‘The issue of our civilization’
Actress-activist Jane Fonda excited to join climate change rally in T.O.
Jane Fonda used to be a Blue Jays fan.
“I loved them,” she says, perched crosslegged on a sofa at a downtown Toronto hotel. “Until I married somebody that owned another team.”
But Fonda’s not in town to revive her fandom or her past betrothals. The 77year-old actor and activist comes with a solar-fuelled fire in her belly.
“The climate change problem is the issue of our civilization. It will affect everything about our lives if we don’t do something about it,” she says.
The two-time Oscar winner is part of a parade of distinguished guests who are putting foot to pavement in today’s March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.
The demonstration, organized by environmental group 350.org two days before Toronto hosts the Climate Summit of the Americas, has wrangled participants from more than 100 organizations, including Greenpeace.
“I’m really amped up about the participation of the unions, because it’s a false choice that either you stay with the fossil fuel economy or you lose jobs,” Fonda said.
Active for nearly half a century in causes ranging from anti-war campaigns to gender equality, she insists it was Canadian author Naomi Klein’s 2014 bestseller on climate change, This Changes Everything, that jolted her out of complacency and lit her fire, as she puts it.
“It changed my life.”
Fonda called up Klein, who passed on the number of Greenpeace Canada’s executive director Joanna Kerr.
Days later, a straw hat on her head, she was speaking at last month’s rally in Vancouver to protest planned offshore drilling by Shell.
The former fitness guru, who deliberately uses her influence as a film star to “amplify” important issues, says she is “moved” and “inspired” by the resilience of many of Canada’s First Nations. “They’re really on the front lines.” Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a Greenpeace energy campaigner, is a rising leader in that battle. A member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation in northern Alberta, she remembers clearly when a pipeline rupture sent more than three million litres of oil gushing through the ground about 10 kilometres from her family home in the village of Little Buffalo in 2011. It was the biggest oil spill in Alberta since the mid-1970s.
“My family is breathing in the toxins. My family is sick, nauseous. Their eyes are burning,” she says.
Small communities have often faced the brunt of environmental blunders, in places such as northern Alberta and Lac-Mégantic, Que., notes Laboucan-Massimo, 33.
Now many First Nations leaders feel like “economic hostages,” she says. They’re caught “between a rock and a hard place” due to the conflicting pressures of turning on the oil valve in their community — and reaping the royalties — and ensuring the health and safety of their people.
Laboucan-Massimo has raised money to install a photovoltaic power generator at the school in Little Buffalo. “Panel by panel, we’re showing politicians what true leadership is.”
Forty-five years ago, Fonda herself was arrested along with dozens of indigenous protesters as they at- tempted to occupy a U.S. army base in Seattle. Her sense of social justice runs deep. “My dad” — Henry Fonda — “was not a man who talked a lot, but he did
these movies, like Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln, 12 Angry Men, and he had a special relationship to those kinds of characters because of their values,” she says. “They were characters who stood up for justice.
“When my time comes, I don’t want regret. And I know the regrets that I would have would not be about what I did; they’d be about what I didn’t do.”
The March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate kicks off with a rally in front of the Ontario legislature in Queen’s Park at 1p.m. Sunday. After speeches, demonstrators will head south on University Ave., turn east on Dundas St., pivot north at Jarvis St. and wind up at Allan Gardens.