Climate change key topic at Langley all-candidates meeting

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Climate change was a key subject at the all-candidates meeting in Langley on Friday, which was attended by representatives of the Conservative, Green, and Liberal parties.

The event was hosted by Climate Crisis Langley Action Partners (CCLAP) and Trinity Western Environmental Club, a club from Trinity Western University, a private Christian post-secondary institution.

Lionel Pandolfo is a climate scientist and the President of CCLAP who says hosting meetings like this is important across Canada, not just in Metro Vancouver.

“As you move out of Greater Vancouver, people are not as aware and they don’t want to accept climate change is occurring and we don’t have anything to do with it,” he said.

Conservative candidate Tako van Popta, Green Kaija Farstad, and Liberal Kim Richter attended to discuss their priorities and solutions. The NDP candidate Michael Chang and PPC candidate Rayna Boychuk did not show up.

Although van Popta won in the last election, Pandolfo says the Liberal candidate this time seems more educated on climate change. While the Greens have “viable solutions that would mitigate and stop climate change,” he’s not sure the Canadian public is ready to take that kind of action. The Conservatives’ approach to mitigation focuses mostly on business, which he doubts will be entirely effective. The leader of the PPC Maxime Bernier denies climate change, and since neither he nor the NDP representative attended, Pandolfo did not comment on their stances.


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That doesn’t negate the urgency of the situation, though. As a climate scientist, he emphasizes the importance of meeting fossil fuel targets, hopefully shrinking Canada’s emissions by 85 per cent.

An article published in Nature, an academic journal, says Canada needs to reduce its emissions by 83 per cent to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees by 2030.

“We have to educate people to really see what the options are because people don’t feel the disasters that are coming, except maybe this summer when they saw the temperatures going up so much and sadly, people thought it was just the weather and it will end soon,” he said, adding that attribution studies show this summer’s wildfire season wouldn’t have been as severe without the effects of climate change.

Hosting more events that unite voters and politicians to discuss climate change is crucial to getting people to vote for parties that will make change, says Pandolfo. The all-candidates meeting for Cloverdale-Langley City and South Surrey-White Rock is being held on Sep. 14 through Zoom. Pandolfo anticipates climate will also be a key subject at that event as well.

“If you look at what party leaders talk about, it’s really short-term issues like housing affordability, childcare, firearms control, and so on, and these are very important and the electorate is very concerned about those issues. One issue that gets put to the side is climate change … and it’s something we need to take care of now, because it creeps on us and in the future when we’re seeing real disasters, it will be too late,” he said.

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