As Canadians abandon the climate battle, will eco-terrorism rise?
Who can ignore our Mother Earth screaming out in pain?
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When it comes to the War on Climate Change, I have some bad news. Canadian society has decided to join the war…on the side of climate change.
In Mark Carney’s literal first move upon becoming Prime Minister of Canada, he removed the consumer carbon tax. Despite the carbon tax still being law at the time, he abused the power the law gives cabinet to adjust the rate to simply set it to 0%.
An elegant policy, the consumer carbon tax charged people more for living a higher-pollution lifestyle. Since I live beside a metro station and take an electrified train most places, my carbon tax was very low!
But oil junkies who need to drive their SUV just to get from their couch to their washroom to take a piss? Well, they paid a fair bit more, as they should! And combined with a rebate, people like me who are better than average actually got money back, making a profit on being good environmental stewards!
Anyway, that’s gone now! Because Canadian society decided that nobody should have to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions! And surely, a society of individualistic pricks who give their neighbours zero consideration is a society that will last a long time, right?
Right?
It’s not just the carbon tax. Mark Carney has steamrolled a lot of anti-environmental actions through Parliament in his short time as Prime Minister, and he’s shifted the Overton Window and given NDP Premiers to the left of him license to do the same.
Carney has spoken to the press about the need for new pipelines, to deliver “decarbonized” oil, which is more accurately called snake oil. It is the same horseshit as when Donald Trump talks about “clean coal”; there is no such thing! Carney is engaging in blatant lies to manufacture public consent to pump out more oil.
And now, the CEOs of Ford Canada, Stellantis Canada, GM Canada, and the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association have all met with Carney, to issue a demand that he remove Trudeau’s electric vehicle mandate, which would start at 20% of cars next year in 2026, and very gradually slide up to 100% by 2035. Gas-electric hybrids would also remain fully legal for sale under this plan, which defeats any argument that it would be too cumbersome for people in more rural areas.
Mind you, the American companies make this demand of us after Stellantis stabbed Canada in the back, moving production to the United States after a massive financial gift from the Federal and Ontario governments, subsidies that are quite frankly bad economics which will take twenty years just to break even for Canadian taxpayers.
Now, Canada and the United States do have a problem with uptake of EVs over gas-powered cars…but this is a uniquely North American problem, explainable by having overpriced and oversized cars (see my piece on banning the Ford F-150, and Japan’s delightfully more useful and compact Suzuki Carry).
In 2024, about half of all new cars sold in China were EVs. For those of you unfamiliar with math, China’s population of roughly ~1.4 billion people is much bigger than Canada’s population of only 40 million. And yet unlike Canadian car manufacturers, companies like BYD seem to have a much easier time building EVs.
It’s not just about building a lot more of them, it’s about doing it really cheap. Chinese EVs are so cheap, in fact, that in a childish fit of arrogant stupidity, claiming it was “unfair” that China’s cars were so much cheaper and better than ours and that they must somehow be “cheating”, Canada placed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, to protect the very same Ford and Stellantis and GM that have repeatedly fucked us over.
Because of that, a small five-door hatchback like BYD’s Seagull EV with about 300 kilometres of range, which should only cost $14,600 CAD, is now $29,200 CAD post-tariff. And yet this is still a better price than what the American manufacturers will give you.
It is clear at this point that climate change and environmental protection have descended to an extremely low priority. Various lobby groups across numerous industries have successfully pushed Mark Carney to remove the safety limiters on their high-pollution activities, in order to obtain greater profits from exploiting the Canadian people.
And now, a majority of the populace says they support new pipeline projects, in addition to existing ones. Every single year, cities like Toronto set new heat and humidity records, with every heat wave causing more and more hospitalizations and deaths.
But Canadians do not care. They are so caught up in the throes of their addiction to oil and gas that their own cognitive dissonance does not allow them to comprehend what their pollution is doing to our planet. The public is now fully complicit in the murder of our planet.
So what can environmentalists do, when the battle for public opinion is lost? The politicians and the voters have chosen to do the wrong thing. They have chosen to accelerate the destruction of our Mother Earth. What can mere words accomplish for climate defenders in such a scenario?
I am not happy to be discussing this kind of situation. For a time, I really did have faith that Canadians were on the right path, that we were sincerely working to reduce emissions and protect the environment and leave a better world behind.
But I was naive. I was wrong. We live in a country of greedy fools. In a real society, the old plant trees so that it will grow, and eventually their grandchildren will sit under the shade. In Canada, we rip out the trees for profit, and gleefully wave the cash in the faces of our grandchildren as they weep.
The truth is that regardless of public opinion, and regardless of what any government decrees, climate change is real. Fossil fuels are poison, and every barrel we take out of the ground is another stab of the knife into the world that birthed us.
How can any human being, who still remembers how to be human, ignore Mother Earth screaming out in pain? Who can ignore her pleas as the worst of our species torture and mutilate her?
It is these people of conscience, these souls who through a miracle are not weighed down by gravity, who will take matters into their own hands. They will not accept a government or a society which demands the death of our planet to fuel capitalist profits.
Quite the opposite, they will likely engage in sabotage and vandalism to disable and decommission the fossil fuel infrastructure that poisons Mother Earth. It’s certainly what books like Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline are already radicalizing people into doing. In the author’s own words:
“Things have shifted, in the sense that, if you know something about the climate crisis, you know that the situation is extremely dire. And that gives you a kind of sympathy for the idea that some people might want to take things into their own hands, or at least a measure of understanding of the frustration.”
The desire of Carney’s government and the Canadian people to grease the wheels of profit and suffocate Mother Earth will do immense damage to everything we hold dear. Am I expected to be critical of those who stand against the onslaught?
Call it climate defence, or call it eco-terrorism, but I don’t care. This is a battle for the trees and the oceans, the people and the animals, a battle for life itself. And in that battle, I know which side I’ve picked.
Do you?