NWT’s Kira Young testifies as youth climate trial begins

In a legal challenge pitting a roster of federal lawyers against a group of young Canadians, Yellowknife 20-year-old Kira Young got her day in Federal Court on Monday.

Young is among 15 plaintiffs arguing Ottawa violated their Charter rights by failing to adequately address climate change. A trial in Vancouver just began.

On Monday, Young – an undergraduate student at McMaster University – appeared before Federal Court Justice Simon Fothergill to describe how the 2023 wildfires forced her family to flee their Yellowknife home, leaving her “fearful” about the future of the place where she grew up.

Time skiing, cycling, canoeing and sailing has shaped Young’s identity and remains “very important” to her physical and mental health.

During a canoe trip on the Keele River in the summer of 2023, Young and her family encountered an active wildfire with thick smoke making visibility poor as she struggled to breathe.

“We were in such an incredibly special and important place, and we were watching it burn,” she testified.

On August 16 that year, Young received an evacuation order. Her family packed essentials and irreplaceable belongings but she had to leave behind her guitar, which she had played since childhood. She recorded herself playing one last song, unsure whether she would see it again.

Young left with her father and brother the next day while her mother, a healthcare worker, remained behind. 

“It was very hard. I felt so powerless,” she said.

One incident remains etched in her mind. As she passed the skeleton of a warehouse in Enterprise, a community destroyed by wildfire, she wondered if “this was the fate of our home that we had just left.”

“I was terrified. I was so sad. I was despondent,” she told the court.

This year, during a 10-day cycling trip from Yellowknife to Edmonton, she witnessed the aftermath of more wildfires. Where trees and ground had been blackened by flames, she was struck by the “unusual silence” compared with the sounds of life in healthy forests.

“I find it disturbing and quite sad,” she said, adding the destruction left her anxious about the future of other “vibrant” places she loves.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer – Catherine Boies Parker, KC of Arvay Finlay LLP – argued that such experiences make the case urgent as it pertains to the “most fundamental rights of children in Canada: the right to life, liberty and security of the person, and how those rights are affected by what the Supreme Court of Canada has called an ‘existential threat.’”

The central question is whether Canada’s contribution to the threat facing children can be treated as a “purely political matter” or whether government action must meet minimum standards grounded in “constitutional principles and legal norms.”

“These young, vulnerable plaintiffs say that the Charter must provide them with a degree of protection from their own government’s actions that contribute to the greatest threat to personal security that humans have ever faced,” Boies Parker said. 

In June this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared the policy changes his government is making to maintain sovereignty will translate to higher emissions “in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan.”

“We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short-term goal,” he said.

The lawsuit does not ask a judge to design Canada’s climate policy or dictate measures the government must adopt. Instead, it argues the Charter requires the federal government to establish sufficiently ambitious emissions-reduction objectives and implement a plan rooted in science capable of meeting them.

Despite “decades of explicit international commitments and legislative promises, the defendant has repeatedly failed to set sufficient targets, repeatedly failed to meet those insufficient targets,” Boies Parker asserted.

Federal legal representative BJ Wray argued that neither the Charter nor Canada’s international climate commitments create the obligation the plaintiffs are asking the court to recognize.

“The Charter was never intended to solve existential crises,” Wray told the court, arguing that the case would require the judge to create a new constitutional obligation rather than apply an established one.

She also challenged the plaintiffs’ argument that national emissions policies can be linked to the individual harms they have experienced. “Climate change is a global problem that can only be remedied with a global solution,” she said.

In depth: Read a more detailed version of this article at The Pointer

Canada currently accounts for about 1.4 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions, and the government argues it cannot control climate change’s effects through domestic policy alone.

Even if Canada immediately reduced its emissions to near zero, government experts are expected to testify that the change would have no discernible effect on global temperatures, precipitation or extreme weather patterns. 

“Because climate change is a global phenomenon, the impact of climate change in Canada is largely determined by the choices of other countries. No single country can mitigate the impacts of climate change within its borders,” Wray argued.

She said federal scientists will explain in the coming weeks how Canada’s emissions have declined from 2005 levels, emissions per capita have also fallen by nearly 30 percent since then, and emissions intensity has decreased as its economy has grown.

The plaintiffs counter that Canada does not need to solve the climate crisis independently to be held accountable for its own contribution to it.

They argue accepting the government’s position would allow individual countries to evade responsibility because no single country can prevent climate change by itself.