When politicians get down and dirty in an election campaign they usually target their opponents’ policies. If they really want to get into the mud they sink to personal attacks.

But one would think that verbally assaulting a teenager for her beliefs and her medical condition would be out of bounds.

Sadly, that’s not the case for Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada.

Before the election writ has even been dropped he’s set a new low, in Canada at least (sorry U.S. voters), by viciously attacking 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg in an eight-part Twitter tirade.

Readers will know by now that Thunberg is the Swedish girl who started the Fridays for Future movement that has inspired hundreds of thousands of students around the world to protest against climate change. Oh, and in the process she’s been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

It would be bad enough if Bernier had kept his remarks to the insults he flung at her, calling the teenager “deeply disturbed,” “clearly mentally unstable,” and a “threat to our prosperity and civilization.” (Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a condition she calls her “superpower.”)

But what is even more unacceptable is that in a world filled with Twitter trolls Bernier urged others to attack her.

“She has become an influential figure in a movement that is a threat to our prosperity and civilization,” he wrote. “If she wants to play that role she should be denounced and attacked.”

As deplorable as Bernier’s comments were, at least he has shown his true colours. It turns out that he’s a bully who is afraid of a child.

And in the process, he has highlighted his party’s absurd, head-in-the-sands stance on climate change.

In the electoral platform of the People’s Party, Bernier claims: “There is no scientific consensus on the theory that CO2 produced by human activity is causing dangerous global warming today or will in the future, and that the world is facing environmental catastrophes unless these emissions are drastically reduced.”

In fact, thousands of scientists and climate experts around the world agree that climate change is a global catastrophe that does require urgent action.

Indeed, last October the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the Earth is headed for a place of no return if global warming isn’t kept to under 1.5 degrees C over pre-industrial levels.

This comes not from a group of “deeply disturbed” individuals, but from a body “dedicated to providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change, its natural, political and economic impacts and risks, and possible response options.”

The IPCC based its report on 6,000 scientific works.

In his Twitter rant, Bernier says his “concern” was for “the millions of Canadians and people in other countries who will be poorer, will suffer and have their lives upended if we let (Thunberg) and the movement she represents impose their radical ideas.”

But the world’s leading scientists beg to differ. The real “threat to our prosperity and civilization” is doing nothing in the face of all the evidence about the changes in the atmosphere unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions.

The fact is that climate change is leading to famines, floods, fires and mass migration.

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What could make the world poorer or its peoples suffer more than that?

If Bernier truly cared about Canadians he might listen to Thunberg rather than insulting her in a manner so childish that it makes us ask: Who is the grown-up in the room?

Clearly, it’s not Bernier.

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