Climate change is the new free trade, or, if you prefer, green is the new black.
Justin Trudeau and his deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, have been trying out this metaphor in recent days as a route out of Canada’s environment/economy impasse.
“Think about the free trade debate here in Canada in the 1980s,” Trudeau told a mining conference in Toronto on Monday.
The country was fiercely divided over whether Canada should enter into a trade deal with the United States, he reminded his audience, and the issue divided families and regions.
Yet, barely five years later, in the early 1990s, the prime minister said, Canada-U.S. free trade was expanded “with very little fuss.”
“That’s exactly the same situation we’re in right now, where the debate over climate change, the debate over economy versus environment, is just as polarized, just as divisive,” he said.
“But as we saw from the free trade debate, that can flip fairly quickly. It won’t be easy, but we all know, you all know, that’s where we need to go.”
Freeland was also shopping that comparison around in weekend interviews, on CBC Radio’s The House, for instance, when she recalled how her mother, Halyna Chomiak Freeland, was a New Democratic candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona during the 1988 free-trade election.
“And one of her main issues was opposition to free trade,” Freeland told The House.
“Fast forward to today, and we now have a strong national consensus across the country, and across parties, that trade is the right thing for our country.”
There are indeed some parallels. Climate change today, like free trade back in the 1980s, is pitting business against civil society, left versus right, global versus local — and definitely region against region.
Both debates touch on the existential and the very future of the country — in the 1980s, it was about what would put our economy in the black, and today, it’s about what will keep Canada green.
But there are also some important differences that make the metaphor less useful.
Unlike the free-trade debate, for instance, the current federal government has been trying to straddle both sides of the climate change impasse.
While Brian Mulroney was staunchly pro-free trade with the U.S. throughout those polarized 1980s, Trudeau’s government has tried to stay in the uncomfortable middle of the current environment/economy standoff: accused by each side of selling out to the other.
Nor is it entirely clear how the free-trade example provides a practical road map for depolarizing the current discussion over climate change.
Senior federal government officials say it revolves around changing the nature of the debate — evolving from a binary “yes/no” discussion to a more practical conversation about how to get to climate targets and grow the economy at the same time.
While it’s true that free trade eventually moved to that practical type of discussion, it wasn’t because of any great effort or grand, depolarizing campaign.
All the passions that were stirred up by the great national debate of the 1980s died down mainly as a result of time.
Mulroney won the 1988 free-trade election with a majority and the country had five years to get used to Canada-U.S. free trade.
Trudeau is correct: There was “very little fuss” when Jean Chretien came to power in 1993 and approved a wider North American free trade deal, but that was mainly because the issue had faded from the grand national drama it had been in 1988.
Trudeau, with only a minority government, doesn’t have the luxury of five years to wait for passions over the environment and the economy to simply die down, as free trade did in the 1980s.
Goldy Hyder, head of the Business Council of Canada, says he believes there are useful parallels between free trade and the environment/economy debate, but he is citing more recent history.
Hyder has been urging Trudeau’s government to tackle the climate change issue as it tackled renegotiating NAFTA with the U.S. after Donald Trump won — drawing on advice from all sides as an advisory force.
“We need to depolarize and depoliticize,” Hyder says.
Trudeau has been saying much the same thing: “That’s where we need to go.”
So far, however, the idea that climate change will go the way of the free-trade debate still seems more like a wish than a plan.
It will presumably take more than a simple declaration that green is the new black, or that things will “flip fairly quickly.”
Susan Delacourt is a columnist with Torstar Syndication Services.