The urgency of the climate crisis also gives us something that can be very helpful for getting big things done: a firm, unyielding science-based deadline. We are, it bears repeating, out of time. We’ve been kicking the can down the road for so many decades that we are just plain out of road. Which means if we want a shot at avoiding catastrophic warming, we need to start a grand economic and political transition right now.
And yet, as we all know, climate change doesn’t play out like a market collapse or a war. With the exception of increasingly common monster storms, it’s slow and grinding, making the warming dangerously easy to push away into our subconscious, behind more obvious daily emergencies. Which is why what brought us together for that meeting in the spring of 2015 wasn’t only the climate crisis, but something that was grabbing front-page headlines: the collapse in oil prices, which has been such a problem for ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, and Vladimir Putin. For us in Canada—where governments had bet the farm on the expensive tarry oil in Alberta—the sudden drop in price was proving a devastating economic blow. Investors started fleeing from the tar sands, tens of thousands of workers were losing their jobs, and there was no Plan B—whether for creating jobs or raising government revenues.
For years, Canadians had been hearing that we had to choose between a healthy environment and a robust economy—now it turned out we had neither. Huge swaths of Alberta had been logged and contaminated to get at that heavy oil, Indigenous land rights had been grossly betrayed, and the economy was tanking anyway. Indeed, it was tanking precisely because we had pinned so much on a commodity whose price was on a roller coaster ride nobody seemed able to control.
Which was why a few of us had started discussing the idea of a national meeting, wondering if perhaps the oil price collapse, combined with the urgency of the climate crisis, might provide the catalyst for the deep transformation our society and economy needs on so many fronts. We began imagining that we could seize this juncture of overlapping crises to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create large numbers of well-paying, low-carbon jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up. This would be the inverse of the shock doctrine. It would be a People’s Shock, a blow from below.
So we sent out a letter, headed “From price shock to energy shift,” and invited leaders from across the country to meet in a circle for two days and dream big. I’m sharing what happened next in the hope that the experience might be useful at a time when so many are looking for ways to bridge divides.
A Platform without a Party
In response to our invitation, they came. Heads of labor federations and unions, directors of major green groups, iconic Indigenous and feminist leaders, key organizers and theorists focused on migrant rights, open technology, food justice, housing, faith, and more. The fact that we were able to bring so many players together with only a few weeks’ notice reflected a shared understanding that this was a rare political opening—not unlike the 2008 financial crisis. Only this time, people were determined not to let the opportunity pass us by.
The other factor lending urgency to our gathering was a looming federal election campaign. The Conservative Party, led by the extremely pro-oil Stephen Harper, had been in power for a decade, but the national mood was shifting and the political landscape looked likely to change. Yet, at that stage in the campaign, there wasn’t a political party that had succeeded in exciting voters with a different vision for the country. On climate, both principal opposition parties—the centrist Liberals under Justin Trudeau and the center-left New Democratic Party—were running conventional campaigns that called for new tar sands pipelines, still failing to honestly reckon with either the price collapse or the climate crisis.
So, at our gathering, we decided to do something that movements in our country had not attempted for several decades: intervene in a national election by writing a “people’s platform,” one that would attempt to reflect the needs not of one particular constituency, but of a great many at once.
We saw this as a chance to begin to heal not only our relationship with the planet but the colonial and racial wounds that date back to our country’s founding.
We kept something else in mind too: the way of life that is leading to both climatic and economic destabilization is creating other crises as well. It’s giving rise to an epidemic of anxiety and despair, expressed through everything from rising prescription drug dependence to high suicide rates, from road rage to screen addiction. So we asked ourselves to imagine: what would it take to build happier, healthier communities? And could those be the same things that would make the planet healthier?
In short, we aimed high. It felt, on some cellular level, like the only moral thing to do: for everyone in the room, whether they were working on migration or homelessness or Indigenous land rights or the climate, there had rarely been so much at stake.
The goal was to come up with a vision so concrete and inspiring that voters could, practically speaking, do two things at once. They could go to the polls to vote against what they didn’t want (the disastrous government of the day); and they would still have a space, even if it was outside electoral politics, to say yes to a vision we hoped would reflect what many actually do want, by adding their names to our people’s platform or otherwise voicing public support.
We figured that if we built up enough momentum behind the platform, it might exert some pressure on our elected representatives. But before that could happen, we first had to agree on the planks of the document—and that wasn’t going to be easy.
Connections, Not Competition
There were a few ground rules in that initial meeting, some unspoken, some not. The first was that no one was allowed to play “my crisis is bigger than your crisis,” nor argue that, because of the urgency and scope of the climate crisis, it should take precedence over fighting poverty or racism or other major concerns. Instead of ranking issues, we started from the premise that we live in a time of multiple, intersecting crises, and since all of them are urgent, we cannot afford to fix them sequentially. What we need are integrated solutions, concrete ideas for how to radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.