— Originally published in The Hill Times, May 6, 2026 —
As the Climate Alarms Ring More Loudly, the Government Shuts out the Noise
There was a time when the Green Party was one in a crowd of parties calling for climate action. No longer. The Liberals have reversed their boldest programmes, the consumer carbon tax, the oil and gas emissions cap, the home energy retrofit funding, and the list goes on.
We were never on track to meet the climate target we adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement to hold global average temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the global average temperature in the time before the Industrial Revolution. In fact we have never come close to any of our targets- whether 1997 Kyoto (adopted by Jean Chretien) or 2009 Copenhagen (adopted by Stephen Harper). We do not slide backward as much as rush to reach and breach planetary thresholds that threaten human civilization.
Targets and goals to meet the 1992 commitments of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change are broken time and again. The 1992 treaty pledged to avoid “dangerous” levels of warming. As I watched former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sign that treaty at Rio’s Earth Summit, I was sure it would work. Canada succeeded with the 1987 Montreal Protocol in halting the damage to the ozone layer. We had succeeded in stopping the damage caused by acid rain. The thought that Canadians would be dying in large numbers, that tens of thousands of people would be forced to flee approaching wildfires, more of my fellow citizens dead in floods that cause billions of dollars in damage, washed out to sea by hurricanes – the very thought that such dangerous and deadly events would become routine, while governments call for more pipelines and more fossil fuels – that thought never entered my mind. Surely, we would heed the warnings of science long before the climate crisis claimed lives..
Now, the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP (at least NDP in provincial capitals) act as though climate action was a fad, like wearing a Swiftie bracelet. Climate science is out of fashion. Other than Greens, the only other MPs consistently opposing increasing fossil fuel production are those in the Bloc Quebecois.
The latest warnings are not of bad weather, increased heat domes and fires. The latest warnings are of global catastrophe.
Scientists around the world have been carefully monitoring evidence of the slow down of the great conveyor belt of ocean currents. In lay terms, we call it the Gulf Stream. Scientists call the larger system the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. For years, the global consensus was that this was a low risk event. Recent updates have changed the consensus view. The latest analysis puts the risk at about 50-50. (Ditlevsen, P., Ditlevsen, S. Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Nat Commun 14, 4254 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39810-w)
As quoted in the Guardian (April 15, 2026, byline Damien Carrington), Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: “This .. shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of the Amoc by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.”
He added: “I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that Amoc shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.”..Rahmstorf, who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. “I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the Amoc switched to a different state.”
This is more than alarming. We should be pulling out all the stops to ensure we move off fossil fuels and restore forest cover as quickly as possible. Instead we are blinded by the “Build Canada Strong” messaging.
Greens also want a strong Canada. But a livable planet is absolutely essential for any Canada at all.
More pipelines, fracking and off-shore drilling will weaken life support systems. The collapse of the AMOC must be avoided at all costs. Millions of lives are at stake.
Truth is Canada remains the worst climate performer in the G-7. Oil and gas production is at an all time high and our government throws billions of dollars in subsidies to drive up global heating.
It is not too late to avoid this global tipping point. But it will surely be too late if we remain in the grip of fossil fuel boosterism.
Elizabeth May, O.C. is the Member of Parliament for Saanich Gulf Islands and leader of the Green Party of Canada. She is the co-author with John Kidder, Climate Change for Dummies (2022, John Wiley and sons),