When contemplating this piece, my thoughts turned to deadlines.

Not only all one’s many fast-approaching personal deadlines, but rather the national deadline we should all be demanding of our Prime Minister and his Cabinet — a deadline that seeks to end the Conservative party’s universal deceit about plans for further environmental cutbacks and deregulation in their second term, once their taxpayer financed election campaign masquerading as a minority government, goes into full swing, as anticipated this fall.

While we shouldn’t hold our collective breath for a response to that demand we should immediately call upon Environment Minister Rona Ambrose to begin telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the true perils of global climate change, the federal environmental “smart regs” industry-government process now underway, the gutting of the Fisheries Act in respect to mine effluent discharges in fish-bearing lakes and other mounting federal industry handouts of grave ecological concern to Canadians.

It’s no secret, but in case you missed it, in an unparalleled mixture of policy and political sleaze, the Stephen Harper regime (not to be outdone or embarrassed by parliamentary opposition critics), has now swept most federal websites clean of any mention of the Kyoto Treaty.

This is truly desperate “now you see it, now you don’t” sleight of hand, in the hopes that Canadians will neither expect Tories to honour an international treaty ratified by Parliament, nor more importantly, feel compelled to angrily pummel these political animals for dancing like dinosaurs, blissfully inattentive to an incoming asteroid about to obliterate life as they know it.

When it comes to climate change, international treaties and politicians, perhaps Murphy was an optimist.

Yes, Kyoto is now officially dead for Harper, and no amount of exhortation from you or me can resurrect it any time soon.

But there is an important lesson here.

In the same way you can’t trust dogs to watch your food, we really should cease to expect Stephen Harper and his sidekick Rona Ambrose to honestly watch over the Canadian environment for Canadians.

Make no mistake: they and the resource vampires that finance them are vandalizing our futures. The swift snuff-out of Kyoto from even web-memories by Harper and Ambrose is our last warning.

All those pre-election promises to kill Kyoto, full throttle tar sands expansion, obliterate the offshore oil and gas moratorium, put a farm salmon burger in every mouth, and dish out new clearcuts, pesticides, mines and nuclear plants for Canadian neighbourhoods, weren’t empty, laughable threats to amuse us all.

On the contrary. Harper still means to make good on all of them, and then some.

You can try to sit back and relax and enjoy the crisis like every good Conservative card-holder, or you can be stirred to ask why your children and grandchildren’s lives never matter as much as you wish they would with the newly retreaded Conservatives.

And like a fallen climber on Everest, the planet’s current equilibrium is left for dead in the ensuing climatic heat-up and meltdown, as Canadian leadership on the environment goes the way of the Spotted Owl and Vancouver Island Marmot in the pursuit of short-term political glory.

For decades of inaction, Canada is now paying environmentally for U.S. oil thirst. “Inconvenient truths” as Al Gore would call them, abound.

Glacial retreat. Significant species migration, feeding and hibernation disturbances. Arctic icefield and tundra thaw and meltdown. Pine beetle infestation threat to the entire boreal forest. Communities increasingly becoming refugees from natural disasters from early icefield retreat, wildfires, floods, ice storms and drought — just to name a few the media has deemed to report on and only recently attribute to climate change.

And this is far from the worst of it.

Some scientists now affirm that we are witnessing planetary extinction of our biosphere’s atmosphere and biodiversity in slow motion.

Without decisive and immediate action by all G8 governments to reduce fossil fuel consumption by 70 per cent they predict our civilization will abruptly flat-line into oblivion.

Tory calls for more scientific study is a Byzantine exercise that is a ludicrous extension of private sector business influence and interference.

The current scientific consensus on climate change is like an incoming rush hour subway train, so numerically headstrong on this that to say we need more science is like trying to argue the earth is flat. It’s false. And worse, it’s immoral. And suicidal.

People in a position to do something ought to be focused on coming up with creative policy solutions. And damn fast.

The Tories (and the Liberals before them), lost their way the moment they bowed to their first corporate imperative over ecological common sense.

Time’s up! It is time to live fearlessly in a fearful time. We can. We must. We need politicians of conviction, not seeking to convict the young, bright voices among us who say “enough is enough!” and mount blockades at corporate headquarters.

In spite of industry and government growing “Green Scare” tactics, we must prepare as non-violent warriors, and head off to wage war. No joke.

We need a national war-like commitment where every anti-life attitude, behaviour and habit must be personally challenged and reversed. We need tax shifting to reward those meeting a higher bar, strong regulation and enforcement, and ensure corporate environmental crime recidivism is no longer feebly punished in the courts.

If Chuck Guité receives three plus years for corruption what should the Tory government face for their unflinching extremism in allowing subsidies and low taxes to the kings of the oilpatch to permit them to steal away from future generations their very survival?

Politically strategic inaction should result in a political verdict of reckless endangerment and gross ecological negligence.

For starters, we must silence their long-tired propaganda battle cries, “No drugs, no gays, no terrorism” with our own: “No more planet-destroying political compromise!”

We must challenge the planet’s enemies of excessive greed and hyper-consumption. Make our leaders feel the heat. Trounce thumb twiddling, policy window dressing and doubletalk. End ministerial impunity. Invoke a corporate-polluter “three strikes you’re out” for government procurements, or use of public funds and lands.

Unlike the formidable task of ridding the nation to the south of Stephen Harper’s ideological mentor and friend George Bush, we needn’t muster a costly mobilization to impeach; we need only educate one another before the next election which we all suspect is fast-approaching.

In the meantime, I urge you to call for Minister Ambrose’s immediate resignation from the environmental portfolio.

It’s up to us to buy the future some time. If we don’t, we have no one but ourselves to blame if more than just our gas tanks come up empty.