“I would say to those who oppose our fight to build this pipeline [the Trans Mountain expansion project], that they are being extremely foolish. Maybe on Salt Spring Island you can build an economy on condos and coffee shops, but not in Edmonton and not anywhere in Alberta. Here in Alberta, we ride horses — not unicorns — and I invite pipeline opponents to saddle up on something that is real.”
— Alberta Premier Rachel Notley at the Alberta Teachers’ Association Convention, October 2018
It’s pretty crowded in all five Salt Spring Island coffee shops these days. People are slurping lattés, dreaming of unicorns and trying to figure out who’s going to start building all those condos we’ve been promised. But one concrete thing most of us have done — something that seems to have been missed by too many politicians to the east of our province — is read the October 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report about the developing climate crisis, and the near impossibility of stopping global warming at 1.5C.
We think a lot about the climate crisis here. We think about our grandchildren and future generations and we wonder how to provide them with the safest and most intact natural world we can. We think about the billions or trillions of dollars in infrastructure, health, emergency relief and adaptation costs that will result from greenhouse warming of even 1.5C — let alone the 2C we are already almost doomed to cause.
We think about the beautiful Salish Sea that, before our eyes, is rapidly degrading with increasing temperatures and ocean acidity, and which is threatened drastically by the outlook of highly increased oil/bitumen tanker traffic.
We think about those things, and we do our best to move our community, our society and our economy to the low-carbon future that all of Canada needs to embrace as soon as possible.
That’s why we’re working hard to increase local farming and food resilience. That’s why we’re installing walking paths and cycling lanes and why we’ve got the highest bus occupancy rates of any B.C. rural community. That’s why we have the highest small-region density of personal electric vehicles in all of Canada and why we have citizen groups exploring how to get electric trucks, electric buses and even electric ferries to be the dominant forms of transportation here.
That’s why we celebrated the holiday season in the community here on Saturday, Dec. 1 with a chili cook-off event in the park and Canada’s first All Electric Vehicle Christmas Lights Parade. To the cheers and applause of hundreds of chili-munching kids and adults, a convoy of EVs decorated with string lights, signs, hood ornaments and more snaked almost silently through the few streets of Ganges Village. It was a memorable addition to holiday celebrations, and organizers plan for it to grow in future years as our EV population flourishes.
As the parade wound down, I talked with two couples standing beside a Nissan Leaf decorated with a large “unicorn horn.”
“We have a message for Rachel Notley,” one said. “We are ‘saddled up,’ Rachel. And EVs are totally real. They don’t need fossil fuels, and after a very short period of paying off the embedded footprint, there is no carbon added to the atmosphere.”
And then one added: “It would be extremely foolish to ruin a perfectly wonderful planet with fossil-fuel emissions when we already have all the technologies and can quickly create the opportunities to power it 100 per cent with electricity and renewable energy.”
Is it time for all Canadians to “embrace the unicorn”?
David Denning is a science educator, community activist and 25-year resident of Salt Spring Island.
