We need to protect Canadian jobs, restore our economic sovereignty, get serious about confronting the climate emergency, and address the deep corporate control over every sector of our economy, in which greed for massive profits is driving the cost-of-living crisis. And it can be done!
I find it really invigorating to talk about how we can respond in this high stakes moment with courage, care, and a passionate commitment to righting the scales of society. It’s long past time we make these fundamental changes to the values underpinning our economy.
So we’ve been energetically collecting “ideas lying around” - those policies we need right now. It’s a reference to The Shock Doctrine (the life-changing book by my brilliant wife Naomi Klein) in which she uncovered this strategy from arch-conservative economist Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
I know I’ve cited him glowingly before, but in my view, Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is one of the most important thinkers in Canada today. Following his excellent pitch for Power lines Not Pipelines, Hadrian has just released “Ten Trump-proof nation-building projects for a strong, independent Canada”[2].
From massive federal investments in electric buses and cars to an East-West power grid, a torrent of publicly-built, non-market housing to a surge in publicly-funded arts and culture, Hadrian’s list overflows with common sense spending by Ottawa. Public investments that don’t pour profits into the gas tank of extractive industries and the banks that finance them, but actually shift the landscape of our economy to one based on care and repair for land and people.
Because here’s the thing. And I’m sorry to have to repeat what the world’s top scientists have been saying (and in recent years, screaming til they’re hoarse): we have to get off fossil fuels as fast as humanly possible.[3]
[4]
No more extensions, no more magical thinking about carbon capture and get-out-of-pollution free cards[5]. We’ve run out of second and third and forty-fourth chances. Had we started gently weaning ourselves off the biggest source of emissions in the 90s, we could have done it in stages. But we didn’t. And so now we need to change course immediately, without extending the fossil fuel era by the lifespan of a single new pipeline.
And now we have a series of cascading, linked emergencies to confront. From the cost-of-living crisis to the lack of housing, exploding homelessness and hunger, crumbling infrastructure and chaotic public health and education systems.
But we can do this. We can walk and chew gum, reduce emissions while addressing inequality, re-invest in the public while reining in corporate power. In the language of wonks everywhere: We can multi-solve in a polycrisis!
So here’s one more big solution to the moral and material crisis facing our country. One of Hadrian’s most exciting Top 10 Projects is to unleash Indigenous-owned renewable energy projects:
“Already, a fifth of renewable energy projects in the country have Indigenous owners or partners. These projects are helping both to decarbonize and decolonize the energy system while creating lasting economic benefits for Indigenous communities.”
There’s an extra piece that could make this really powerful. The Liberal government already committed and failed to make the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples the law of the land. But just one principle from that famous document could be a game-changer: enshrining the legal principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous Communities over industrial projects that take place on their lands.
Or, to translate into wonk-speak once again, if UNDRIP - including FPIC - was made Canadian law[6], Indigenous rights would suddenly and finally get equal legal standing with the massive power of corporations to extract value from the land. And that balancing of the scales would do more for Indigenous and climate justice than any arcane market mechanism, Net Zero pledge or symbolic commitment to Reconciliation. Liberals of course have been incredibly devoted to these measures - despite their utter failure to control Canada’s emissions or genuinely repair relationships with Indigenous communities still subject to ongoing colonialism.
If you would like to see more focus on big ideas like these please consider chipping in.
The time is now to take these ideas and turn them into action.
With unapologetic hope and determination,
Avi Lewis
Vancouver Centre
NDP Candidate for MP
1. First installment: https://www.voteavi.ca/canada_at_a_crossroads
Second installment: https://www.voteavi.ca/we_need_to_do_big_things
2. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/ten-trump-proof-nation-building-projects-for-a-strong-independent-canada/
3. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/chapter/chapter-6/
4. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51111176
5. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/why-carbon-capture-is-no-easy-solution-climate-change-2023-11-22/
6. https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/beyond-94/adopt-and-implement-the-united-nations-declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples
