A government versus its people on climate change

Stephen Leahy:

The Canadian public is completely at odds with its own government on climate change, a new survey revealed Friday.

A large majority of Canadians want urgent action on climate, including redirecting military expenditures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In sharp contrast, the Stephen Harper-led Conservative minority government used parliamentary trickery to kill pending legislation to reduce emissions that had already been passed by the majority of Canada’s elected representatives.

“This is a real low point in Canadian democracy,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria.

“It’s an abuse of democracy like we’ve never seen before in this country,” Weaver told IPS.

Canada has a multi-party parliamentary system. In May, a majority of Canada’s elected members of parliament (MPs) passed Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, committing the country to a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. The only reason Bill C-311 passed is that the anti-climate-action Harper government has just one-third of the votes.

After Bill C-311 was passed, unelected senators in the Canadian Senate were supposed to review and debate its merits and then pass the bill into law as per usual. The Senate’s role is to give pending legislation a second look, offer suggested changes, but not overturn what elected MPs have already voted for.

Instead, Conservative senators successfully engineered a snap vote Tuesday night to kill the bill without notice and without debate when many other senators were not present.

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