Pandemic response shows we can tackle climate change, too

Sept. 8, 2020

On Aug. 22, Vancouver immigration officers quietly deported a Danish journalist making a film about opposition to the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX). He was told that, during COVID, media is not an essential service.

As a public health physician and scientist blocking the TMX, I would disagree.

The pandemic has, understandably, caused many Canadians to forget the TMX and the threat it poses. But a lifetime of research suggests to me that we cannot look away. Sadly, the action of the immigration officers seemed to be aimed at helping us do just that.

Kristian Lindhardt, the deportee, prepared carefully for his return to Canada and seemed to have everything required.

He was also qualified. Since 2014, he had got to know Canada and more recently invested months covering protests, talking to residents along the pipeline route and seeking an interview with the federal minister of environment. Jonathan Wilkinson declined, repeatedly, but many others were ready to contribute, including me.

One of Lindhardt’s first stops, post-quarantine, was to be a TMX blockade in Burnaby, B.C. that I initiated in August. I never expected to find myself living in a tree at 63, but there I was: 25 metres off the ground in a grove of cottonwoods, trying to stop the construction.

For 30 years, I’ve been studying and working on policies related to climate change. Like other scientists and medical experts, I’ve spent those years informing politicians about the risks climate change poses to human health, from drinking water quality to asthma and other diseases.

I used to think our message was sinking in. Last year, Parliament declared a climate emergency and Trudeau’s Liberals promised to get to net-zero emissions. But then, pressured by the oil industry, the government bought the TMX pipeline project from Texas fossil fuel company Kinder Morgan. The pipeline is to facilitate increased oil extraction and exports from the oilsands — already Canada’s fastest-rising source of emissions.

At the current rate, as carbon emissions increase globally, the Earth’s average surface temperature will likely increase by more than 2 degrees C by 2060 — a threshold that most scientists agree would be catastrophic.

Building a pipeline in the middle of this climate crisis is like walking into a crowded supermarket without a mask, knowing you have COVID.

The federal government’s response to the pandemic has been swift and effective. We need to respond with an equal sense of urgency to climate change. Here and now is the right place and time to rethink TMX.

Canadian media have largely forgotten this story, making the Danish filmmaker’s work all the more essential. Pity our border authorities disagreed.