A visit to Manitoba’s dystopian future

IT is the summer of 2036. The world hurtled past the 1.5 C target for climate heating by 2028 as greenhouse gas emissions, especially in North America, soared under the Trump doctrine of drill baby drill.

Winnipeg now swelters in temperatures that hit 40 C between May and October.

The Squires government was forced to order the closure of Manitoba’s numerous data centres built during the Kinew era. Their water and power demands, especially in summer, are no longer sustainable. Being largely automated with few permanent jobs, they never delivered their promised economic bonanza. Three natural gas generating stations built at a cost of $10 billion, ostensibly to meet peak load demands in winter, were used 24-7 to service these energy vampires. That power is now needed elsewhere.

Summer is now the season of peak demand on the electricity grid, to meet cooling needs and EV charging during the summer driving season. Winters warmed dramatically as climatologists predicted, with temperatures rising at more than double the global rate. Days below -30 C are increasingly rare, allowing wind farms supplementing hydro to meet winter demands easily.

The drought on the Prairies beginning in 2031 was a return to dust-bowl conditions. It spelled the end of most farming. The Assiniboine River dried up, meaning no irrigation occurred in the southwest. This year, the Red River is also dry. Now the only water that flows to Lake Winnipeg is sewage effluent from city. The algal/cyanobacterial blooms are spectacular.

The drought has reduced Manitoba Hydro’s generating capacity. The Saskatchewan River now barely reaches the Manitoba border. Glaciers in the Rockies feeding it are gone and nearly every remaining drop goes to irrigation in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The turbines at the Grand Rapids generating station rarely spin. But downstream on the Nelson River capacity is maintained by increased flows on the Red and Winnipeg Rivers most years.

From spring to fall, southern Manitoba is blanketed by thick, choking smoke from wildfires across Canada’s boreal forest. Winnipeg is home to many thousands of evacuees from communities burned to the ground. The CFL collapsed in 2034 when the Prairie teams could no longer play in the constant smoke. The old Bomber stadium now houses the homeless.

The expanded Churchill Port operates only intermittently with the rail line regularly out of service. Permafrost on which it sits melted leaving the railway bed unstable. Plans to spend billions relocating it to firmer ground are still on the drawing board.

New gas and oil pipelines to the mouth of the Nelson River were finished in 2035, years late and twice the original $100-billion budget. The world’s largest storage tanks for oil and gas, needed for when the tanker fleet is icebound, sit empty. They are rusting, stranded assets.

Demand destruction for Canada’s oil and gas occurred with the rapid rollout of renewables across the EU. Europe’s shrinking need for fossil fuels is now easily met by European and Middle Eastern suppliers.

Huge cost overruns for the pipelines pushed by premiers Smith, Moe, and Kinew were dumped onto domestic consumers of fossil fuels and the taxpayer. Natural gas prices are fivefold higher than a decade earlier. Federal budget woes meant that the fleet of a dozen icebreakers needed to extend the Hudson Bay shipping season was never built. Costs soared to over $60 billion, a fossil-fuel subsidy that was too much even for the Poilievre government.

Wild swings in climate are now the norm. Before the drought, record winter-spring flows on the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in 2029/30 overwhelmed Winnipeg’s flood defences, resulting in tens of billions of damages. The Assiniboine River jumped its banks and reclaimed its old channel down the La Salle River, swamping the capacity of the floodway to protect the city.

The massive flood costs were the death knell for the Kinew government, unable to meet an election promise of a balanced budget in their second term.

The early 2030s saw an exodus of rural Manitobans as farming withered in the drought and water to supply towns either dried up or became unpotable due to industrial contamination of aquifers with arsenic and heavy metals.

Such is life in Manitoba’s hotter future.

Could this come to pass? Possibly. Maybe a little further down the road.

Are Manitobans solely responsible for the catastrophic damage of rapid climate change? Of course not. Our contribution is fractional, but not zero. The Earth’s air and water are shared resources and we cannot continue to dump our waste into them without consequence. Should we ignore our responsibility, we sanction the same behaviour for other, larger polluters.

And then we are doomed to climate catastrophes such as those sketched above.

Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg.