Dan McTeague, a former Liberal MP and president of Canadians for Affordable Energy, told The Epoch Times that federal efforts to stop climate change are themselves dubious, expensive, and job-threatening, and that the adaptation strategy is no better.
“How many more plans are they going to unveil? And how much is it going to run us to prove absolutely nothing? Other than virtue signalling, it’s a very expensive exercise in futility. This is a government that has a lot of money apparently, a lot of our money, to spend and throw around,” McTeague said.
“When will someone finally call this charade for what it is? It is very much a significant, colossal movement of public funding to achieve absolutely squat.”
McTeague said Canadians should be skeptical of scientists who have become political and politicians who are “fake scientists.” Failure to do so, he said, will drive down the standard of living for Canadians.
He notes that the hyperbole around the issue, such as claims that climate change is “killing the planet,” is not based in science but “on the willingness of elites—globally, and those here in Canada—to push something that they can’t control and for which there is no basis in fact.”
Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, said that “hurricanes, floods, and wildfires ... are only going to intensify” across Canada.
McTeague said good forest management only makes sense, while building housing in flood plains will always carry risks.
“Some of this is extraordinarily simple. The rest of it, of course, is a question of how we adapt to weather. We’ve been doing a damn good job of it for the past few hundred years anyways,” he said.
Worthy Goals, Ideological Approach
Malcolm Bird, a University of Winnipeg political science professor, said the climate strategy wraps an ideological approach around worthy goals.“The aims and efforts of this are reasonable. These are all good things: resilience, infrastructure, health and well-being, nature, and the economy,” Bird said in an interview.
“[But] the government is in the paradigm that there’s a causative link between carbon production and climate change, and then more disasters, and then that is causing other mental health issues and the loss of culture, and all these other things tied up with the social justice causes that the Liberal government is quite concerned with.”
First among the strategy’s four guiding principles is to “respect jurisdictions and uphold Indigenous rights,” while the second is to “advance equity and environmental justice.” The principles also forbid “maladaptation,” which might include the use of more fossil fuels. An analysis of the 619 people who died in the heat dome in British Columbia in June 2021 highlighted the issue of “intersecting vulnerabilities,” such as being over 70 years old, living alone, or living in low-income neighbourhoods.
“Even if Canada stopped making carbon tomorrow, it still wouldn’t make a difference in world aggregate carbon production,” he said.
“Adaptation provides tangible benefits to Canada. Now, nobody’s going to write you a thank-you letter for building a nice firebreak in the forest that stops a fire, or for a bigger dike that saves you from flooding or to build the floodway, ... but it’s going to save you from having a catastrophe, which you’re going to have to deal with.”
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