Tom McMillan wasn’t long in the job as federal minister of the environment, plowing through binder after binder, briefing note after briefing note, when he hit the section on the depletion of the ozone layer.

“It was like an electric shock,” he says of the moment of realization that the atmospheric destruction by chlorofluorocarbons was an immediate threat to the health of the planet, followed by a moment of clarity that the only way to deal with ozone depletion effectively would be by “marshalling jurisdictions all over the world.” The year was 1985.

McMillan was in Toronto recently to receive the annual award of distinction from Corporate Knights magazine in recognition of his environmental leadership all those years ago. The magazine’s feature article on his accomplishments, cleverly titled “The Man Who Fixed the Hole in The Sky,” documents his work as environment minister in the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney.

Three years ago McMillan published Not My Party: The Rise and Fall of Canadian Tories, from Robert Stanfield to Stephen Harper. But our conversation was not about the destruction of the Progressive Conservative Party — well, it was a little bit — but the cross-disciplinary victory that proved possible more than 30 years ago as governments came together in a common front creating the Montreal Protocol of 1987. “A lot of people said it couldn’t be done,” says McMillan. “It was a matter of mobilizing this huge network around the world.”

Not to mention recruiting the likes of Elizabeth May. Decades before she became leader of the Green Party, May was recruited as senior policy adviser to McMillan. (In 1998 May noted to the Star that in “a state of shock,” she had to admit that she missed Mulroney’s environmental leadership, which included the establishment of five national parks and the modernization of the Canadian National Parks Act.)

The Montreal Protocol is still cited as one of the most successful treaties, not only for its collaborative accomplishments in the global phasing out of CFCs and restoring the ozone layer, but for its adaptive structure as it was broadened over time to include 165 ozone depleting substances. The most recent amendment, drawn up in 2016 in Kigali, came into effect this year, supported by all 197 countries agreeing to phase down the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that replaced CFCs to meet the increasing global demand for refrigeration and air conditioning. The avoided temperature increase due to the Kigali agreementis expected to make a substantial contribution to the targets set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“So the Montreal Protocol, which was designed to deal with ozone depletion, morphed to be a climate change related treaty,” McMillan says. “They were in Rwanda addressing climate change but they were using the structure of the Montreal Protocol to do it…That confirms the hope that we had in 1987 that the Montreal Protocol would be a beginning, not an end.”

Other beginnings did not meet expectations, a fact deserving of reflection in the current election period. There was an enormous opportunity to be seized by Canada to be the industrial world’s most environmentally friendly country. “If we didn’t do it, and it had to be done, it would likely be done by the only other country with the resources to pull it off, and that would be the United States,” says McMillan. With the Republicans in power in the U.S. — “you had bigots and far right-wingers heading key congressional committees” — the opportunity was clear. “There was a void. If the Americans were not going to play this role, we could. We had the goodwill and to some extent the influence to be the pre-eminent leader throughout the world on the environment.”

McMillan knew innately how to grab a headline. In the fall of 1987 he blasted the release of a U.S. report, commissioned by the administration of President Ronald Reagan, that concluded that the causes of acid ran were unclear and its damaging effects insubstantial. “When science is used to make the case that acid rain is not critical, that is not science, that is voodoo science,” he told an environmental conference in Colorado, adding that the report was “awkwardly out of step with prevailing scientific judgment.”

That was before the “progressive” elements were drained from the Conservative Party, before Prime Minister Stephen Harper took on the role as what McMillan calls a “spoiler” on the international stage, trying to “trip up the world community in progress on such things as climate change.”

“In order for Canada to have cemented that status [as a leader on the environment], not for partisan reasons, but because it reflects progress, it has to be carried over,” McMillan reminds us. “There has to be consistency from one leader to another, from one generation to another.”

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Where are we now? “I think his heart is in the right place,” McMillan says of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “But the resources of the entire government of Canada have to be mobilized if these issues are to be addressed, if we are to emerge as the pre-eminent leader on this.”

In an opinion piece in The Hill Times last month, Elizabeth May cited many of the country’s environmental accomplishments way back when. “In the ’80s, Canada led in the successful efforts to save the ozone layer,” she wrote. “Were we a big contributor to ozone layer thinning? Not at all.” Regardless, if a global threat required action, action was taken. “Decisions were based on science and evidence.”

That’s the kind of global leadership the climate crises demands. That’s the kind of global leadership against which the current aspiring political parties must be measured. Tom McMillan believes we haven’t missed that opportunity. “I don’t think we have,” he says. “I really do not. We proved that we could do it.”

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