By John Geddes
Back in the spring of 2016, when images of a voracious forest fire menacing Fort McMurray, Alta., were dominating the news, reporters asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if climate change was to blame. As the unofficial capital of Alberta’s oil sands, Fort McMurray figures prominently in the bitter debate over fossil fuels and global warming, so Trudeau responded carefully. “It’s well-known that one of the consequences of climate change will be a greater prevalence of extreme weather events around the planet,” he allowed, before quickly adding, “Pointing at any one incident and saying, ‘This is because of that’ is neither helpful nor entirely accurate.”
Trudeau drew criticism from some who thought he had missed a chance to highlight the heavy price humanity is already paying for making the planet hotter and drier. But his answer was a pretty standard political dodge at the time. Even Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said “no credible climate scientist” would draw a neat cause-and-effect link between climate change and the Fort Mac fire. Then-NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said, “It’s not time to start laying blame.”
A lot has changed, though, in the past three years. During severe flooding in Eastern Canada this spring, for instance, Trudeau didn’t hesitate to raise the alarm about climate change. “Canadians are already seeing the costs,” he said.
But is the message getting through? According to a poll released early this year by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, fully 74 per cent of Americans say their opinion of climate change has been influenced over the past five years by extreme weather. Polling by EcoAnalytics—a Canadian joint venture of charities, non-profit groups and academics, meant to provide research support to the environmental movement—found that in 2017 and again in 2018 more than half of Canadians thought that climate change was already harming people in Canada, up dramatically from about a third of those polled in 2014.