Exercise #4

February 27, 2022 By: TAORUI LIU

Article – Poll: 1 in 5 Canadian Conservatives not concerned ‘at all’ about climate change

The article discusses the extent to which the country’s conservatives show less concern for the global warming threat. It is based on a recent report by Politico and Morning Consult indicating that left-leaning political parties seemed to have more concern for climate change relative to their right-wing counterparts. Right-leaning parties find the carbon price policy too much and unnecessary, especially to farmers. Hence, they are seeking to scrape it off with no solid replacement plan. A whopping 20% of the respondents in the poll indicated that they do not know whose responsibility it is to mitigate climate change.[1] This proportion of the population is a vindication of the knowledge gap existing in society concerning global warming and climate change. The good news is that 37% of Canadians stated that they were taking fewer flights to reduce the impact of global warming.[2] It is worth noting that the transport sector is the second-biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

I am not ideally political. However, I find the conservatives wrong in their assertions regarding the climate change issue. I think claiming that climate change is a non-existent threat is being dishonest with oneself. Signs of environmental degradation are all over for everyone to see. Civil disobedience can have a significant impact on climate change legislation. In September 2021, there were mass demonstrations in Montreal to protest climate change. The message relayed to the public and policymakers was that there was no other planet for people to go to if the earth becomes too warm. They sought to have stricter carbon tax policies, which would instill discipline in how firms emit greenhouse gases. Legislators and policymakers dread civil disobedience because it is an indication of their ineffectiveness as leaders. Hence, the hope is that the leaders will impose these taxes on corporations. If they fail to meet this expectation, the public can easily replace them with another set of leaders who are sensitive to the climate change issue. For this reason, I find civil disobedience an important tool in the fight against reckless negligence of leaders’ civil duty to be the caretakers of the Canadian and global environment.

[1]. Lum, Zi-Ann. 2022. “Poll: 1 in 5 Canadian Conservatives not concerned ‘at all’ about climate change.” Politico. February 09. Accessed February 10, 2022.

[2]. Ibid 8