Canada’s National Fridays For Future Strike May 3

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – April 29, 2019

At the end of the week, thousands of students will be participating in a national day of climate action. At least 75 Fridays For Future Climate Strike events (updated April 30) will take place mostly on Friday, May 3. From Tofino BC to Sydney NS youth will be demanding climate action.

Youth around the world are striking regularly from school in protest of the lack of action on the climate crisis. National climate strike events will also be taking place in Australia, the USA, Mexico, Mauritius, Chile and India. On Friday, May 3, 2019, 611 strikes have been registered in 70 countries around the world.

We are in a climate emergency. Currently, over 10 million Canadians live in cities and municipalities that have declared climate emergencies.

The October 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5 C shows that limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C is achievable but will require unprecedented transformation in all aspects of our society. The world has already warmed by one degree. Currently, with business as usual actions, the world is on track to a world warming above 3C. The youth are literally fighting to save the fate of humanity.

Simply, an effort unprecedented since World War II is needed. Our politicians must heed the advice of experts such as the Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Lancet Countdown, and Nobel Prize winning economists to stay with the planetary limits of our carbon budget.

It is an election year in Canada, and failure to elect a government that has evidence-based plans for the climate could result in Canada being left behind as the rest of the world grabs onto the $26 trillion opportunity in clean tech available between now in 2030 to businesses and industries in countries that have set-up the economic framework to tackle the climate crisis.

FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament every school day for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral. On the 8th of September, Greta decided to continue striking every Friday until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2 C and line with the Paris agreement – and the Fridays For Future movement was born.

Fridays For Future Canada History: On Friday, November 2, 2018 a youth in Sudbury, Ontario became the first youth in the Americas to conduct a “Fridays For Future” strike in solidarity with Greta. By Friday, December 7, 2018, there were nine youth groups in Canada conducting Fridays For Future strikes. The Canadian youth strikers in Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Sudbury made it onto the CBC National News and Greta shared her appreciation on Twitter and Instagram. On March 15, youth in 92 cities in Canada joined the international climate strike.

Media Contacts: Fridays For Future is a purely grassroots organization with no top down messaging. When Fridays For Future local organizers sign up their events online, they have an option to be their local spokesperson and then we collect the media contact information in a spreadsheet. All local spokespersons speak on behalf of themselves only.

For local contact persons be sure to check the map.

Special request: If you know of local strikers and they are not on the map please encourage them to register their Fridays For Future event. Building grassroots support for a liveable world at the community level one riding at a time is how we will prevail.

For the most up-to-date information follow Fridays For Future Canada on Twitter and Facebook.

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