TorontoToday received the following letter to the editor from reader Gabriel Blanc, a former youth organizer for the Green Party of Canada.
Liberal Party of Canada leadership contestants Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have announced that they would not support a consumer price on carbon. This only confirms what many climate activists had long suspected: that every major party would turn its back on pollution pricing.
This was a coup for the fossil fuel industry, via Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre. Through his “Axe the Tax” rhetoric, he was successful in framing climate action in opposition to affordability.
The Liberals ultimately failed to convince the voting public that their revenue-neutral carbon pricing policy was not the culprit in the affordability crisis. NDP premiers barely put up a fight.
People who care about fighting climate change will need to regroup and re-evaluate our approach. Climate policy must become associated with tangible improvements in people’s quality of life.
Urban policy provides one avenue to do this. Investment in public transit decreases emissions from cars while benefiting all commuters. Environmental Defence Canada has done extensive research showing how gentle density can decrease rents while protecting conservation land like Ontario’s Greenbelt. Cities like Toronto prove daily that we can live more sustainably by sharing space.
Climate activists lost this round. But policy change, even for a crisis as urgent as climate change, is a marathon rather than a sprint. By investing in livable, sustainable cities, people will begin to make the association between climate action and their favourite parts of urban life. We can build our new constituency from the ground up.
When all is said and done, it will be much harder for politicians to “axe the trains.”
Gabriel Blanc
Toronto
