Climate action should hit the fan
Trevor Hutchinson is a writer, musician and not-for-profit executive. He lives in Lindsay with his wife and three of their children.
To date, 2025 has been an eventful year for weather events. That’s understating it. It has been a year of the type of storm that hits the fan.
We had the snowiest January on record. Lindsay, for example, received 113 cm of snow in January, over three times the average amount and required extraordinary public and private snow removal.
And who can forget the ice storm that happened in late March. The city was required to declare a state of emergency that lasted two weeks. Power outages and damage to buildings and property damage were widespread. There were more than 2,300 hydro poles destroyed. The clean-up went on for weeks. This timeline pales in comparison to the decades it will take the tree canopy to repair itself.
From that precipitation disaster we jumped to a lack of precipitation, with below-average amounts from April through to July (and counting). For much of the city, rainfall was 75 per cent below normal, according to Parks Canada. The long-term average for July is around 99.5 mm of rain. Some areas received as little as 12.6 mm. This led to heart-breaking conditions for local farmers. By mid-August the Kawartha Region Conservation Authority would call on residents to reduce their water consumption by 10 per cent.
And that drought led to yet another problem: two provincially classed forest fires, with more than 60 hectares of forest on fire at its zenith.
The city has yet to announce the municipal costs of the ice storm, however, we can expect it to be in the millions. It will probably be a couple months before the costs of the forest fires are in.
Paying the climate-change piper is not just some abstract thought here in Kawartha Lakes. These weather events are — and will — cost us large, both at the public and private level. And let me be unequivocal: severe weather events will be more frequent because of human-caused climate change, negatively affecting our health and standard of living.
The idea that climate change will lead to increased costs for us is not new. Government and private forecasts have predicted increased food, goods, insurance and health costs for Canadians with reduced GDP for years and the province’s independent Financial Accountability Office predicts a 16 per cent increase in municipal infrastructure costs due directly to climate change.
Although this city was one of the hardest hit by the storm, we were sadly not among the 50 municipalities to receive an Ice Storm Recovery Grant of $10,000 (that’s not a typo) from Hydro One.
With the city into its budget consultation process, hopefully some will advocate for more climate-change cost line items. Taking the steps as per our aspirational Healthy Environment Plan might reduce how much climate change will cost us. But some of those ideas require investment. Without bold action, we might be like the homeowner who can’t afford to fix the problem because of the mounting repair costs.
If the government set up a ‘GoFundMe’ type website for people to donate their own cash to , to fight ‘climate change’ , they’d receive ZERO donations. No one really buys in to this stuff. It’s just another tactic the government uses to justify forcibly taking our money that they spend on themselves and their own pet projects. Just look at the lifestyles of the people who are the loudest on this topic and you’ll see that they don’t even believe what they’re saying. It’s virtue signalling at its finest.
Obviously, you two aren’t old enough to remember the winters of the late 40’s and 50’s. Where I grew up, which is the same latitude as the Kawarthas, we would get snowed in for at least a week and maybe two each winter. That’s the only time my mom would bake bread and we drank powdered milk. Our winters were so cold that our front sun porch was used as a make shift deep freezer for chickens and hind quarters of beef and pork and the whitefish and blue herring caught from our fish hut on the lake. Our pantry and cupboards were stocked with baking ingredients, canned fruits and veggies, and there was a huge bin of potatoes, carrots, onions, turnips and apples in the cold cellar. My dad ran an ice and fire wood business and the ice had to be cut and stored before the new year, when it was still thin enough for the huge round saw blade to cut through its depth. I have a photo of my dad, standing on top of a snow bank, resting his elbow on the cross bar of a telephone pole after we finally got ploughed out. And you say that global warming is bunk. Think again!
Evolution happens. That is what climate change is. Homo sapiens is no different than any other species when it comes to change. We too are subject to it. In my lifetime, I’ve seen lots of change, including the more recent higher levels of moisture in the air and the forest fires burning so close to big cities. But I don’t agree we should damn the poor among us for needing to drive gas powered vehicles to get to work, medical appointments, and other resources when the elites continue to fly hither and yon because they can afford to pay carbon credits.