On Tuesday, prime minister Mark Carney released his latest episode in his “Forward Guidance” series on YouTube where he made the admission, after months of denials, that the government would not be meeting Canada’s emissions targets—something that should be no surprise given how much Carney’s government has blunted measures that were getting results, for the sake of crass politicking. There was a tacit admission that the policies of the previous government were actually working, that we were on target to meet the reductions goals, but Carney said that they were “too costly,” and “too divisive,” but they were only divisive if you listened to a bunch of liars and grifters who made outrageous claims about those costs, which were not true and were proven to be untrue when the consumer carbon levy was unwound. The following day was Canada Day, and while the noon show just off of Parliament Hill went off without a hitch, the skies soon opened up, and the rest of the festivities, including the Snowbirds and the fireworks were cancelled, and Carney’s own plane was grounded, meaning he couldn’t make a planned Canada Day stop in Edmonton.

Ottawa was hit by hours of thunderstorms and torrential rains that broke records, flooding basements and downing trees and power lines across the Nation’s Capital. This wasn’t divine intervention, but it’s the kind of coincidence that makes people believe that it was, particularly because it’s comes on the heels of the kinds of hubris that would set off the Greek gods and see them exact a punishment. Make no mistake—this is the kind of extreme weather that is brought about by climate change, and it’s only getting more frequent and more damaging as global climate change accelerates. If the damage within Ottawa from this storm is not in the hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s in the billions, and the more these extreme weather events keep happening, the more those costs will rise. The insurance companies across this country have been warning about this for years, and there are places that will soon become uninsurable because of the effect these extreme weather events. They are no longer “once in a hundred years” events—now they’re within every five, or less.

And it’s not just this kind of extreme weather that is affecting homes and property—climate change is taking a massive toll on the food-producing regions of the world, including Canada, which is one of the key drivers of why food prices have been accelerating so rapidly. If you’ve complained about the price of beef, it’s because the drought on the prairies that began in 2021 meant that ranchers couldn’t afford to feed their herds because there wasn’t any forage, and importing feed was becoming prohibitively expensive. That meant that herds needed to be culled, and they can’t be restored in a single year, so that means ongoing supply shortages, which means higher prices. That’s not the fault of Loblaws, or imaginary “money-printing,” or “Liberal deficits,” no matter what the NDP and the Conservatives keep trying to tell you—this is a direct result of climate change. Same as when drought in California means there’s less produce to send to Canada. Same as when hurricanes devastated the orange groves of Florida. Same as what droughts are doing to coffee plantations in places like Brazil. All of this is increasing the prices you pay for groceries, and it all goes back to climate change.

“The climate crisis is still with us, and our commitment to fighting it is absolute,” Carney claimed in his video—just before launching into his excuses for why emissions are going to increase, breaking the trust of global partners that he just spent the previous section talking about why it was important to build it. He claimed that the Trudeau plan was fine for the world of 2015, but the world of 2026 is too unstable and hostile, which actually makes no sense at all. “In my judgment, that plan was not sustainable over the long term,” Carney said. “It would have been too expensive for Canadians, Canadians who are already struggling with affordability.” And let’s get this straight—a few cents on a litre of gasoline versus billions of dollars of lost homes and property from wildfires, floods, and extreme weather events. Slowing down the transition to clean electrification in order to make us more reliant on global oil prices (made worse as Alberta proposes more gas-fired electricity to power digital asbestos data centres that will impact the water tables in a province that is already drought-stricken). Doubling down on oil and gas extraction for the supposed “transition period,” which makes us even more reliant on global oil prices, and when the Strait of Hormuz reopens and we are back into a global supply glut and prices crash again, we will have sunk billions of taxpayer dollars into feeding that glut for diminishing returns—and he just announced that the federal and Alberta governments would be partnering on that proposed new west coast pipeline because no private proponents could be found (because they too can see the writing on the wall of the supply glut).

The math is not mathing, as the kids say. The costs of preventing climate change now are far less than it’s going to be the longer we delay action, and Carney is not only delaying action, he’s putting literal gasoline on the fire. It’s not only costing us more, it’s going to keep costing us exponentially more money the longer we keep from taking meaningful action, and those few cents on a litre of gasoline will be peanuts compared to what’s coming. The extreme weather on Canada Day is the perfect illustration of what is already happening, and what is going to keep happening, with increasing frequency and severity, and when the insurance industry stops ensuring homes in entire swaths of the country, it will be up to governments to pick up those pieces yet again. It wasn’t that the old plan was too expensive—it’s that Carney was too lazy to counter the lies about it, and too smug in his own belief that the market will find the right solution in time, when clearly that’s not the case, the longer they don’t face sufficient pressure to pay for the costs of their emissions and inaction. This should have been a wake-up call, but Carney has completely ignored it, and we’re in for so much worse as a result.