here's a research project for you, if you insist on it.

back in the 1800s, canada faced a major problem trying to populate the "frontier", by which i mean the prairies provinces, stretching all the way from the rockies into northern ontario. no matter what we tried, we couldn't get anybody to settle up there, because it was cold and dark (for much of the year) and isolated. so, we became paranoid that we were going to lose control over the western provinces to american settlers, which probably wouldn't have happened because it was cold and dark and isolated, but which was a consuming fear by the british authorities, nonetheless.

when i talk about may's insistence on settling saskatchewan being a commitment to settler colonialism, i'm not talking out of my ass. it's exactly what she's talking about, except that she doesn't seem to have learned the lesson - even with climate change, it's still cold and dark and isolated, and still incredibly difficult to settle.

african-americans didn't want to live in rural canada in the nineteenth century, and african climate refugees aren't going to want to live in rural canada in the twenty-first century, either.

the british eventually realized that the only way they'd manage to settle the region would be to find migrants that were acclimatized to the weather. so, instead of trying to attract freed american slaves or even german settlers, which migrated in large numbers to the much warmer united states, they made a broad appeal to northern europeans - norwegians, finns, ukrainians, russians, swedes and even the damned scots. while there are still the descendants of french settlements across the west, large swaths of the prairies are, today, majority northern european in ancestry.

you can say what you want about this, but the lands would not have been colonized any other way, for better or worse.

nowadays, these northern european countries have some of the highest standards of living in the world, although i wonder why nobody's talking about air-lifting ukrainians into saskatchewan. these are rural people that are used to a cold climate. it might actually work. the ukrainians aside, these countries are not likely sources of mass immigration into canada any time soon.

but, if the goal is to people or repeople the frontier, some thought needs to be put into finding people that will stay there.

so, that's the research project: where in the world are there people that are being threatened by climate change, that are used to living in rural communities (rather than cities) and that can handle cold climates?

the only thing i can think of is japan.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.