Rally banks on change
CLIMATE: Social activist and union head team up in Toronto
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 anticapitalist 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 purpose of the rally was to promote the March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate, which will happen in Toronto on July 5 to coincide with Pan American Economic Summit meetings on climate and an expected statement on climate from Pope Francis.
The audience was equal in number to the activists — about 30 people in each. They got a few honks, but none of the passing suits seemed to pay much attention.
There was, of course, a hint of class warfare in the frequent allusions to the people in the glass towers — this was the main reason for holding the rally on a busy corner in the heart of the financial district.
It was also difficult to square Klein’s economic optimism with the view of Syed Hussan, representing the No One Is Illegal activist network, who said the climate movement “is about turning away from capitalism.”
“The real people of this city are in other parts,” he said.
“This is the top of the mountain. This is where the mining companies make the decisions to impoverish our people.”