CALLING ON TRUDEAU
Climate activist camps out
It took Ann Cognito almost six months to get to Ottawa, and she’s not turning back now.
Cognito — her chosen name — is a 50-year-old climate activist from Calgary. On Saturday, despite the freezing cold, she was camped across the street from the downtown building housing the prime minister’s office. She said she wasn’t leaving until Justin Trudeau met her and committed to a series of actions to fight climate change.
Cognito said she travelled on foot and by kickbike to get to the national capital, her service dog Mr. Myrtle by her side. It was a trek called “walk to waken the nation,” and it had a Facebook page, a Patreon and a Change.org petition with more than 2,500 signatures.
While Cognito’s journey officially dates back to April 20 in Calgary, its roots run far deeper.
In the petition, she describes herself as a woman “who has spent most of my life mostly in the margins, and also spent most of my life caring about the state of this planet but not knowing how to make an effective difference.”
Then came October 2018, when an intergovernmental panel on climate change released a report laying out the potential state of the world if average global temperatures rose by 1.5 degrees or more.
“We caused this, we did this. It’s like going to visit somebody and burning their house down while you’re visiting,” Cognito said from her campsite.
“We’re on this planet to take care of it, and to live in a relationship with it, and we’ve utterly destroyed that and totally disrespected it, and we cannot continue to live this way.”
Cognito said she started the Calgary section of the global climate movement Extinction Rebellion, but she was not a skilled organizer, so she passed the reins to others.
“Then I had to sit down, I did a lot of meditation and prayer and self-inventory: What am I, and what am I good at, and how can I make that useful for this purpose?
“I’m a stubborn little old Gypsy hermit, and so this is how I thought I could make that be useful, how I could use what I am to help create awareness.” Cognito arrived in Ottawa on Oct. 15, just days before Extinction Rebellion staged a protest that briefly closed the Laurier Avenue Bridge. She stayed with a friend for several weeks, getting organized, and then set up her campsite near the National War Memorial on Thursday.
She has three specific asks for the prime minister, reflecting demands established by Extinction Rebellion: that the government “tell the truth” about the danger of the climate situation and reverse all policies incongruous with that; commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025; and create citizens assemblies to help work on the first two demands.
“I won’t leave until I see him and do this,” Cognito said. “And I won’t leave until our government is doing what we need them to be doing. I’m not going to walk away with an empty promise. Our government has made too many of those.”