KEEN TO BE GREEN

Support for climate change action grows from strength to strength

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500,000 attend mass climate action rally in Montreal

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By Gavin Wiens

What does it look like when thousands of working class Canadians stand up to demand justice from the government? Well, it looks like what happened all across Canada on September 27, when almost one million Canadians came together in support of climate action. Montreal alone had one of the world’s largest protests, with over 500,000 people—political parties, grassroots organizations, and of course unions, all joining  in. That’s on top of a sea of working people, students and children who set aside all their plans for the day to stand up for what our government wont.

Hundreds of thousands of working Canadians, singing and shouting, arm in arm against a government and an economy that no longer work for them.

No more pipelines. No more oil subsidies. We want an end to an economy that destroys the environment with our very own hard earned tax dollars.

Canadians do not want to work 40 hours or more a week just to see their money spent on oil extraction. Especially when the companies doing it are being handed $60 billion in tax cuts and subsidies, despite being giant privately owned corporations who take the benefits of oil for themselves.

Renewable energy bigger than big oil

The renewable energy sector is now bigger than the oil sector, so why are we keeping these corrupt companies on life support? Canadians say cut all that support—and give fossil fuel industry workers training for a new jobs, with a living wage (and maybe a union while we’re at it!).

The time has come for working class Canadians to dictate the direction of this economy, not billionaires, millionaires and the CEO’s of fossil fuel companies. It’s time for a just transition to a booming green economy for the 21st century, where the products of our hard work actually come back to us. When we’re in a climate crisis, and our government is meeting with Enron hundreds of times in only a few years, instead of investing in green infrastructure and our future, we know that something has to change.

A united working class

Seventy-one percent of all global emissions are from just 100 companies. When you’re dealing with 100 of the richest, most powerful corporations on earth, there’s only one thing that can win: a united working class pushing a working class mandate through government.

We’re not happy sitting around waiting for change to come from a class of wealthy politicians. We know that the poorest and the most vulnerable in our society will be the hardest hit by the climate crisis. So instead of waiting, we demanded that things change.

Waves are already being felt throughout Canadian politics. Politicians are scrambling to meet the demands of a vocal working class, strutting out new green legislation day after day, while we keep on demanding more. For once, it seems like working Canadians have finally got what they want – and more importantly, it shows that we can get what we want whenever we want it.

No power greater

The power has always been in the hands of working people, because there’s more of us than there are of them. And when the working class joins together in common cause, “there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.”

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