As you and I wrestle with the thousands of little ways that we can improve our pro-environment actions, it can be VERY frustrating when the powers-that-be seem to be using that power to be doing the exact opposite of what we’d like them to do. But who are these ‘powers’ – and how do I get me some!? 

“If I was King of the Forest…..” sang the Cowardly Lion on the road to Oz. Well, if I was King of this forested land called Canada, I know that I would take legislative steps on a myriad number of issues near and dear to me and my vision for a greener, healthier tomorrow. What kind of steps, you ask? Well, don’t mind if I do!

I’d take steps to reduce our carbon footprint and increase our caring footprint. I’d take steps to ensure that we have less oil pipelines siphoning the last of the dead dinosaur juice from our sacred grounds – and I’d sure as heck have more freshwater pipelines bringing aqua-vitae to the First Nations communities across the North who have to live without water all too frequently. I’d take steps to ensure that those most impacted, most vulnerable, to the growing pain of the climate emergency are given more voice in the decision-finding and decision-making, and that we, as a country, measure ourselves to a higher standard of living within the means of Nature.

But, truth be told, I really don’t know that much about politics, or the inner workings of the system. I’ve voted most of my life and have occasionally dabbled by assisting a friend with a campaign – but it has never gone beyond that. And it’s not as if I’m not an opinionated SOB who may be guilty of an over-fondness for the sound of his own voice. But despite my lived experiences as a white male of acceptable means, I remain intimidated and afraid to break through my barriers in pursuit of something that has always percolated in my mind.

Thankfully, some friends shared with me a link to the FLIP 2.0 summit – and it was like flipping a switch in my mind as I pivoted from “I can not” to “why the heck not”. I will be spending my Saturday learning from those in the know, those who’ve walked paths that I seek to explore. I will listen and I will learn from people of all backgrounds as they share their wisdom for summoning the courage to be king or queen of a forever-forested land.

I may never be a powers-that-be but, by the end of day Saturday, I’m pretty certain that I’ll understand that power and how best to work together with my friends and peers to affect positive change on a local, provincial and federal level. And that’s a pretty powerful way to spend the day.

The post FLIP the Script appeared first on A\J.

So, what happened? Here is what we know so far…

On April 9, 2020, WE drafted a proposal for a youth entrepreneurship program which was sent to Youth Minister Bardish Chagger and Small Business Minister Mary Ng. While similar to the CSSG program, WE stated this proposal sent in early April was unrelated.

Just over a week goes by and Rachel Wernick, a senior Employment and Social Development Canada official, reaches out to WE on April 19 regarding a new proposal which would become the CSSG program. Wernick stated she was unaware of the original proposal sent a week and a half prior, and that the idea to reach out to WE about running the CSSG program originally came from someone in finance.

Chagger later told the House of Commons finance committee on July 16^th that neither Prime Minister Trudeau or Bill Morneau, former finance minister, had suggested to partner with WE for the delivery of this program prior to introducing it to cabinet. Instead, according to BNN Bloomberg, Chagger noted Public Service had their hands full with the coronavirus and the recommendation (made in writing by Wernick), was that WE Charity would have the capacity and network to handle the program. She stated in her testimony, “I was given a recommendation by the public service…I accepted the recommendation and brought it forward to cabinet.”

Earlier this September, new documents were released which allegedly proved Minister Chagger may in fact have been a dominant driver for WE Charities involvement with the program, and not Public Service as she had stated. According to the National Post, although originally claiming to have not discussed the program with anyone from WE Charity prior to presenting it to cabinet, Minister Chagger had been in contact with WE co-founder Craig Kielburger as early as April 17^th to discuss a suggestion made by Chagger of a summer service opportunity. Justin Trudeau would announce the program five days later on April 22^nd.  

Youth Minister Bardish Chagger// SOURCE: CBC

It is hard to know what actually happened, and I am starting to develop a headache trying to figure it out. So, at this point you might be asking, why do we care about who came up with the program?

WE Charity was set to be paid $43 million by the federal government to administer the program (they received $30 million before the program was cancelled). It did not take long after the announcement of the program for family ties between Trudeau, Morneau and WE Charity to be exposed. With both the Morneau and Trudeau family directly profiting off WE in the past, this just didn’t sit right with people.

Shortly after, the agreement was dissolved and WE Charity announced they would pay back the funds they had been given thus far. This whole ordeal seemed to be quite a hit for WE. According to CBC, WE Charity confessed fundraising since the scandal has been fairly difficult. Between the pandemic’s financial strain on the company and the failure of the student grant program, on September 9^th the WE Charity announced the closing of their Canadian operations.

Any trace of the program’s existence isn’t easy to find these days. The online portal where students were able to access CSSG, called “I Want to Help”, has been dismantled on all web platforms. If you go to the main page you will find nothing, but “The Government is currently considering options for the Canada Student Service Grant. As such, applications for service opportunities and students are not currently being processed or accepted.”

Wait a second. What about the 35,000 students who applied to the program and were left without a volunteer placement? I have questions!

Surely, one would like to assume the money allocated for the program would go back to students in some form or another. According to the Huffington Post, many students are asking for the grant to be dissolved into the Canada Emergency Student Benefit or through tuition relief. 

Nicole Brayiannis, National Deputy Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, told Alternatives Journal that so far, this has not been the case.

“Students have not been receiving consistent and clear support about what would be coming from the government to support financially throughout this pandemic, and students are still eagerly waiting.” -Nicole Brayiannis

“I think at the closure of the program, it was tried to be said that only $500 million was allocated which was not consistent with what was originally said to be $912 million,” said Brayiannis. “Students have not been receiving consistent and clear support about what would be coming from the government to support financially throughout this pandemic, and students are still eagerly waiting.” Brayiannis says, to her knowledge, the 35,000 students who applied to the program have still not been given any kind of placement or alternative funding.

I spoke with Bardish Chagger, Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth to try and understand what was going on. “In response to Covid-19, we came out with a $9 billion dollar plan for students and youth,” Chagger told me, “So the Canada Student Service Grant was part of that bigger picture.” Included in the $9 billion dollar plan was placing moratoriums on Canada student loan repayments and increasing job opportunities.

Chagger continued, “We had students wanting to not put a pause on their future and wanting to gain work experience, so we increased the number of Canada student summer jobs opportunities from 70,000 to 80,000. We had students that were saying, yes, it is great to work in the not for profit sector, but we also want to work in other sectors including for small businesses. So, the government responded by saying 100% of wages will be covered for all sectors that provide a youth a meaningful employment opportunity…. If you actually look at the $9 billion dollar program, the Canada student service grant was just a very small portion of that. And those other programs we put out, have actually been better used than we additionally thought, and we were able to help more Canadians than we had originally estimated.” Chagger noted the government is still currently looking at options for a replacement for the CSSG program but stated that everything remains on the table.

The “I Want to Help” platform had 35,000 applicants // SOURCE: Doyle

At the end of the day, the breakdown of the CSSG program is about a loss of support for youth who needed help during a challenging time.

“I would say across the board it’s been a disappointing amount of support students have received throughout the pandemic,” said Brayiannis. “The Canadian Student Service Grant from the start did not seem like a good program to go for because it was setting students up for precarious working situations.” The program would have paid students 33% below minimum wage.  

“What is really interesting about the students that applied,” Brayiannis continued, “was that I believe around 64% were visible minorities…So that is really telling about the individuals who were trying to access these resources… and these are students who now again have been left with no further support. There hasn’t been anything on where this $912 million will be going after this failed program, and students are desperate and in need which is shown through 35,000 students applying to what was shown to already be a problematic program to begin with.”

I asked Minister Chagger what she believes a 64% visible minority application rate tells us, “I think what that demonstrates is the importance of collecting data and asking questions… and then governments can know who they are responding to and how to respond,” she told me.

Brayiannis also mentioned in our conversation that the CSSG was not inclusive to all students since it did not include international students and students over 30.  When looking at international students for example, she said, “It’s unjustifiable because international students are contributors to our economy, yet that is usually the argument that is used, that they only come here to study and are not engaged in the same way domestic students are…But when we look at the realities and the facts, last year international students cross Canada contributed over $24 billion dollars to the economy.” Brayiannis said students over 30 are also often overlooked and not always included in these kinds of support programs.

Brayiannis attributes this to a lack of consultation with students and disregard for viewing students as experts in their own field. “There has been less and less investment into post secondary education, so unfortunately this isn’t a new trend that just started existing during the pandemic, it’s reemphasizing the lack of regard that has been given to supporting students,” she says.

“It’s very unprecedented and challenging times for everyone across the country and around the world since the global pandemic. So, we are all in it for the first time, all of us together.” -Bardish Chagger

I believe the CSSG program had good intentions. I also believe the people behind the program wanted to help students during a difficult time. And I understand making decisions that will affect millions during a pandemic, at superspeed with no former playbook to follow, is not easy for governments. As Minister Chagger said, “The pace at which we are having to respond is very different for the government, governments have never had to respond at this pace. But somehow by working together, we have been able to bring up programs rather quickly.”

But now it is time to clean up the messy situation – that negatively impacted the present and future for 35,000 young Canadians – that the CSSG program left behind.  

“It’s very unprecedented and challenging times for everyone across the country and around the world since the global pandemic. So, we are all in it for the first time, all of us together,” said Chagger.

While comforting to hear the Minister remind that we’re all sharing this discomfort, it does sounds like there are still a lot more questions than answers, let alone actual support for students, all 35,000 of us.

The post How WE Hurt Me appeared first on A\J.

Give me a second to digest this – I’ll come back to this.

In the 2015 Canadian federal election, young voter turnout (between the ages of 18 and 24) was approximately 57%. When the remaining percentage were asked why they did not vote, nearly a third of youth stated they weren’t interested in politics or they were just too busy.

Give me a second to digest this – I’ll come back to this.

In the past few weeks, I have watched my fellow rightfully outraged millennials and gen Z’s marching down busy streets in their respective cities, protesting different forms of systemic injustice in our society. It was only last September, Greta Thunberg inspired over one million people to march in the name of climate all around the world. One would think that marching, sloganeering, and appearing eager to make change happen NOW would all appear to suggest that young people DO in fact care about issues political in nature, no?

As I sat in my living room watching the crowds make their way down the congested streets, I couldn’t help but wonder, how many of these people voted? Or will vote? While young voter turnout in the 2015 federal elections was much higher than previous elections, can we not do better than 57%? Are we saying that 43% of us do not actually care?

Aaron Freeman, founder of GreenPAC and owner of Pivot Strategic Consulting, cited a few common reasons many young people do not vote: “It’s a very common notion among younger people, and generally among people who don’t vote, that the candidates are all the same, the parties are all the same, and it doesn’t actually make a difference.”

GreenPAC, founded by Freeman back in 2014, is a nonpartisan organization that helps to both elect and support environmental leaders in office. In addition to recruiting environmental leadership, GreenPAC offers a Parliamentary Internship program which places young environmentalists in the offices of MP’s that demonstrate environmental leadership.  Mavis Chan, who participated in this program from 2018 to 2019, interned under the Honourable William Amos (Liberal), the MP for the Pontiac riding in western Quebec.  

“Getting credible environmental champions to run for office- and I’m talking from all parties across the spectrum- is critical if we want to inspire younger voters to show up at the polls” – Aaron Freeman, founder of GreenPAC

When asked why she feels young people might not vote, Chan said, “I think part of it is maybe cynicism of the political system, so not feeling like their vote would make a difference…I think there is a steep learning curve at the beginning where you’re just in your ‘baby adulthood’ where you have to grasp all these issues that are in an election campaign and you just don’t know where to start. Maybe some people have grown up in political households, but I think a lot of people don’t know where to start when they do have this right to vote.”

In the last few elections, the environment has been a key issue among young voters. “Getting credible environmental champions to run for office- and I’m talking from all parties across the spectrum- is critical if we want to inspire younger voters to show up at the polls,” Freeman says.

He continued, “[Environmental problems] extend beyond political mandates; they require a level of environmental literacy we don’t always have. What we [are] seeing, is when governments do deal with those kinds of problems, it usually boils down to one really important quality and that’s leadership.”

While not everyone can vote, there are other ways you can participate in a meaningful way. As Chan explained, “Everyone can make a difference in their own way; there are so many niches within the field. Some people are really good at fundraising and working for NGOs, and some people are good at being in the bureaucracy, and some people are good at political campaigning. We need all of it.”

Instead, we often direct our civic engagement in the wrong places. We virtue-signal our desired actions (in many cases without actually possessing said virtue). We decorate our social feeds with the latest campaign frames and hashtags to demonstrate our ‘wokeness’, or we click a button to LIKE and feel like we’ve actually participated in #meatlessmondays (or any other cause). We do this, I believe, to mask our disingenuity and desire to do the bare minimum. In reality, these kinds of actions arguably do very little – and many of us do not show up where it really counts.

SOURCE: Treehugger

Now, protesting isn’t a bad thing – in fact, it’s a great thing. “There is importance to protesting in a way as it helps makes the issues really salient for policy makers and political leaders – to know that’s it’s important to their electorate,” says Chan, “I think those who are protesting on the outside are able to provide a completely different push to the political agenda.”

“There is importance to protesting in a way as it helps makes the issues really salient for policy makers and political leaders – to know that’s it’s important to their electorate” – Mavis Chan

However, protesting Justin Trudeau’s approval of a pipeline expansion, when you didn’t exercise your civic duty to vote in the election that put him there in the first place, makes your words fall flat.

While protesting still has a purpose, the energy is lost unless we take it to the polls. Our ability to make the kind of change that we want to see happen ultimately falls in the hands of our elected leaders. As Aaron Freeman said, “I think the protests that happened last year on climate change were inspiring, and the question really is – where are you going to take that? How are you going to convert that energy into meaningful results? …One of the most accessible ways we can create that change is by electing leaders. Certainly, if you look historically, that has been the X factor – that’s been what’s made the difference when we have made progress on the environment.”

I am not going to rant in this story about the Women’s Suffrage movement, or about the people in Sudan or Thailand who have had to fight for a free, and fair democracy. But I do think that we should recognize the vital power we hold toward making a change. That the power lies in our ability to choose our leadership. My point is, if you are going to protest now, make sure you vote later.

The post Protest Vote appeared first on A\J.

***

Follow up:

Sources: News this week

The Recap is part of our Student Summer Takeover series which aims to amplify the voices of young people in environmental media. New episodes will be released at the beginning of every week, don’t miss out!

***

Follow up:

Sources: News this week

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/greta-thunberg-four-days-into-atlantic-crossing https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/21/amazonian-rainforest-is-ablaze-turning-day-into-night-brazils-capital-city/?noredirect=on https://www.livescience.com/46319-oil-drilling-contaminated-amazon.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article234161407.html

The post The AJ Recap: Are environmental charities partisan? appeared first on A\J.

The environment has not been so front and center in Canadian politics since the early 1990s. October’s federal election suddenly has three parties (Greens, Liberals and NDP) looking to outdo each other on environmental concerns. It has been a long time since government in Ottawa made our glaringly obvious environmental problems a leading priority. What happened?

Increasing visibility happened: starved whales washing ashore with stomachs full of plastic, mass puffin deaths likely a result of climate change, above normal scale and frequency of wild fires and flooding and the recent devastating IPCC climate report. But also, crucially: Trump, Ford and Kenney determined to ignore our urgent environmental problems and, worse, to aggressively erase long-established protections and, perhaps most important to the green shift in priorities, the stunning worldwide political interventions of savvy young people.

Work to get young people thinking about their futures and older people thinking about their grandchildren’s futures. If we can do that, most Canadians will figure out the right thing to do in the voting booth.”

As in the 1970s, new environmental organizations are proliferating: the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion to name three. They take to the streets peacefully and playfully and are quickly changing global public consciousness. American Presidential candidates are endorsing the Green New Deal and green parties recently made big gains in the European Parliament and elsewhere.

Canada’s Green Party is also surging: electing provincial leader Mike Schreiner as Guelph MPP, winning a federal by-election in British Columbia, electing three members in New Brunswick and becoming the official opposition in PEI. Federally, Greens are now polling at 10-11% and, importantly I think, Elizabeth May will participate in this autumn’s televised leader debates. The Canadian political landscape could be moving toward a system with four major parties.

Regardless, a three-way competition for pro-environment voters is underway. The Liberals, doubtless reading opinion polls carefully, are 1) pushing hard on a carbon tax, 2) eliminating the captivity of whales and dolphins and 3) proposing elimination of single-use plastics by 2021. All are very positive steps. The NDP, also losing ground to the Greens, has offered bold proposals in the spirit of the Green New Deal advanced in the US and elsewhere. The NDP has included energy efficiency renovations of virtually every building in Canada by 2050. The Green Party, of course, has had broad and bold plans on climate in its platform for years and, of late, had pushed for the parliamentary initiative on whales and dolphins. The question remaining now is what do environmental voters do in the federal election to maintain this new momentum?

Absent electoral reform our decision as voters is not easy, all the options involve complications and unknowns. My own first choice in terms of outcome is for a minority government that includes any combination of the three parties that do not more or less exclude environmental action (other than cutting Environment Canada budgets). A ‘Minority government comprised of only the pro-environment parties’ is not, alas, a single ballot circle where one can put an ‘X’.

There are things to learn or decide before making one’s choice. Has the incumbent in one’s riding demonstrated environmental concern through past actions? What is in each party platform? Which candidates and parties emphasize aggressive initiatives on climate change? For those considering strategic voting, what is the prior voting history in your riding (does the best party have any chance)? Is the worst party competitive in the riding (if not, vote freely for your first choice)? What do current polls show about this time (how much have things shifted)? And, importantly, is it time to consider just putting aside strategic voting considerations?

These are all tough questions, but here are some suggestions. Work out a personal plan soon enough to participate on behalf of your choice early on so that you can help with a campaign. Even without a plan, go to all-candidates meetings and ask environmental questions. Talk to friends and family about why this election, and environmental issues, are urgent this time around. Work to get young people thinking about their futures and older people thinking about their grandchildren’s futures. If we can do that, most Canadians will figure out the right thing to do in the voting booth.

The post Environment: On Canada’s Agenda Again appeared first on A\J.

***

Follow up:

Go check out Our Time for more information:

http://its.our-time.ca

The Recap is part of our Student Summer Takeover series which aims to amplify the voices of young people in environmental media. New episodes will be released at the beginning of every week, don’t miss out!

***

Follow up:

Go check out Our Time for more information:

http://its.our-time.ca

Also check out Climate Justice Toronto

https://www.facebook.com/climatejusticeto/ 

Sources: News this week     

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/this-is-a-wake-up-call-the-villagers-who-could-be-britains-first-climate-refugees
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/north-atlantic-right-whale-dead-1.5219891
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49108847

The post The AJ Recap: Change the debate appeared first on A\J.

Prior to the 42^nd Canadian Federal Election, GreenPAC led by founder Aaron Freeman, released their “Green 18,” an endorsement of 18 election candidates from all four major political parties with strong environmental track records.

Recognizing Canada’s need for stronger environmental protection, GreenPAC was created with the goal of addressing the most serious environmental issues and translating these concerns into political action. With the help of hundreds of thousands of Canadians and a panel of experts, they recruited, nominated, elected and supported a group of environmental champions, fostering environmental leadership from the four major political parties.

Their campaign proved successful, with 14 of their Green 18 Candidates elected, including Francois Choquette, Linda Duncan, Dianne Watts, Kirsty Duncan, Romeo Saganash, Michael Chong, Elizabeth May, Richard Cannings, Jim Carr, Will Amos, Joyce Murray, Fin Donnelly, Terry Duguid and Nathan Cullen. Half of elected environmental champions were not the incumbent MPs.

“This was not just about the ‘red tide’” said Freeman. Among the elected included six New Democratic Party MPs, five Liberal MPs, two Conservative MPs and one  Green Party MP. 

“We’re very pleased about the environmental champions who have been elected,” said Freeman. “It is a pretty good story to tell how environment fared in this election.”

However the campaign was not without its share of losses, Freeman acknowledged the loss of environmental champion Megan Leslie, who held the Halifax riding as an MP for two terms, as well as Karine Desjardins, Bruce Hyer and Gord Miller. “There were some bittersweet elements to it but the takeaway for this election for us was that if you were an environmental champion, that was working for you in this election,” said Freeman.

Within three election cycles, GreenPAC hopes to have one in ten federal MP’s elected as environmental champions. 

The success of GreenPAC’s campaign can only mean good things for Canada and the environment. The newly elected government has made several significant promises on making environmental progress. With the 14 environmental champions from all the major parties sitting in the House of Commons, there is a much better chance that those promises will be kept. Going forward, Freeman is confident that there will be many exciting opportunities to build politically relevant constituencies for the environment in politics.

What’s next for GreenPAC? According to Freeman, this is up to their supporters.      

“We now have the ability and basis to have those [environmental] conversations and we now have the capacity to build environmental leadership in different levels of the government,” says Freeman. “What we want to do now is see where that [supporter] energy is the strongest and focus on those places.”

GreenPAC will continue to support their environmental champions in moving the needle on environmental issues as well as being active in other levels of government and getting involved in nomination races in local levels.

Within three election cycles, GreenPAC hopes to have one in ten federal MP’s elected as environmental champions. By continuing in their current path and building supporters, they are well on their way to achieving this goal.

This is just the beginning for GreenPAC, join the movement by visiting greenpac.ca and signing up for their mailing list.

The post Building Environmental Leadership appeared first on A\J.

Defying all odds just a few months back, Trudeau’s Liberals have swept into power with a majority mandate. During the campaign, they made a series of promises – on the environment, on First Nations’ issues, on water, for instance. Can Trudeau actually live up to these promises?

With the Paris Climate Change negotiations starting at the end of November, many are focused on what the Liberals will do to distinguish themselves on the climate file. At this point, the Prime Minister would simply have to install a few solar panels on 24 Sussex to have a better climate policy than the Harper Years. Which is precisely the worry.

At this point, the Liberals have been just vague enough in their promises to let just about anything happen. Trudeau has promised to attend the Paris talks – he hasn’t stated if would go personally, but there will be a lot of pressure for him to join other world leaders. He’s also promised to host a meeting with Premiers within three months of the Paris talks to flesh out a carbon pricing policy.

And that’s about it. The vagueness leaves an opening big enough for a few jumbo jets, meaning that it will be up to environmental groups and concerned citizens to keep up the pressure for climate action. Sure enough, two major protests are already planned for Ottawa alone during Trudeau’s first month in power, in the lead up to the Paris negotiations.

On the pipeline file, Trudeau did commit to ensuring the National Energy Board, the government agency that approves (and rarely, denies) major pipeline projects and their ilk, would be empowered to consider climate change emissions in their process, something forbidden during the Harper Years. This would add a significant barrier to proposed pipelines like Kinder Morgan and Energy East if these new measures have any teeth.

Trudeau has also pledged to support a tanker ban on the north coast of British Colombia, which would seem to make the Northern Gateway pipeline, already hugely unpopular in the province, a moot project. He had already spoken of his opposition to that project, which was also opposed by the NDP and Greens.

Troublingly, Trudeau has pledged his support for the TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, and a few days before he reigned victorious over Harper, his own campaign co-chair was forced to resign after it was revealed that he was also acting as an advisor to TransCanada and soliciting them advice on lobbying the new government. On TransCanada’s other proposed pipeline, Energy East, Trudeau has proved equally hard to pin down, saying only that he would want to await the results of the NEB’s review.

Here again, the rising power of environmental movements may make all the difference, as they’ve already been able to build a strong level of opposition to both Kinder Morgan and Energy East, with even Ontario’s Energy Board saying that Energy East’s risks outweigh any benefits, and community opposition forcing them to abandon plans to build a tanker terminal in endangered beluga habitat in Quebec.

First Nations nationally have been trying to get some traction on resolving the sorry state of water quality in reserves across the country for many, many years. As it currently stands, over 100 First Nations communities are under drinking water advisories, meaning in some places water needs to be boiled, while in other places it’s completely undrinkable.

Trudeau actually managed to distinguish himself on this issue, pledging to deal with the various communities by the end of his first term. While admirable, the real question as with so much in politics comes down to dollars. Simply put, this is an expensive problem – the government itself estimated it would cost nearly $5 billion, or just under the pricing of the Kelowna Accord, negotiated over 18 months with First Nations. We may have to wait until the next budget is released to see if the dollars match common sense.

Also reaching a salient point was the plight of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, with all parties but the Conservatives pledging an inquiry into the issue. Trudeau has already stated that he intends to fulfill this promise, after he has had some time to form a cabinet.

The Liberals also pledged their complete support for all recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which earned them a verbal thrashing from the National Post over the veritable impossibility of their claim.

Unfortunately, the National Post may be right. Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing more I would advocate for than the full machinery of the government put to use marching for justice for Indigenous communities. I just don’t think the rest of the country is there.

One of the biggest recommendation calls for the enforcement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In a previous article, I wrote about why Harper and many industries in the country had long opposed this declaration – for its inclusion of a kind of veto for Native communities over projects that would negatively impact their communities.

Many Native communities see this provision as a necessity, and fundamentally similar to recent Supreme Court rulings, but many businesses and governments see it as political and economic anathema that would send this country into chaos. For that reason, Trudeau will find his hands partially tied on implementation, or find himself at war with many industries and Canadians who share their fears.

On-reserve water, missing and murdered women, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission all emerged as major issues for Indigenous movements and voters, who turned out in record numbers to elect a record number of Indigenous MPs (ten). Indigenous groups will be hoping for the best from this new government, but like other movements, will have to be prepared to push back if they find the new government far too like the old. 

The post WTF: What’s Trudeau’s Future? appeared first on A\J.

The first time I met Justin Trudeau in person was on December 6, 2009. I remember it clearly because I also got arrested.  The Copenhagen climate summit was in full swing, and I had joined a group of young climate activists in the last of a series of sit-ins sweeping across Canada asking our government to be ambitious on climate. Our team had made its way into the heart of Parliament where the House of Commons Environment Committee — of which Trudeau was a member — was studying Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act. 

At the time, Trudeau and the Liberal Party were, along with the Harper Conservatives, opposed to the legislation. Their reasoning was that the Bill set ambitious political targets but didn’t lay out a plan in order to achieve them — a move that harkens to Trudeau’s reticence to set climate targets in his election platform over the past few weeks.

About fifteen minutes into the meeting, our group stood up and removed our jackets, revealing shirts printed to read “Climate Action Now!” — the tip of the exclamation point replaced by a maple leaf. We walked slowly and deliberately to the front of the room, where the MPs sat around a donut-shaped table, to declare our intention to sit-in until the bill was put back on the House of Commons floor with the support of the Liberals.

Within minutes we had been picked up, dragged out, and detained by security. Within hours we were placed under arrest, processed, and issued trespassing tickets.

At that meeting, the committee voted to return Bill C-311 to the House of Commons without amendment, where it returned four days later on December 10th.

Long story short, the C-311 was not passed in time to affect Canada’s position in Copenhagen, but it was passed a year and a half later by the House of Commons — this time with the support of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Later, in an unprecedented move, the Climate Change Accountability Act was defeated by a Conservative Senate. The moral of the story remains that a strong display of people power held the Liberal Party to account. And so I can’t help but feel hopeful in the wake of this past election.

It gives me hope for two reasons. The first is that the movement of people calling for real climate action in Canada has never been stronger. From coast, to coast, to coast there are powerful, deeply rooted struggles to defend communities and the climate, evidenced by the failure of Stephen Harper to have even a single tar sands pipeline touch the ocean. The second is that Trudeau needs to be accountable to this movement, and more broadly to progressives in Canada.

The simple truth is that in this election, people wanted change. Time and time again, polls showed that 3/4’s of people in Canada wanted to oust Stephen Harper. Justin Trudeau won the change vote, and in many ridings was the beneficiary of the hundreds of thousands of people who were tired of the Harper decade.

These people voted against Harper. They voted against a Prime Minister whose vision of turning Canada into a fossil fuel super power was destroying environmental protections, polluting our democracy, muzzling science and criminalizing opponents — particularly Indigenous communities.  

They also voted for hope, and now it’s up to us to turn that hope into action, without delay. If we can do that, we can hold Justin Trudeau accountable to his campaign promises, and demand those things that we know are necessary for a more just, progressive, and fair society.

For a lot of us in Canada, it’s not in our nature to demand things. Unfortunately, the ticking time bomb of climate change means we need to be a little impatient and demand climate action from our new government. We only have a handful of years left to change the course that this country has taken over the past decade, and to turn Canada from a pariah into a leader. Put another way — we need to pull a Reverse Harper.

Here’s what I mean. On January 23, 2006 Stephen Harper was first elected. He was sworn in on February 6th and before the end of February had cancelled billions of dollars in federal spending on climate change and energy efficiency. On top of that, they abandoned work that Environment Canada had taken on to regulate greenhouse gases from large industrial facilities and started describing or legally-binding Kyoto Protocol climate targets as unrealistic. In other words, within a couple weeks of his election, Harper had already dismantled some of the most important pillars of Canada’s climate change action.

We need Justin Trudeau to act with the same kind of bold, swift action to dig Canada out of the hole on climate that we’re in. We need the polar opposite of the concrete actions that Harper took to tear down this country’s reputation on climate, but we need them to be as decisive — and this time to protect the planet, not put it in peril.

Unfortunately, that kind of action isn’t something Trudeau will do on his own. We already know that his former campaign advisor had been on contract with TransCanada, and had advised the pipeline giant to start their lobbying efforts without delay. We know that Trudeau’s climate platform on the campaign trail, despite some great initiatives like phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and overhauling the pipeline review process, falls short of delivering a clear plan, in line with the science, to meet Canada’s climate obligations.

Prime Minister Trudeau has pledged to pursue a climate and energy strategy that respects science and evidence — something we have in troves when it comes to climate change. Those troves are clear that in order to meet our obligation to a 2ºC world, at least 85 percent of tar sands needs to stay in the ground. Personally, I think that Mr. Trudeau understands this, but I believe he needs the social license in order to act on that understanding.

That’s why I’ve been a part of organizing something called a “Climate Welcome”, a series of gentle, but serious, sit-ins happening in two weeks at 24 Sussex in Ottawa. The idea is to throw a welcome party for the new Prime Minister — one that is both hopeful, but also defined by the need for bold and urgent climate action. That’s why we’ll be risking arrest and why we’re bringing gifts. Each day we’ll deliver a series of gifts for the new Prime Minister, gifts that should give him the tools he needs to do what we know is necessary to get Canada back on track when it comes to climate change — freezing the expansion of the tar sands and committing to build a justice based, clean energy economy.

This could well be the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of Canada’s climate movement, but that alone is not the point. The point is that we need bold leadership from this government, we need it now, and we’re going to use our bodies, our creativity, and risk arrest to show it. What happens next will be up to Mr. Trudeau.

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Wouldn’t it be great to be fueled by hope instead of fear as the late Jack Layton urged us in his letter to the nation? 

“What is it about activists that they can’t even be optimistic for one day after a whole decade?” The disgust and disappointment on my 16 year olds’ face is somewhat heartbreaking as he pours cereal the morning after the Canadian election and surfs the comments on my Facebook page.  I can only shake my head sadly and agree with him. 

Wouldn’t it be great to be fueled by hope instead of fear as the late Jack Layton urged us in his letter to the nation? 

My sons have never known a Canada that was not under Stephen Harper’s thumb.  For the last decade they have listened to their parents shock and outrage over the weakening of our environmental laws, the lack of transparency, the erosion of democracy, the muzzling of scientists, the attack on environmental groups, the disregard for Canada’s constitution.  Along the way we tried to keep hope alive. We painted a picture for them of a Canada that valued evidence based policy. A Canada that led on the world stage to create critical international agreements like the Montreal Protocol.  We talked about how lucky we are to live in a democracy and how important it was for us to participate, to organize and to vote. Wouldn’t it be great to be fueled by hope instead of fear as the late Jack Layton urged us in his letter to the nation?  For just a minute could we not take a deep breath and focus on all the things that we know will now change?

Together we watched the election results come in from coast to coast and I watched the hope and optimism on my sons face as he listened to Justin Trudeau’s acceptance speech.  “Sunny ways!” We all yelled, half-hysterical and grinning ear to ear.  “To the end of the Harper Era!” We cheered as we raised a glass in jubilant toast. 

Our exuberance made the next mornings conversation all that more painful. “Is he really no different?”  “Why can’t people ever be hopeful?”

Canada will have to scramble to catch up after a decade of Federal inaction and there is a considerable amount of fear and cynicism in the activist and scientific community about how our new Liberal government will rise to that challenge. 

Why not indeed. Optimism is a particularly hard place for the activist community.  It is by nature a community that draws from the margins, those that question the status quo are often the same people that the status quo doesn’t benefit. There are also those that are simply hard wired to question authority and then there are those who have immersed themselves in climate science and for whom incremental progress or half measures are simply seen as disastrous and even immoral. In the case of this election and the thorough trouncing of the New Democratic Party there are also those in the activist community who were deeply invested in seeing an NDP or at least a Liberal minority that would give more space for an NDP agenda and with it the potential to strengthen the Liberals position on climate change. 

Let’s be clear — the Liberal Party Platform on climate change currently lacks strong emissions reductions targets at a critical moment in history when it is clear that the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference discussions are undergoing a dramatic cultural shift.  For the first time in over a decade we are seeing a race to the top on climate policy.  Countries are committing to aggressive targets and, like China with the announcement of their cap and trade system, they are putting in place real policies to meet those targets. Canada will have to scramble to catch up after a decade of Federal inaction and there is a considerable amount of fear and cynicism in the activist and scientific community about how our new Liberal government will rise to that challenge. 

The Liberal campaign slogan during this Federal election was ‘hope and hard work’.  In the coming months we will need a lot of both. 

Prime Minster-elect Justin Trudeau’s support for the Keystone pipeline and the cozy relationship between the Liberal campaign chair and Transcanada has not helped create optimism on the climate file. Of course, there is also the experience of our colleagues south of the border who remind us that without strong public campaigns the Obama administration would never have considered pulling permits for Arctic drilling and certainly would have approved the Keystone pipeline by now. The pull of the oil and gas industry is strong and while we now have the technology to build a cleaner, safer energy system, it is not easy for any elected leader to forego significant short term financial benefits from fossil fuel exploration let alone tell their constituents that the price of electricity and gas needs to go up.

The Liberal campaign slogan during this Federal election was ‘hope and hard work’.  In the coming months we will need a lot of both.  Not just from our new government but also from ourselves.  Let’s allow ourselves to hope.  For our children and our health and the health of our communities.  Over the past week I have forced myself not to fall into the pit of cynicism and to take a moment everyday to think of one thing that I care about that will change under this new government.  It has had the effect of weights being lifted off my shoulders leaving me feel more spacious, more creative and free. A decade of attacks on our democracy, on those who can afford it the least and on our environment has left considerable baggage and scars.  It will take a while to unpack it all and to trust my own government again.  For my children I will try.  If we allow ourselves to hope, Prime Minister-elect Justin Trudeau is making it easy for us.  We aren’t getting platitudes and framing devoid of real promises and content.  Within minutes we were getting renewed commitments to a new voting system, an inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women and an invitation to Green Party leader Elizabeth May and every Premier to attend the Paris Climate Summit as part of a team.  We even got a day after press conference where our Prime Minister-elect … answered questions. 

A decade of attacks on our democracy, on those who can afford it the least and on our environment has left considerable baggage and scars. 

The coming months will not be easy as we begin to establish a new relationship with our government and the international community but I am hopeful that we now have a government that will govern for all of Canadians best interests and not simply for one sector.  I am hopeful that we now have a government that will choose science over politics, clean, safe energy systems over business as usual and perhaps even a government that will choose people over polluters. 

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