What Leadership Should Do Now (Part 3 of 3)

This is the final piece in a three-part series on climate resilience and Canadian leadership.

Over the last two parts of this series, I've written about what wildfire season has become in this country — the scale of it, the cost of it, and the gap between what our leaders say and what they fund.

Doug Ford budgeting less this year than he spent last, even as fires outpace last season. Mark Carney cutting climate science while fast-tracking a $90-billion rail line. Danielle Smith deflecting on climate while chasing pipeline wealth. British Columbia announcing old-growth protections that mostly weren't. Manitoba's Wab Kinew, to his credit, actually publishing an honest account of what went wrong.

None of that was only critique. It would be too easy to end there.

What Leadership Should Do Now

If proactive leadership means anything, it means doing these things now, not five years from now.

Convene an emergency meeting of the relevant ministers — environment, natural resources, public safety, Indigenous services — before this fire season ends, not after it. Wildfire deserves the same standing table that trade and defence already get.

Stop the cuts to climate science and environmental monitoring, and reverse them. This is not the year to shrink the agencies that tell us where the next fire, flood or collapse is coming from. It is the year to grow them.

Require every province to set aside a fixed, protected share of its budget for climate resilience and wildfire prevention — not whatever's left over after everything else is funded, and not a number a premier can quietly shrink the way Ontario just did. A floor, not a suggestion.

Audit whether provinces and municipalities are actually respecting their own official plans — the documents that already govern how water, forests and land use are supposed to be managed and where development is and isn't supposed to happen. Most of this accountability doesn't require new legislation. It requires enforcing the rules already on the books instead of quietly weakening the bodies meant to enforce them, the way Ontario did to its conservation authorities.

Make every province publish an after-action review of its wildfire season, the way Manitoba already does voluntarily. If Kinew's government can be honest about what went wrong without being forced to, there's no excuse for the rest not to be required to.

Filter every major project — Alto, the pipelines, the LNG terminals, the mines, the hydro project near Iqaluit — through climate and resilience criteria before approval, not after. Not some projects. All of them. Climate change is not a factor to weigh anymore. It is the baseline every project has to be built on top of.

Carney has made his case for new pipelines plainly: diversify Canadian oil exports away from a U.S. relationship he's called a weakness rather than a strength under Trump's tariffs, and end the security risk of western oil having to flow through American territory just to reach Ontario and Quebec. That argument deserves a hearing.

But it should have to reckon honestly with what it's asking Canadians to accept: a single new pipeline carrying a million barrels a day would add 20 to 28 megatonnes of emissions a year, not offset by the carbon capture project it's supposed to be paired with. A bitumen spill in northern Alberta this past April, near a major aquifer, was a reminder that this isn't theoretical — bitumen scorches soil on contact and persists in the ecosystem far longer than conventional crude, and it happened without a single tanker involved. Environmental groups on the coast put it plainly: rerouting a pipeline doesn't remove the risk, it just decides who inherits it.

A single hydro project doesn't buy a government the right to call itself climate-resilient while cutting the budgets that actually protect the country — Ottawa can't keep offering it as the answer every time someone raises the environmental cost of everything else. Every project on the list should have to clear the same bar, not be waved through because Ottawa has decided speed matters more than scrutiny.

If one of my students handed in an essay this contradictory — cut the smoke detectors, fund the addition — I'd hand it back for revision. Somehow it survives as national policy instead.

We wouldn't cut the budget for smoke detectors halfway through a house fire. We wouldn't sell the truck to pay for gas. Canada's forests, water and stable climate are not just scenery; they are the resources everything else — the mines, the pipelines, the export terminals — depends on. Burn the house down chasing profit from what's inside it, and there's nothing left to profit from. And that's before counting what unchecked wildfire smoke, worsening air quality and repeated climate disasters will cost in hospital beds, respiratory illness and long-term public health spending — a bill this country will eventually pay whether or not it chooses to see it coming.

Redirect discretionary capital — starting, yes, with a hard look at Alto's $60-to-$90-billion price tag. It's structured as a public-private partnership, which sounds like it takes taxpayers off the hook. It doesn't.

Ottawa remains the owner of the asset, has already committed over $4 billion of confirmed public money to get it this far, and by independent analysis, will likely be backstopping the rest if ridership doesn't hit the ambitious numbers the projections assume. Redirect that kind of exposure toward community resilience instead: FireSmart at scale, forest restoration, climate-adapted infrastructure, and the kind of local preparedness my aunt already practices without being asked.

Do it now. Not as a talking point for the next election, and not as a response to the next Kelowna. Now, while the smoke is still in the air.

I met a man this summer, back home visiting his aging parents in Newfoundland after years of working pipelines out of Cambridge, Ontario. Six months a year away from his wife and four kids, because if she worked too, there'd be nothing left after daycare. He wasn't angry at anyone. He was just tired, and glad to be near his granddaughter for a while. I think about him whenever this debate gets reduced to a slogan on either side — for the pipeline, against the pipeline — because he's neither. He's just a person the policy runs straight through, the same way a fire does. None of what I'm asking for here is against people like him. It's against the idea that his life, and the fires threatening someone else's, have to be treated as separate problems with separate budgets.

None of this happens because a government wakes up and decides to. It happens because enough people make it harder to ignore.

If you want to push this from where you are: call or email your MP's office directly and ask them, by name, whether they support restoring the ECCC and DFO cuts — a constituency office has to log and respond to that, and enough of them add up.

Start or sign a House of Commons e-petition; it needs 500 signatures to be tabled, but once it is, the government is legally required to give a written, public response within 45 days. That's a real answer, not a form letter.

Provincially, the same applies to your MPP or MNA, especially on anything touching your municipality's official plan — those get debated and approved at public council meetings that almost no one attends, which is exactly why they're where quiet decisions get made. Show up to one.

What Are We Willing to Protect?

When I think about my aunt checking the horse trailers each summer, I don't think about fear anymore. I think about responsibility. She isn't predicting disaster. She is preparing for possibility. There is wisdom in that.

Governments cannot stop every wildfire. They cannot prevent every flood or every storm. What they can do is reduce risk. They can invest before catastrophe forces their hand, strengthen communities before they become vulnerable, and design infrastructure that anticipates tomorrow's climate rather than yesterday's. They can support Indigenous stewardship, expand FireSmart programs, restore forests, strengthen scientific research and weave emergency planning into every level of government.

None of those investments are particularly dramatic. Most will never become campaign slogans. Their success will rarely be visible. That is precisely the point. The strongest governments are not simply those that respond well to emergencies. They are the ones that leave Canadians better prepared for the emergencies that have yet to come.

That is the challenge facing every province and every municipality. And today, it is one of the defining challenges facing Prime Minister Mark Carney's government — not because wildfires are the only issue before us, but because they reveal something larger: whether we are capable of governing for the future instead of reacting to the present.

History has a way of remembering moments like this. Not because of the disasters themselves, but because of the choices that followed — the investments we made, the warnings we ignored, the courage we found, or failed to find, to act before the next emergency arrived.

When the wind changes direction, every family eventually asks the same question: what can we save?

Perhaps the better question is this: what are we willing to protect before it is at risk?

Canada has always understood itself through the places that sustain us — our forests, our rivers, our coastlines, our North. Stewardship has never been only about protecting landscapes. It has been about protecting the people, communities and opportunities those landscapes make possible.

Climate resilience is, ultimately, an expression of that stewardship. It is the decision to think beyond the next election. To invest before disaster. To build communities that can withstand uncertainty. To leave our children a country that is stronger because we had the foresight to prepare.

Maybe that's why I'm still optimistic, even after all of this. I've lived long enough to watch Canadians change their minds about all kinds of things. We buckle our children into seatbelts without thinking about it. We don't light cigarettes in restaurants anymore. We don't shrug at drinking and driving the way we once did.

None of those changes happened overnight, and none of them happened because we became different people. They happened because enough of us decided the old way no longer made sense, and we said so, together, until the people in charge had no choice but to listen.

Climate resilience asks something similar of us. Not perfection. Not panic. Just the willingness to keep learning, to hold our leaders accountable, and to keep showing up for one another the way Canadians always seem to when the smoke finally reaches someone's doorstep.

Resilience is not measured by how well we rebuild after disaster. It is measured by what we had the wisdom to protect before disaster arrived.

That, perhaps, is the true test of leadership.

*This concludes the three-part series.

This is the first series under a new home on this site: The Stewardship Essays, where the question isn't whether something is good politics, but whether it's good stewardship. Next up, I'll be looking at the major projects now moving through Ottawa's fast-track approval process — one at a time, through the same lens: who benefits, who pays, and what we stand to lose.