No smoking movement provides climate change lessons - Toronto Star

No smoking movement provides climate change lessons | The Star

The news is depressing. It always is. As someone who made decisions about what to put on CBC news programs for a very long time, it was the most common criticism I heard. Wars, famines, natural disasters, genocides, murders, scandals, crisis after crisis. Pierre Poilievre isn’t the first person to think that everything is broken.

In fact, everything isn’t broken and even the things that are, can be fixed. It just takes time. Take climate change for example. It’s easy to give up hope that Canadians will ever do their part to stop our planet from burning itself to a crisp. But we’ve thought other entrenched problems were also beyond solutions. Think about how hard it was to change our smoking habits.

In 1965 about 50 per cent of Canadian adults smoked. Today, it’s down to about 10 per cent. That didn’t happen by magic. Governments saw a problem, and governments worked to solve it, overcoming resistance and opposition every small step of the way.

Today, there is fierce pushback against putting a price on carbon. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation says, “Canadians can’t afford this carbon tax punishment.” Sounds a lot like what the Smokers Freedom Society once said about higher tobacco taxes. “We’ve reached a point where the government is trying to impose a way of life on the citizens. The government is trying to control people’s lives.”

When governments told businesses they had to have areas reserved for non-smokers (because second-hand smoke is a killer too), compliance was grudging.

I once walked into a restaurant for breakfast with one of my daughters and asked for the non-smoking section. I was directed to the one table in the middle of the room with a cardboard sign on it that said, “No Smoking.” When I pointed out to the manager that one table was hardly a section and was pretty much useless, all I got was a shrug.

At a hotel, I once booked a non-smoking room but when I opened the door, I found an ashtray on the desk. When I called to protest, I was told that since I wouldn’t smoke in the room it would be a “non-smoking” room.

That was how hard it was to change things. But change they did. In 2014, when Ontario banned smoking on outdoor patios, the spokesperson for Restaurants Canada said, “We realized society was going this way … we’ll deal with it.” I’d call that surrender to reality.

These days, fossil-fuel companies aren’t anxious to surrender, but they’re moving in that direction. It’s impossible to imagine that the CEO of an oil company would today say what the CEO of Exxon said in 1996. “The scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate.”

If we rely on blind optimism to solve the climate change crisis, we are doomed. If we rely on hope based on history, we have a shot.