GLOBE AND MAIL: Wednesday, Aug. 28 2002

Jean Chrétien: a great Canadian leader? Many would wince, others snicker. Few could doubt, however, that if he turned long-talked-about objectives — such as defining a new role for Canada in the global economy, defending the vulnerable, and rescuing cities — into lasting achievements, general opinion would sway in his favour. Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol would accomplish these goals and secure our 20th Prime Minister’s place in history.

We must accept economic realities, the corporate elite said. These new realities justified the lowering of environmental standards. But today ordinary Canadians across the country support the agreement to slow climate change. Ratifying Kyoto would proclaim that in a democracy realities are chosen, not dictated.

When economic realities meant cutting waste, Canadians suffered the knife valiantly. Now wasteful consumption of fossil fuels is the target. North Americans are responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gases — five times the global, per-capita average. Suddenly, this inefficiency is vital to our competitiveness. Ratifying Kyoto would say that it isn’t waste only when someone else’s activity is in question.

The corporate elite proclaims realities that tell us to cower in Washington’s shadow. But someone who licks your boots isn’t always your best friend, unless it’s a dog. We marched without permission into the Second World War; without apology into the Suez, Cyprus, and Bosnia. To ratify Kyoto is to act on what we believe, and to tell our wealthy friend there isn’t much point owning everything if it’s sinking and stinks.

Climate decay harms the vulnerable first. They live at the margins: the first to smell the fumes, the last to escape the scorching heat. But there will be no cataclysmic event. The monied, sipping iced cappuccinos at seaside villas, will manage. To ratify Kyoto is to stand with farmers facing drought in Africa, and families cramped in stuffy apartments in Toronto.

The elite says a transition will cost jobs. Oil and gas executives, who have been choking us for almost a century, worry about our ability to cope with change. But when the ranks of the working poor grew and food banks proliferated, it provoked no similar anxiety. To ratify Kyoto is to deal with the difficulties of transition, without letting tycoons oversee the accounting, or control the agenda.
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Our children are among the vulnerable. The same emissions that warm the planet leave them gasping for air. And most of the gases emitted today accumulate in the atmosphere for generations. The alternatives merely delay action: “Make our children pay,” is their motto. To ratify Kyoto is to protect our children and to develop a resource-management policy more sophisticated than sucking fossil fuels from the earth and blowing them into the sky.

Our cities are declining. A breath of fresh air would help. Industry is to blame, and so is the abysmal political failure to get us from A to B in some rational way each morning. But pollution is very much a tale of the power of one — the sum of me-first inclinations, on a you-first reduction schedule. Bush-league leaders encourage this behaviour, deny the problem, then conclude it is too late to act. To ratify Kyoto is to rouse and harness the communal will against this toxic inertia.

Ratifying Kyoto without fear and without delay is a first step to being peacekeepers in a new time of uncertainty: On one side is an insidious force, on the other, every living plant and creature. For Mr. Chrétien, ratifying Kyoto would make him not only a leader of our generation — but a man remembered as one by the next.