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While we waited Friday for Conservative leader Andrew Scheer to arrive by car at the terminus of the Evergreen SkyTrain line, some placard-carrying kids hurried to take the train so they could join the climate strike in downtown Vancouver.

They joined an estimated 100,000 who met at Vancouver’s City Hall and marched downtown disrupting both transit and traffic. And they were among the millions of people around the world who walked out of classrooms and workplaces Friday in an effort to pressure politicians to do more to curb carbon emissions in the midst of a global climate emergency.

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Those kids hurrying by, the Tories’ big campaign bus and the fact that Scheer had just flown from Montreal to Vancouver and would leave a couple of hours later to fly to Edmonton only highlighted the Conservative leader’s surprisingly tone-deaf day.

Rather than joining with youth in the streets, Scheer and Maxime Bernier — the People’s Party of Canada leader who denies that there is a climate emergency — were the only federal leaders who didn’t participate in climate strike events.