The left’s big Leap
TORONTO — In 2009, with the world’s attention on the Toronto International Film Festival, the activist author Naomi Klein helped write what came to be known as the Toronto Declaration. Signed by movie stars from Danny Glover to Jane Fonda, it accused TIFF of being “complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine” because of that year’s special spotlight on Tel Aviv. It also drew intense criticism for its opportunistic mixing of art and politics.
Six years later, Klein is set to nail another manifesto to TIFF’s door, and once again offer some divisive politics to the star-struck masses — this time with an eye on the federal election.
The Leap Manifesto, which launches with a press conference Tuesday in the climactic week of TIFF, near the festival’s downtown epicentre, is focused more on Canadian politics than film or the Middle East. But that focus is so broad — indigenous rights, social inequality, climate change, energy policy, transit, immigration, agriculture and child care — that it seems more like a blur.
Its list of signatories is likewise diverse, with cantankerous old rock stars who have walked this activist path before, like Neil Young and Bruce Cockburn, and poetic troubadours who often seem to exist apart from the sordid affairs of the political world, like Leonard Cohen and Leslie Feist.
There are, of course, filmmakers, such as Sarah Polley, Denis Villeneuve and Patricia Rozema, and actors Donald Sutherland, Ellen Page and Rachel McAdams. There are the authors Ann-Marie MacDonald, Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, Rawi Hage, Thomas King, William Gibson, and Yann Martel. There is even a philosopher, Charles Taylor, and a lawyer, Clayton Ruby.
To reflect the non-partisan manifesto’s origins last spring in the new alliance of climate activists and union bosses, there are the labour leaders Paul Moist, Sid Ryan and Hassan Yussuff. And it is surely one of the few lists that includes both Pamela Anderson and Roy McMurtry, the Ontario jurist and former Progressive Conservative politician.
Notably, it also includes the filmmaker John Greyson, who was detained in Egypt for several weeks in 2013, and who in 2009 pulled a film from TIFF in protest at the Tel Aviv spotlight, which sparked the Toronto Declaration.
Tuesday’s press conference has a less glitzy guest list, dominated by familiar grandees of the Canadian left — David Suzuki, Stephen Lewis, Maude Barlow, with the poet George Elliott Clarke, and distinguished aboriginal Canadians Tantoo Cardinal, Joseph Boyden, and the newly crowned Mrs Universe, Ashley Callingbull.
Manifestos are a tricky business. Some articulate new and urgent ideas and are wildly successful, like the Communist Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence. Most, however, are case studies in ideological futility, an illustration of the eternal law that saying it does not make it so, like for example the Euston Manifesto, which sought to save the political left from the torpor that followed the Iraq War.
It is not yet clear how the Leap Manifesto can live up to its vast ambition, but it at least acknowledges the task is great.
“We start from the premise that Canada is facing the deepest crisis in recent memory,” the manifesto begins. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking details about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty and inequality are a scar on the country’s present. And Canada’s record on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future.”
“We demand that this shift begin now,” it reads. Small steps are not enough. “So we need to leap.”
The difficulty, however, is that even with this star-studded sign-off, it is far from clear the Leapists will be able to stick their landing.