‘Insurmountable crisis’ posed by climate change, Massé says

Manon Massé said Friday she feared that the climate crisis hanging over the planet was becoming insurmountable.

Since the beginning of the election campaign, Massé has maintained that safeguarding the environment should be the ballot box question — the decisive challenge of the Oct. 1 vote.

At a news conference on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, the co-spokesperson of Québec solidaire reaffirmed the importance of the population sending a clear message Monday, to better manage the climate crisis that will hit Quebec and the whole planet over the next few years and decades, especially if we do nothing.

The vote on Monday will be decisive “for the next 30, 40 years,” said the leader of the party with the most ambitious platform on the environment.

“We are starting to have more time behind us than ahead of us” to counter the negative effects of this crisis, Massé said.

Surrounded by QS candidates from the Quebec City region, Massé predicted that for the first time QS would make gains outside of Montreal, by winning in the ridings of Taschereau and Jean-Lesage in Quebec City.

Currently QS has three seats in the National Assembly, all from Montreal.

“The more the old political class remains with its arms crossed, the more its inaction will cost us. The more the crisis will be insurmountable,” she said.

The more the old political class remains with its arms crossed, the more its inaction will cost us ... It’s now or never.

“It’s now or never,” Massé said solemnly, reaffirming that the protection of the environment, the “challenge of the century,” should be on everyone’s minds the day of the vote.

Massé also wondered whether the leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec, François Legault, was a climate skeptic. One of the CAQ’s projects is to build a third link between Quebec City and Lévis, a project that will only encourage cars, increase traffic congestion and the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, she said.