Why these seniors are heading to Ottawa with a message for Mark Carney

Why these seniors are heading to Ottawa with a message for Mark Carney

Several Nova Scotians are part of a caravan heading to Parliament Hill by electric vehicle and train

N.S. seniors head to climate protest in Ottawa

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.

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.

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.

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Josh Hoffman is a reporter for CBC Nova Scotia. Josh worked as a local radio reporter all over Canada before moving to Nova Scotia in 2018.