Political campaigns begin with optimism and end with debt for 90 per cent of the candidates. I belong to the 90 per cent. Although Cape Breton is on the front line of climate change with hurricane force winds, coastal erosion, ocean heating and declining fish stocks, it’s also fiercely connected to the old carbon economy. Fort Mac is where we get our trucks and on the island we are still mining coal, still clear cutting forests.

Climate change was the reason I switched from the NDP to the Greens. I did so because climate change was central to the Green party’s existence. It wasn’t a policy item. I changed with the hope that with Hurricane Dorion downing power lines and Greta Thunberg making headlines, there would be a Green surge right across the country. I was wrong. In Atlantic Canada, although we more than doubled our vote, we elected only one member of Parliament in the university town of Fredericton.

The news on the climate change front continues to alarm. The annual audit of the Canadian fishery shows a decline of all the cold water fish stocks, cod, haddock, mackerel; (same for bees, birds, most mammals, etc.) but the consumer demand for fish increases each year. Fish are now a luxury food item, not the food of the poor, which was the way it was in my childhood.

South of us, in the Gulf of Maine, the cold water fish stocks have long since fled, and the crustaceans, (shrimp, lobster), the mainstay of the remaining fishery, are beginning to shrink as the reproduction rates are erratic and overall are declining precipitously. The crustaceans, like the groundfish, don’t reproduce well in warmer waters. (The Gulf of St. Lawrence has registered increased water temperatures every year since 1955.) Economically, the saving grace has been the price of lobster, which is now marketed world-wide and has made many fishermen rich.

Twenty-six millionaires are created off the coast of my village every spring. In May and June, from my front door, I can count all 26 boats hauling five, six, seven hundred pounds of lobster every day. It is a joyous, hard-working time that sustains Gulf communities all year long, with boat work, new housing, new investments, new taxes. It’s very hard to imagine Nova Scotian communities without the lobster and crab fisheries. They are our last stand.

The climate crisis isn’t coming as advertised. It’s here. Hundred kilometres per hour storms have become monthly events in my village. The right whales have moved north, chasing their own food sources, and are now dying in the cordage of crab traps.

American environmental groups are responding the same way Greenpeace and Bridget Bardot did to the seal hunt, by threatening a boycott. The successful European boycott of the Canadian seal hunt has destabilized the entire food chain in the Gulf leaving more and more seals chasing fewer and fewer fish. You can’t remove a top-level predator, whether it is a shark or a human, and not have negative consequences.

There are solutions but we’re not seeing them come forward. There’s been no coherent strategy proposed to deal with any of these problems. To my astonishment, during the election debates the climate crisis was rarely mentioned. (We had more talk about equalization payments.) At the front and back door, the most important driver in people’s vote choice was the electoral system. Compared to climate change, it’s a piddling human invention, easily fixed by simply shifting to a proportional system where every vote counts. It could be done with the stroke of a pen in a single term of Parliament as Justin Trudeau once promised, but it never happened.

The old parties control the electoral system, it works for them and they don’t want to change it. In Cape Breton the election was decided by fear of “losing your vote.” Right across the country, people “saved” their vote as best as they could, while on the ground the climate crisis raged.

For me, the principal lesson of this election was the Greens and the NDP have to find a way, for at least one election, to bury their small differences and find a way to co-operate with a shared slate and a shared platform that includes reforming the electoral system. Otherwise, we’re playing the same “my party first” game as the old parties. The time has come to put our communities and the planet first.

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Clive Doucet is the Green party’s fishery critic, an author and former Ottawa city councillor. His last book is Grandfather’s House, Returning to Cape Breton.

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