Air quality a big part of living well - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

There was surprising news recently that, in 2023, some Canadian cities had among the worst air quality in the world, as smoke from the worst forest fires in memory filled the air of southern cities. And already there are warnings about the upcoming year from authorities in many provinces that the situation may be repeated.

 

Climate change, our own and that imported from larger countries, hit us hard last year, but how quickly we forget. Against this is the campaign by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and several premiers in opposition to the federal government’s carbon tax.
It’s a strange thing about humans: we quickly accept the good things as part of what’s due to us and concentrate on the things that we see as standing in the way of what we deserve to have.

 

And so, with the federal government’s carbon tax scheduled to go up three cents a litre on April 1, it’s become a convenient target for Poilievre and several premiers to complain about the cost. 

 

The federal government may argue that, because of the rebates every Canadian receives, 80 per cent of us are actually better off, but these government transfers, every three months, generally slip quietly into our bank accounts, while every time we fill up the tank we see the carbon tax pushing the price up.

 

That’s generally the way it was supposed to work, of course: we were supposed to see the cost of adding pollution and feel the urge to cut back to, for instance, buy an electric-powered vehicle and avoid buying gas. The problem is that with vocal critics of the carbon tax like Poilievre, we tend to see only the bad side and never the good.

 

Poilievre promises that when he becomes Prime Minister, he will get rid of the carbon tax. He hasn’t been nearly as vocal about cancelling the carbon tax credits we receive.

 

Of course, the federal government opened the door for the complaints, and the duplicity, when it sought to help voters in the Liberal-friendly Maritimes, by dropping the carbon tax on furnace fuel oil, but not cutting the carbon tax rebate.

 

Since the changes in the Maritimes, other businesses that are hurt by the carbon tax, and other premiers, have chipped in with their own requests for exemptions from the carbon tax. The federal government has ignored them.

 

Premiers of oil-producing provinces like Alberta’s Danielle Smith, are on the other extreme, expounding the belief that burning carbon is not a problem. In fact, there were Albertans, so opposed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, that when forest fires broke out last year, they suggested he had arranged for them to be purposely lit to support his opposition to burning carbon. If so, he was a busy man, setting fires in forested areas of most provinces.

 

Experts are already warning us to prepare for a repeat in 2024. With warmer than normal winter temperatures from El Niño and less moisture during the fall, winter and spring seasons, experts even say that some of last year’s fires have remained smouldering underground all winter and will reignite to start new fires come spring. And spring will be earlier because of a shorter winter!

 

Despite being the world’s second-largest country as far as territory goes, Canada, though growing, is far from the largest source of problems. Our own pollution alone did not produce the conditions that promoted the polluting northern forest fires , even if we are one of the world’s largest oil producers.

 

But we can do better - including you and me. On one hand, we’ve improved greatly. Most rural homes used to heat by burning wood from our own woodlots - recycling, to some extent, but still polluting. We switched to coal, again, very polluting, then furnace oil and natural gas. But, as we caused less pollution in one direction, we caused more in another as we bought more and more where we used to grow or raise most of our own food and preserve it. 

 

Many of us travel much more than we did a couple of generations ago, causing more pollution from jets and cars. (At the same time more people live in tents than at any time since the Great Depression.)

 

Looking from afar, last year’s air quality figures show Canadians not just as the problem, but also as the victims of climate-altering conditions created in a larger part by the U.S. and Europe. We can do better, however. We live so much better than we did in the 1950s, yet we also suffered the worst air quality last summer I’ve ever experienced.

 

We lost hundreds of thousands of acres of valuable woodlands to last year’s fires, while we had the worst air conditions ever. We can certainly do a lot better - and stop complaining about incentives to pollute less.