David Suzuki believes Justin Trudeau is squandering the opportunity of a political lifetime.

Usually, when a new government takes power, its major concern early on is getting re-elected.

That’s not something the Liberals have to worry about, Suzuki said Sunday in Ottawa — since neither opposition party even has a leader at this point. As well, the Liberals undercut a lot of both parties’ traditional support in 2015, so they’re having to redefine themselves.

The environmentalist, broadcaster and scientist was in town to accept the Frederic A. McGrand Lifetime Leadership Award in Animal Welfare at the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies’ National Animal Welfare Conference. He sat down with iPolitics ahead of the awards ceremony.



“You can see it in the Conservatives in spades — are they going to go the Harper route or are they going to go with Michael Chong and that route of conservatism? They haven’t decided that yet,” he said.

“I wrote to Trudeau. I said, ‘You can coast through the next election. You’re going to get through. That means you’ve got the rare opportunity to do the hard stuff now. You’ve got two terms to get praised for that.’ That’s what I would like to see him do.”

So what’s the hard stuff?

Moving away from fossil fuels. Suzuki said it has to happen and he has yet to see Trudeau take serious action on that front. Instead, the PM seems more focused on “picking the easy fruit.”

Yes, he made a serious commitment in Paris in December of 2015 — signing the climate change accord and saying that Canada has to work to help limit the global temperature increase to as close to 1.5 degrees as possible, rather than 2. It’s a very hard target to meet, but it’s crucial the world not warm any more than that, Suzuki said.

For that, Trudeau deserves praise and recognition. But then the prime minister went ahead and approved the Site C dam in British Columbia. The Peace Valley is the breadbasket of the North and flooding it just doesn’t make any sense, Suzuki said.

“We can’t have a food chain where food is grown, on average, three to five thousand miles from where it’s consumed. That’s all carbon fuel that’s being used to transport that. We’ve got to have food that much more local.”

And then there are the pipelines — not one, but two approved last November. When you approve a pipeline it means you’ve got to use them for at least 30 years, Suzuki said — which tells him Trudeau hasn’t put it all together.

“It’s classic. Politicians think very short-sighted. But we’ve got to get off oil. It’s as simple as that.”

In January, Trudeau said at a town hall that we can’t afford to dig all the oil out of the sands, which caused outrage in Alberta. Before long, he was claiming he’d misspoke.

“He got dumped on and backtracked and went, ‘Oh, no no, I didn’t mean that,” Suzuki said. “But he was right. He was absolutely right. That oil should be left in the ground.”

And while the Northern Gateway pipeline didn’t get the green light last fall, Suzuki said he knew five years ago that wouldn’t go through.

“It would have gone over the bodies of First Nations people who said no friggin’ way. So that’s not a big deal that he turned it down. It wasn’t going to go ahead anyway.”

It was, however, an act of political brilliance, he said.

“Trudeau got (Enbridge’s Line 3) approved. Nobody knows about it, it went under the wire. He knows he’s going to take a shit kicking over Kinder Morgan. People in Vancouver are going to fight that, so it probably won’t go through. All of the attention will be focused on Kinder Morgan, so that Line 3 pipeline is going through.”

As Suzuki sees it, the prime minister is pandering to Alberta and playing up to its premier, Rachel Notley. His father poisoned the political well out west with his National Energy Program in the 1980s. And while the country needs a national energy strategy, the Liberals haven’t won a foothold in Wildrose Country since — something Trudeau is hoping to change. In the process, Suzuki warned, he’s going to lose a lot of people in British Columbia.

“You’ve got young children, Justin. Catherine McKenna, who I really think is terrific, has got young children. Then for God’s sake think about them. They’ve got to act now and get us off fossil fuels,” Suzuki said. “His kids and McKenna’s kids, they know they’re going to grow up under very different and very difficult circumstances. They’re not going to escape the consequences of your inaction now.”

Making deep reductions in carbon emissions can’t wait until 2050, he said.

“Humans are at a major crisis point.”

We’re the dominant force on the planet and in 9 billion years, no species has altered it the way we have, he said. Natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes are natural no longer: We’re causing them.

“We’re changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. We’re undermining the very life support systems we depend on as animals. And Canada will be affected more than any other country.”

We already are: With the world’s longest coastline, we can’t escape rising sea levels that are the result of warming oceans and melting Arctic ice. In British Columbia, swaths of forest and millions of dollars have been lost to the mountain pine beetle, which is a parasite normally kept in check by cold winters. Winters aren’t cold enough anymore, so trees are paying the price.

“You just have to look at this winter, it’s been very damp. It snowed in Toronto two days ago. When air is warmer, as it is, it carries more water vapour. So we’ve got seven per cent more water in the atmosphere than existed when the temperature was one degree lower. So when it dumps, Calgary gets record floods, Toronto gets record floods,” said Suzuki.

“Forestry, fisheries, farming tourism, winter sporting events … these are all going to be hammered by climate change.”

The Canadian public understands that climate change is real, he said.

“We’ve known for 40 years — that’s how long the Inuit have been telling us the Arctic is changing. The problem is that although the Arctic is going through these unbelievable changes, for most Canadians, the Arctic is this mythical place ‘up there’ that they’ve never really experienced.”

Although he said he’s been left feeling “bitterly disappointed” by Trudeau, Suzuki didn’t always feel that way. He too had been swept up by sunny ways.

“When Trudeau won, I was ecstatic. For the first year I wrote articles and sang his praises. But talk is one thing. Doing something is a very different thing. He’s really disappointed me on his indigenous commitment and what he said was his environmental commitment.”

Suzuki said alarm bells started to go off when, after years of fighting salmon farms on the West Coast and thinking they were about to be moved onto land, as environmentalists had pushed for, the federal government extended the licenses of the fish farms from five years to seven.

“That passed under the wire, but he could have stopped the fish farms,” Suzuki said. “Instead he extended them. And then the big issue is the dam at Site C on the Peace River.”

There’s currently an indigenous lawsuit fighting the dam project, and rightly so, he said.

As for the $3 billion in government subsidies that go to the most profitable sector in the country? That hose needs to be shut off.

“Get off the pot. Stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry,” he said.

Let Alberta be the energy leader in wind and solar, he said. Oil workers with Iron and Earth are lining up and asking for the help to make that transition.

Although he’s still pushing for change, Suzuki said he has colleagues who feel it’s already too late — that too many tipping points have been passed.

“You have to keep plugging along. But I’m enough of a realist to see where all the curves are going. We’re in trouble. Very deep trouble. It’s frightening.”

In response, people are coming up with ideas to geoengineer the planet to try and save it.

“But we’ve fucked up the planet and we think we’re going to take it over? It’s crazy.”

Asked about tech entrepreneurs pushing plans to push out into space and colonize other planets, Suzuki shook his head.

“What a cockamamy hubristic idea this is. We haven’t even found a way to live on this beautiful planet that we were born on, yet we’re going to spread our seed all over the universe?”

The head shaking continues when he brings up the recent U.S. presidential election, where all 17 Republican candidates in the leadership race that chose Donald Trump were climate deniers.

Closer to home, he has been watching the Conservative leadership race “with a bit of interest.”

“All but one of the candidates is a climate denier,” he said. “If (Kevin) O’Leary is where the Conservatives head, they’re in for long, long dark years ahead I think. The only one who is of any interest to me is Michael Chong.

“I’ve had long talks with Preston Manning. He understands very clearly and he says you can’t just use the air as a garbage can. You’ve got to pay for that. There should be a price on carbon. He told me that over 10 years ago.

“Conservatives understand that if the economy is going to be a factor that’s going to affect the planet, that economy has to use the tools that are available to make sure we’re living in a sustainable way. Putting a price on carbon is an obvious way.”

Although Suzuki has always had opponents — he fought with the forestry industry for years — these days they’re a new breed entirely. Enter media personality Ezra Levant, who has repeatedly gone after him.

“Ezra is a new kind of phenomenon. He’s the neoconservative Trump kind of mentality where facts no longer matter. It’s really astounding,” he said. “He’s been sued and lost cases. My only question is where is his money coming from. That will tell you what interests he generally represents.”

He points out that Levant didn’t last on television because his audience was “minuscule.”

Despite it all, Suzuki insisted he’s still driven by hope.

“I’m driven by being a grandfather and knowing my grandchildren are inheriting a mess. The hope for me is not in human intelligence, but in nature’s capacity to regenerate.”

He doesn’t think we know enough about nature to be completely hopeless. He gives the example of sockeye salmon and the world’s largest run in B.C.’s Fraser River. Ideally, 20 to 30 million sockeye come back to spawn in a season. In 2009, just over 1 million returned.

“I remember vividly turning to my wife and saying that’s it. They’re toast.”

One year later, the river surprised everyone and had its biggest run in 100 years.

“I use this story not to show how stupid I am, because nobody knows what the hell happened. But nature shocked us,” he says.

“I believe if we can pull back and let nature give nature room and help it, she may give us surprises we don’t deserve. That’s my hope.”