I was racking my brain about what to base this editorial on when Conservative Northern Affairs critic Bob Zimmer dropped a hot potato in my in-box.
Zimmer was boasting about his motion in the House of Commons this week calling on the federal government to put an immediate stop to the carbon tax in the NWT.
In the news release, he doesn’t mention the reason why the carbon tax for home heating fuel is still in effect is because a previous GNWT cabinet decided it was best to make their own carbon tax, spend a bunch of money on “poor us” advertising and separate Northerners from the federal program. If they had just let the federal tax approach take effect, people who use oil to heat their homes in the North would be enjoying the same reduction of home heating oil that Atlantic Canadians have likely already forgotten about.
In other words, the motion meant nothing, did nothing and basically ate up time in the House that could have been used to resolve real problems — instead of appealing to individuals so caught up in the minute to minute of their own lives they actually can be convinced goods and services were actually cheap at some point in the last half century. I remember adults complaining about how expensive everything was when I was growing up in the 1980s and that’s never changed.
Zimmer ends his release by referring to his party as “common sense” Conservatives. While cleaning up my morning coffee I involuntarily spat out, I was immediately reminded of one our civilization’s greatest minds and his thoughts on “common sense.”
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18” —Albert Einstein.
In my time on this heating rock of ours I’ve found this to be absolutely true. Aside from basic survival instincts, such as don’t walk off a cliff, I have found it’s far more common for people to not have anything I would describe as “sense.” Sense implies awareness. Most people don’t react to something until it’s right in their faces.
Let’s apply some “sense” to the current situation. Yellowknife and Hay River were just hit with a deluge of frozen rain. I’m sure a lone car accident will cost a driver significantly more than paying carbon tax does. British Columbia and Yukon are both on avalanche watch after rain fell on them in biblical proportions — last I checked washed-out roads were extraordinarily expensive. Here in the Beaufort Delta, we’re pretty much guaranteed flooding this spring given the extreme snowfall we’ve gotten thanks to the warmer-than-normal winter. The ice roads to Dettah and Aklavik only just opened, upwards of a month late. That’s an entire extra month of paying for goods to be flown in, thanks to climate change.
Enterprise is still largely uninhabited, months after much of the territory had to be evacuated because of climate change-caused wildfires. In Nova Scotia, people were literally washed away to their deaths by sudden heavy rains.
“Common sense” would dictate that these problems are going to continue and get worse, making things more and more expensive unless we can slow the rate of global warming.
I must not be common, because my sense suggests to me being alive is far more valuable than saving a few dollars on my gas fill-ups. My sense suggests to me the well-being of the coming generations supersedes any inconvenience our own must endure to fix the mistakes of past generations. My sense suggests that the price of gas is going to continue to increase, regardless of what taxes the government applies to it, because that’s how capitalism works.
Here’s some sense which really should be common but sadly isn’t: aside from a select few people in remote parts of the world who know how to live on the land, our entire food system is based on a post-ice age global climate. Every piece of meat, cheese, bread, vegetable or fruit you eat is dependent on rain falling on the right part of the world, at the right time, in the right quantity. Change how the heat is distributed across the planet, you change where and how the rain falls. If rain doesn’t fall on your crops in a specific way, you don’t have a harvest. If you don’t have a harvest, you have a famine.
And then things get really bad.
We have been lucky so far that climate change has mainly washed out roads and damaged cities, leaving our food supply mostly intact. But to paraphrase a Cree proverb popularized by Greenpeace, if we continue to pretend we’re following “common sense” there will likely come a point in time when we, or our children, or our grandchildren, discover money cannot be eaten.