Steve MacLellan

Half the job is showing up, I’m sure you’ve heard it said. So when it comes to political leadership, what are we to make of it when this most basic of requirements is shrugged off? Where were Canada’s leaders when we declared a national climate emergency?

An emergency in any other context would signal, at minimum, a need for the following: 1) an alarm, or repeated alarms to give notice to the public; 2) an immediate mandate to respective agencies to initiate plans and procedures for an urgent response; and 3) deployment and action of expert teams.

And yet nothing in present-day Canada even hints at the fact that we are in the midst of an emergency. Instead, on June 17, 2019—the day the House of Commons passed a motion declaring a national climate emergency—Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and Andrew Scheer were all at the Raptors parade in Toronto, cheering and smiling for the cameras rather than tackling the less glitzy job of public policy.

More egregious, though, is that the party leaders of the Liberals, NDP, and Conservatives did not even vote.