When the Conservative Opposition advocates increasing security to keep Canadians safe, they generally mean from extremist militants the like of ISIS.
But with 2015 coming out as the warmest year since records first started being documented back in the mid-1800s, perhaps it couldn't hurt to address another potential threat.
Regardless of whether climate change is induced, accelerated or even completely unaffected by human activity, the simple fact remains.
It's happening.
Weather patterns are getting more frequent and extreme, the ice caps are slowly but surely melting and oceans are in turn rising.
In other words, thousands of miles of shorelines around the world will at best be flooded or at worst completely gone. From harbours and port cities to small fishing villages, the map is poised to change in the coming years and decades.
Even major oil producers have re-engineered ocean platforms to heights beyond original recommendations to account for rising water levels. Multibillion-dollar companies have been investing major amounts of money to protect their investments from higher waves for some time already, as recently reported on in a Los Angeles Times article called "Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations".
"As many of the world's major oil companies ó including Exxon, Mobil and Shell ó joined a multimillion-dollar industry effort to stave off new regulations to address climate change, they were quietly safeguarding billion-dollar infrastructure projects from rising sea levels, warming temperatures and increasing storm severity," reads an excerpt from the article, referring to actions that took place throughout the late 1980s and early 2000s.
"From the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic, the companies were raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic."
Yet meanwhile, coastal cities are basically sitting ducks, deer in headlights, totally unprepared ó take your pick. They cannot simply build higher, and even if they could, the price tag would be astronomical. Extreme droughts in some areas and massive floods in others will also bear burgeoning costs on rural agricultural areas as well as urban centres.
Many economists are even warning about the serious economic impacts of rising temperatures.
"The asset management industry ó and thus the wider community of investors of all sizes ó is facing the prospect of significant losses from the effects of climate change," reads the lead of a report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, found on www.economicinsights.com.
If oil companies taking measures to mitigate the effects of climate change on their ocean platforms and infrastructure isn't a sufficient enough indicator that it might be a good time for governments around the globe to start taking the issue more seriously, what is?
