bogged down in what was said and done by each leader in the past.

It reminds me of Logan Roy’s withering comment to his children in one of the last moments on the television show Succession: in Alberta, and in Canada, we are not serious people. I long for the day when that changes, but I’m not exactly holding my breath right now — and that’s not just because of the wildfire smoke.

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