A tale of two climates |
One of the hallmarks of modern weather is volatility — rapid swings from one extreme to another, with violent storms in between. By no coincidence, volatility has come to define modern politics, too.
Exhibit A is British Columbia, wracked like no other region in Canada by droughts, floods and forest fires in recent years. As I write, the province is grappling with the second once-in-a-century series of atmospheric rivers to hit us in four years, while the Official Opposition — the BC Conservatives — are being blown apart by hurricane-force winds.
The two storms are closely connected.
It was barely a year ago that BC held the most dramatic provincial election seen here in a generation. BC Conservatives exploded from obscurity to win 44 seats (three shy of a majority) in the Legislature. That was 44 more than they won in the last election when they scored less than two per cent of the popular vote. This time they came within two per cent of winning the popular vote. The leader who took them from decades-long drought to overnight flood was John Rustad, a former BC cabinet minister who’d recently been kicked out of his previous party for denying climate change. As leader of the BC Conservatives, he moderated that position, but just barely.
His previous party — the BC Liberals, now known as BC United — flamed out just before the election and no longer exists. This overnight demise of a party that governed BC from 2001 to 2017 was a political extreme-weather event in its own right. Meanwhile, the party of climate denial came within an inch of forming government.
Like their federal counterparts, BC Conservatives made hay on the provincial carbon tax — never mind that Rustad’s former party was the one that inaugurated said tax. As the impacts of climate change kicked in, from catastrophic weather to inflation, Conservatives flipped the script; any effort to rein in climate change, from carbon tax to pipeline opposition,........