Warmongers!

If only we could launch air strikes against climate change – Macleans

Tom Mulcair’s fifth question yesterday for Stephen Harper was rather profound.

“How,” the NDP leader wondered of the Prime Minister, “can he face his children and his grandchildren?”

This was not quite the sort of straightforward and simple question for which the leader of the Opposition has made a name for himself. But there was a certain simplicity to it. Perhaps this is the question that should be asked of every MP, on a daily or hourly basis, or, at least, at the end of each debate. Perhaps we could permanently fill the House galleries with groups of 12-year-olds. Maybe that would impose some constant and heavy sense of consequence on the proceedings.

By a vote of 157-134 last night, the House of Commons did do something of great consequence: It endorsed the government’s plan to launch air strikes against targets in Iraq (and maybe Syria). This decision was preceded by two days of pitched debate, which were preceded by two weeks of questioning and fussing. Now Canada gets to sign its name to the latest attempt to confront one of the great existential threats of the 21st century and commit some number of soldiers and material with the intention of accomplishing something.

But Mulcair’s question had nothing to do with that; it was about that other great existential threat, climate change. The query came in the middle of some back-and-forth as to whether the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol constituted a “socialist scheme”—when the NDP leader reminded the House of the Prime Minister’s 2002 description of the accord, some Conservative MPs applauded—and was precipitated by the latest reminder that this country (not merely this government) is only sort of committed to do anything about this particular threat.

Had we figured out how to bomb climate change into oblivion, we probably would have done so by now—at least, unless someone thought to describe the expense of maintaining an army and sending it into battle as a job-killing, multi-billion-dollar war tax. In which case, we might all suddenly become pacifists.