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FORUM: The heat is on (Summer 2024)

October 15th, 2024 · No Comments

The Ontario government is AWOL on the existential threat that is climate change

By Jessica Bell

This year has been a defining moment in our global climate crisis because the devastating and life-threatening impacts of climate change have arrived in Canada. It’s no longer an inconvenience that affects someone else; it affects us.

This summer the extreme weather event is heat. Lengthy extreme heat waves are making life a misery for people without A/C, mostly renters. I worry about the low-income seniors and vulnerable people living alone. People are dying of heat stroke.

Workers are sweating it out in dangerous heat, from firefighters to farmers, to construction workers. Heat stroke can strike fast. Many workers are not able to refuse work because they can’t risk being fired. 

Our public services, energy grid, and infrastructure are not ready to withstand our electricity needs during an extreme and lengthy heat wave. Demand on our electricity grid reached a record high this June during an unprecedented heat wave that occurred early in the summer.  Our future will look like what’s happening in Houston, where 800,000 people are without power during the insufferable heat.

Because we have delayed taking serious action on climate, humanity now faces three huge challenges at once: we must get to net-zero emissions as soon as possible; we must take on the herculean task of preparing ourselves to survive in a world marred by extreme weather events and ecological disruption, from bolstering our healthcare system to making our farming and food sector more resilient; and we need to do all this while coping with frequent crises, like entire towns being razed by wildfires or epic rainfalls that endanger lives, bring our city to a standstill, and flood our roads, stations, and basements, just like we recently experienced. 

Given the high stakes, it’s tough to watch the Ontario government’s clumsy, reluctant, and contradictory response to the climate crisis. To be fair, the Conservatives are investing in new transit lines and the electric vehicle manufacturing sector.  They’re obsessed, however, with opposing any price on carbon to incentivize people and industry to go green. You can’t go through a question period without the Conservatives asking their MPP colleagues to “axe the tax.”

 We need a response to the climate crisis that matches the enormity of the challenge. That will involve replacing the Conservatives’ car-centric sprawl approach to planning with a sustainable planning mandate, where we build more employment zones, homes and services in existing towns and cities.  

 We need to invest in electric vehicle, transit, cycling and walking infrastructure.  

We need to protect our farmland, Greenbelt, and forests, and restore power to our conservation authorities to ensure we don’t build on floodplains.

It’s time to invest in a large building retrofit program and upgrade our building code so all existing and new buildings and homes are resilient, green, and well-made. 

It means greening our electricity grid, investing in energy efficiency, wind, and solar, and moving away from gas-powered gas plants.

It means bringing in rules to protect people from extreme heat, such as a minimum temperature standard for rental homes in summer and protections for workers in extreme heat. We have solutions.

When I canvass, I occasionally meet residents who feel despair, grief, and a sense of defeat about the climate crisis and what we can do to usefully respond to the many crises we face. 

These feelings are common, especially since so many of us are exhausted from the pandemic times.

I am inspired by the work of Joanna Macey, an Australian activist who helps people feel and channel their grief and despair about the world and recommit to useful social change. She writes books with titles like Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy.

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth,” says Joanna Macey, “is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”   

These are words for hope and for taking useful action.  

Jessica Bell is the MPP for University-Rosedale and the Official Opposition’s Housing Critic. She can be reached at jbell@ndp.on.ca or 416-535-7206. 

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Tags: Annex · Opinion

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