This editorial was written and published by the Toronto Star on March 15, 2024.

It would be surprising if Premier Doug Ford and federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre or members of their respective entourages had not remarked during recent travels over snow-free highways around Ontario on how mild the winter has been.

Shovels and snow tires have scarcely been needed. Backyard hockey rinks have been little more than boarded puddles. Young people have already broken out their shorts.

What’s perhaps more surprising, however, is that in their respective campaigns against carbon pricing, the two leaders do not seem to draw connections.

It speaks volumes about the short-sighted nature of our politics — and, if recent polls are accurate, of voters — that fulminations against measures meant to curb climate change draw enthusiastic applause even as the consequences of the changing climate are so utterly inescapable and worrisome.

Last week, Ford urged the federal government to cancel or put a hold on the carbon tax ahead of a planned increase. As of April 1, the price on carbon pollution is to increase by $15 a tonne, part of the federal plan to increase the cost each year until 2030 to fight climate change.

“The carbon tax is the worst tax ever put on a bunch of people,” Ford told reporters in an historically dubious declaration in Milton, Ont.

The premier warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that, if the federal government doesn’t relent in its battle against climate change, “the people of Canada are going to annihilate you when the election comes up. Simple as that.”

On Sunday, Poilievre held an “Axe-the-Tax” rally that drew thousands of supporters to the Toronto Congress Centre. He has said he will repeal the tax if elected. He’s made opposition to carbon pricing the key plank of his leadership and is now stepping up his political campaign against the looming price increase. As to his own party’s strategy to combat climate change, Poilievre has offered only vague talk of focusing on technology.

Meanwhile, as the Star’s Kate Allen reported, Environment Canada data shows this winter has been, by a wide margin, the warmest in the country’s records. The average temperature for December, January and February was more than five degrees warmer than historic norms — enough to “shock” said David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“These are numbers are just — wow,” he said.

Other than a brief frigid period in Western Canada, “there was no winter weather,” he said. “I mean it just didn’t come.”

The World Meteorological Organization said last week that 2023 was by far the warmest year on record on the planet. It attributed the phenomenon to El Niño, a natural cyclical climate pattern that turns up the global thermostat. But it noted too the implications of a warming planet that are unavoidable.

“Every month since June 2023 has set a new monthly temperature record — and 2023 was by far the warmest year on record. El Niño has contributed to these record temperatures, but heat trapping greenhouse gases are unequivocally the main culprit,” says WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

Such a serious and increasing risk to the planet would surely mean that opponents of the federal government’s carbon pricing strategy were proposing a viable alternative, their own coherent plan to tackle climate change with effective measures to curb greenhouse gases. Instead, it’s all slogans and politicking. Leaders such as Ford, Poilievre and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe seem to be prospering by railing against doing anything about that threat.

It’s as if, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber wrote in The Enigma of Reason, a community of mice chose to live on its firm and unshakable belief that there were no cats.

Political leaders willing to urge their supporters to oppose measures addressing an existential threat such as climate change threaten us with the same end as those delusional mice.