An unlikely alliance banks on (climate) change
As a study in contrasts, Thursday’s climate change rally in Toronto’s financial district had much to offer.
Sweet-grass smoke mixed with the acrid downtown smell of hot tar and exhaust. Finance types on coffee breaks strolled past a woman failing to sell copies of the Socialist Worker. Speaker after speaker said this land belongs to First Nations — Mississaugas of the New Credit, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee — but the private security guards keeping watch made clear this corner of King and Bay streets is also TD territory.
But no contrast was greater than that between the two main speakers: Naomi Klein, lion of the left, socialist slayer of brands, champion of the economically oppressed; and Jerry Dias, head of Canada’s largest private-sector union Unifor and the voice of hundreds of thousands who work in the energy sector, oilsands and automobile production.
This odd couple of a gel-haired union heavyweight and an anti-capitalist oracle in sensible shoes is no accident. It is the new future for climate activism. But it is uncertain and untested. Even Klein called it an “uneasy coalition.”
“We have key differences, but what unites us is greater than that, and that’s why we’re coming together,” she said.
“What you’re seeing are the first steps for the new kind of climate movement.”
Unifor’s presence made the rally, in support of a larger protest this summer, a “historic moment,” she said, and “absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world. There’s trade union presence in the climate movement, but not from the sector that represents the extractive industry as powerfully as Unifor does. It’s very bold.”
Even the effort to strike a positive tone is a shift, Klein said, from past doomsaying and demands for closure of the oilsands toward a more optimistic vision of a possible future economy, based on wind, solar and geothermal energy.
“I think the time is now,” she said.
The problem, though, is that for climate activists, the time has been now for well over a decade.
Once it was all Hollywood and Al Gore at the Oscars, but that eventually fizzled. Now, a new model is being championed, with less glitz and more grit.
“What happened is there was a huge amount of public concern, public attention, and then the financial crisis hit. It’s very simple,” Klein said. Climate change simply dropped off the political agenda.
A key problem was that many of the climate change policies proposed “didn’t put justice at the centre.” Many would have increased costs for regular consumers, and there was not enough emphasis on the positive opportunities for job creation.
The solutions proposed in the “Inconvenient Truth moment” also seemed “notional,” Klein said. “It wasn’t like you could point to a place that was doing it.”
Now there are strong solar economies, in Germany, for example. In Canada, she said Alberta is in the best position to lead, with optimal conditions for geothermal, solar and wind, and also many newly unemployed workers because of the drop in oil prices.