MONTREAL—Something is happening in Quebec.

Catherine Gauthier has seen it simmering for a long time. She was just 16 when she took to the podium at the United Nations’ climate conference here in 2005 and issued a plea to world leaders: take action now, or bequeath the future a broken world.

Fourteen years later, as another 16-year-old girl — Sweden’s Greta Thunberg — captures global attention for her school strike for the climate, Gauthier remains at the heart of an environmental movement in her home province that, on the eve of this year’s federal election campaign, appears newly invigorated by this global push for politicians to take global warming seriously.

“No matter which party is in power, we want to ensure they keep their promises, and we won’t let go of that. We won’t abandon our future because we have a new government that will promise us it will take action,” Gauthier, now 30 and executive director of the organization ENvironnement JEUnesse, told the Star over coffee on Saint Catherine St.

“If we do not pursue radical changes now, it will be too late,” she said.

This urgency to stave off the disaster of runaway climate change is reverberating around the world, with the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, calling on governments assembling in New York to increase their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

In Canada, these concerns have threaded through the political discourse as the major political parties try to convince voters that their policies are the best to address climate change. Polls have suggested the environment is at the top of concerns heading into the federal election this fall: a Forum survey in July found 26 per cent of respondents placed the environment as their number one issue, while an Abacus Data poll found 83 per cent of respondents were either “extremely,” “very,” or “quite” worried about climate change.

Amidst this cloud of concern, though, there is an evident perception amongst political leaders that Quebec, in particular, is preoccupied with the threats of the warming world. After his Coalition Avenir Québec won power last year, Premier François Legault made a point to underscore his commitment to fighting climate change, after he was criticized for not talking about it enough on the campaign trail. This spring, the NDP chose to launch their climate platform, not in British Columbia, where a pipeline expansion has roused environmentalists and Jagmeet Singh has his seat, but in Montreal.

“I can tell you that the environmental IQ of Quebecers is probably the highest in Canada. Quebecers get it,” said Daniel Green, one of two deputy leaders for the Green party, as he sat in his campaign office near the foot of Mount Royal. Green surprised political observers by finishing third — ahead of the Bloc Québécois — in a February byelection in his riding of Outremont, and he used the same line about Quebecers’ IQ to welcome Pierre Nantel, the Montreal-area MP booted from the NDP for secretly meeting with Green Leader Elizabeth May, when he decided to run for the Greens in the coming election.

That may seem spurious coming from a man with an interest in putting green thoughts in the minds of the electorate. But there is data to back up the notion that Quebecers have a higher-than-average preoccupation with the issue.

In an estimate published online, researchers from the Université de Montréal gauged Canadians’ views on climate change based on a public data set survey of more than 9,000 individuals. They estimate that Quebecers rank above the Canadian average in believing the Earth is getting warmer (89 per cent versus 83), and that this is happening because of human activity (67 per cent versus 60). Sixty per cent of Quebecers are also estimated to believe “climate change will harm you personally,” compared with a national average of 47 per cent.

“The intensity of concern is different,” said David Coletto, chief executive of Abacus Data. “Quebecers seem to be more engaged and convinced that we need to do something big to solve the issue.”

Gauthier certainly thinks so. She has seen the rise of the student protest movement in the province, which has seen thousands demonstrate in Montreal, Quebec City and elsewhere. There are groups representing high school students, those at Cégep, and in university who are collectively planning how to make a splash on Sept. 27, the final day of the “global climate strike” organized by groups around the world.

“In recent months we’ve really felt a wave of mobilization… especially among young people,” Gauthier said. “We are the last generation that can mobilize and make things change.”

It’s easier to pin down the signs of a movement than it is to determine why it appears to be at a higher amplitude in Quebec than elsewhere.

Christian Bourque, executive vice-president at the research firm Leger, said heightened environmental concern in Quebec may stem from the historical affinity for its public energy utility, Hydro-Québec. Nationalized by the province during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the utility has become associated with a sense — and desire for — self-determination in Quebec, a source of clean energy produced at home, by and for Quebecers.

In his office in Outremont, Green said he sees a link between Quebec’s independent spirit and recent movements to reject shale gas fracking in places like Anticosti Island, as well as the public push against the now-abandoned Energy East oil pipeline.

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“We are a distinct society, and this distinctiveness is not just cultural. It’s also territorial,” he said. “Quebecers identify territory, the whole part of protecting our territory, as an offshoot of our nationalistic fervour.”

Around the corner on Saint Denis St., Steven Guilbeault sat at a café beside his campaign office, where a tall, Liberal-red sign with his first name stands atop a tall pole on the sidewalk. Until this summer, Guilbeault was the head of a leading Quebec environmental organization called Équiterre, a position he said he left after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his close adviser Gerald Butts started trying to convince him to jump into politics.

Now running for the Liberals in the Montreal riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie, Guilbeault has had to defend his decision to join a party in government that is so keen on the 980-km Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion that it bought the project for $4.5 billion to make sure it gets built. Guilbeault, who admits he’s been described as a “radical pragmatist,” said he’s not happy about the pipeline, but that he supports much of what the government has done, from the national carbon price to the overhaul of environmental assessments in Bill C-69.

He recalled organizing the 2012 Earth Day demonstration in Montreal, when crowd estimates of 250,000 to 300,000 people made international headlines. He also pointed out that, in Quebec, governments of all stripes — Liberal, Parti Québécois, and now CAQ — have supported the province’s cap-and-trade carbon pricing system.

“Climate change became basically a non-partisan issue,” he said.

One reason for this may be the lack of a prominent and influential lobbyist for oil and gas, like the Alberta-based Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, he said. There may also be less of a sense of ownership over Alberta’s oil reserves than in English Canada.

“Quebecers like to see themselves as being green,” he said. “There is this sense that it’s part of us.”

For Gauthier, who has been pushing for climate action since she was a 16-year-old girl at the UN climate summit, the question of Quebec’s heightened engagement means little. The crisis, as she sees it, knows no borders; it’s a collective and existential threat that gets more pressing with each day of inaction.

The election this fall, scheduled for Oct. 21, is the same. The result matters less than the pressure to do something.

“It’s one moment in the year, it’s not the moment,” she said.

“The battles will continue.”

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