Senior citizens from across Canada are on their way to Ottawa to join their peers for a rally against the federal government’s plans to build pipelines and invest in fossil fuels.
The Seniors’ Climate Witness event begins on Saturday ahead of the start of Parliament’s fall session next week. The event aims to call on the Liberal government not to use public money on more pipelines and to commit to climate goals.
“I feel that my generation really dropped the ball on environmental protection and it’s the next generations that are going to feel the impact of climate change much more than I am,” said Sue Adams, 75, from Antigonish, N.S., who is taking a train from Nova Scotia to Ottawa to attend the rally.
The seniors are aiming to travel in energy-efficient ways to get to Ottawa. They say they feel the need to do something after watching climate change become significantly worse throughout their lifetimes.
A group of Nova Scotia seniors travelling as part of a caravan received a party-like send-off before boarding the ferry to New Brunswick in Digby, N.S., on Thursday morning.
“As you get older, you do have a sense, well, my lifetime is finite, but I care about the generations that come ahead,” said Nina Newington, whose electric car is packed with four others for the trip to Ottawa.
“You stop only thinking in terms of your own lifetime and I think that that’s important for seniors,” she said.
A group of people gathered at the terminal for the ferry between Digby, N.S., and New Brunswick to send off the group of area seniors attending the Ottawa rally. (Josh Hoffman/CBC)
The Liberal government is taking steps backward when it comes to protecting the environment, the seniors from Nova Scotia said.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has talked about boosting oil and gas exports and opening new mines. More recently, he’s talked about spending tens of billions of dollars on new pipelines.
“Prime Minister Carney says that in the short run, emissions will go up, but that they’ll go down later. But one of the things that we have been saying is ‘later is too late,’” Adams said.
A group of seniors are hitting Canadian highways in electric cars this summer, heading to Ottawa to urge the federal government to invest in clean energy. We’ll hear more about the Seniors’ Climate Caravan which stopped in Thunder Bay earlier this week.
Newington said Canada can’t let U.S. President Donald Trump’s constant tariff threats scare us into making decisions that help us economically right now at the risk of causing significant environmental damage in the future.
“The idea that the government is going to spend our public money, $40 billion of it, on a pipeline — that seems insane to me. You know, we need to put that money into affordable clean energy, which is actually possible now,” she said.
MORE TOP STORIES
-
911 service restored following intermittent outages
-
New general manager says improving Truro community centre will be a marathon
-
‘I do deserve care’: AG report on out-of-province health care is validating, says patient
-
Nova Scotia women describe harrowing experiences trying to access medical care
-
Video
Parks Canada posts coyote warnings after Louisbourg walker experiences close call
Tag: rewrite-pending