A CHANGE IN CLIMATE
Since last year's march, the biggest protest in Montreal's history, nothing has changed, and yet the pandemic has changed everything
Last year, half a million Montrealers marched for climate action, their numbers amplified by teen activist Greta Thunberg's presence. Where has all that momentum gone? Allison Hanes sees a reckoning at hand.
It was a glorious day for a historic event.
The sun was shining and the leaves on Mount Royal glowed the brilliant hues of autumn as the crowd swelled on Parc Ave. last Sept. 27.
People appeared from every direction: babies in strollers, schoolchildren accompanied by their parents and seniors shuffling along with walkers. Students walked out of CEGEP and university. Unions walked out on “strike.” Law firms and cafés closed up shop. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed up, campaigning for a second term, along with politicians of almost every stripe from every level of government.
But they were not the guests of honour: she was.
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate activist who inspired the global school strike movement, chose to make Montreal one of the first stops on her planned tour of the Americas after crossing the Atlantic on a racing yacht.
Her presence helped bring half a million Montrealers to the streets. It was the biggest rally ever held in this city, which has had its fair share of major demonstrations. It may have been the largest of the hundreds of climate marches that took place around the globe that day, putting Montreal in the spotlight.
There was hope in the air, that maybe, just maybe, public concern and political priorities had converged in time to at long last take the drastic action needed to save the planet from the ravages of the climate emergency.
But one year later, triumph has given way to bitterness and euphoria to disappointment. Nothing has changed and everything has changed. The climate crisis has been overshadowed by a more immediate catastrophe, thanks to the pandemic. The environmental movement has been thrown into disarray and forced to reinvent itself due to COVID-19.
After a year of soul-searching and reflection, upheaval and adaptation, climate activists are starting to chart a new course.
A year ago, François Geoffroy stood behind the ancient stone walls in the peaceful Jardin du monastère des Hospitalières as the massive crowd began to form outside. One of the founders of La planète s'invite au Parlement, which had helped bring 150,000 students to the streets in Montreal in the spring of 2019 and 50,000 on short notice in November 2018, Geoffroy knew Thunberg's presence would draw many times that on Sept. 27. Still, 500,000 defied everyone's wildest expectations.
This past week, Geoffroy, a professor of literature at Collège Montmorency, participated in a much more intimate event: a Zoom session offering a more sobering look back on the first anniversary of the march for a handful of CEGEP students and a lone reporter.
“We were like, we just organized the biggest protest in the history of Quebec and possibly of Canada. What we accomplished was gigantic … and despite that, in terms of results we got nothing more than empty promises and symbolic gestures — political greenwashing, in other words,” he said in an interview afterward. “It was like a slap in the face and it forced us, as a citizens' movement, to reflect that it was maybe time to adopt a public discourse that was a little more confrontational because there was a malaise experienced by many, many people, from seeing Justin Trudeau show up and march with us, saying, `I love the planet.' ”
Louis Ramirez, an organizer for Extinction Rebellion Quebec, now considers the massive attendance to be a hollow victory.
“The question is what did they show up for?” he wondered. “For someone like myself, working on climate realism and trying to disseminate the actual content of the latest scientific data, I don't think the people at the march necessarily turned up for that.
“What polls were showing was there were early signs of positivity and progress in terms of public opinion, but policy certainly did not keep up with that — and this is about policy.”
For Extinction Rebellion, the march led by Thunberg was just a prelude for a global week of civil disobedience planned for last October anyway.
Besides “swarming” intersections with signs politely reminding drivers about their tailpipe emissions and holding a “birthday party” for a dire scientific report that impeded the evening rush hour downtown, the high point of the non-violent direct action group's disruptive tactics was a handful of militants scaling the Jacques Cartier Bridge, forcing police to shut it down and paralyzing Montreal-area traffic.
“Certainly the Extinction Rebellion felt that the movement and the energy needed to be harnessed to take a much more oppositional stance toward the government,” Ramirez said. “So actions like the 8th of October, controversial though they might be, do not leave open the possibility of being co-opted.”
If organizers retreated during the winter to contemplate how the march became a victim of its own success, the arrival of COVID-19 in Quebec forced a more profound reckoning.
Many scientists have drawn links between the pandemic's emergence, deforestation and the loss of biodiversity. Perhaps it's just the first of the many plagues that will be visited upon humanity due to the changing climate and a warming planet.
The devastation wrought by the shutdown of the economy has also given rise to promises of a green recovery in Quebec, Canada and elsewhere. Could this be a pivotal moment for the world to transition to a cleaner future? Many activists are skeptical.
Geoffroy said the response to COVID-19 has shown how quickly change can occur when political leaders treat a problem as a true emergency. He is angry that they are still not treating the climate crisis as seriously, even though it is a much bigger existential threat.
Speaking for himself, and not Extinction Rebellion, Ramirez said he believes the pandemic has changed people's priorities, with fear of the future being overshadowed by suffering in the present.
“And so, the way I think about it, is that the climate-emergency movement needs to reinvent itself to meet this new moment and it needs to tap into current frustrations that are happening right now and look at a much broader set of issues and pointing out that climate actually acts as a kind of time limit to sort out all of these other issues,” he said.
COVID-19 also threw a spanner in the organizational works.
Thunberg's power as an icon has been hamstrung by COVID-19, what with many international borders closed, travel restricted and large gatherings dangerous. She reported she may have even had the virus early on, though she recovered. She has continued her school strikes as she started them: alone or with a handful of friends. On Friday, she stood outside Sweden's parliament as other rallies were held worldwide, including in Vancouver, Toronto and other Canadian cities, the turnout curbed by pandemic crowd limits.
The worldwide youth-driven movement Thunberg inspired was dealt a blow when schools, colleges and universities were shut down and campus life was suspended.
Léonard Leclerc, an organizer with the Coalition étudiante pour un virage environnemental et social (CEVES), a group formed from the union of several other Quebec student organizations after Sept. 27, said activists had to get creative due to COVID-19.
They held workshops and discussions online. They held bike rallies and balcony protests against pipelines and a proposed liquefied natural gas project in the Saguenay.
They've also forged new alliances, finding common cause with other social groups, to broaden, diversify and strengthen the climate movement. If one of the criticisms of environmental activism is that it tends to skew white and privileged, efforts have been made in recent months to be more inclusive.
“We're saying the climate crisis is also a social crisis. So we have to move forward with all these things,” Leclerc said. “There are links we can make. There are bridges we can build. It's the convergence of all these fights. Because we can't leave behind those who are already affected by climate change.”
What polls were showing was there were early signs of positivity and progress in terms of public opinion.
On Saturday, climate protesters in Montreal will once again rally for the first big test of these new bonds. Environmentalists will be joined by Indigenous activists, those fighting for migrants rights, and anti-racism campaigners. This time they will gather in Place du Canada at 1 p.m.
One of the organizers of this year's event is Elijah Olise, who has more recently been involved with the Racial Justice Collective and Defund the SPVM. He was contacted by CEVES to get involved in this march from the start, an extended hand he was more than willing to take.
“We can't have only like a white saviour leading the climate justice movement — I mean, especially when the people affected by climate change are marginalized people, are the minority, aren't the majority of people … Good intentions don't always lead to good things. So when you look at a protest that happened in Montreal and it was huge and it was beautiful — but was it constructive? Did it engage with the communities that are most affected by it? How are we then going to use that kind of energy and momentum to make those changes?” said Olise.
“Mutual aid is crucial to solving these issues that our generation and our society and our communities are facing on a local basis.”