According to NASA data released last week, the hottest year ever was 2016.

Followed hot on its heels are 2017, 2015, and 2018 in the top four thermometer-busters in recorded history.

If there’s any hope at all of reversing this trend, it’s to be found in the fact that these same years have been the hottest in memory for left-wing populism in the U.S., culminating in the game-changing prospect of a Green New Deal.

From the spark lit by Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign to the electrifying ascent of rookie House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, democratic socialism for the 21st century has arrived. A 70 per cent marginal tax rate on the ultra-rich is 60 Minutes material, and the idea of a wartime-level mobilization to deal with the climate crisis is suddenly a Democratic party bandwagon to jump on.

So it’s puzzling that nine months out from a federal election, the Canadian dynamic is, for progressives, a warmed-over mess. This year is shaping up as a battle of corporate-captured centrist Liberals vs. xenophobic, fake news-spouting Conservatives. The NDP is still desperately seeking a distinctive offer, and if it can’t find one soon, the interests of the majority of Canadians will be without a champion this time around.

So perhaps it’s time for lefties to swallow our parochial pride and urgently figure out how to bulk import whatever’s in the water down there — beginning with the House resolution introduced last week by Ocasio-Cortez and venerable Senator Ed Markey, “recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.”

At just over a seven-minute read time, the text is well worth inhaling in full. It is nothing less than a road map to address society’s multiple, connected crises — racism, inequality, and climate change — on a rapid timeline and at a scale commensurate with the crises themselves. It proposes to treat emergencies as if they were emergencies.

Endorsed by many of the leading presidential hopefuls — including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — this is not a political idea that is going away any time soon. In fact, it is becoming a litmus test for progressive Democrats seeking a platform that has a hope of defeating Trump.

Here in Canada, activist organizations are just now coming together to define the contours of a Green New Deal for us — and that is as it should be. Change on this immense scale should not be defined by any single interest or party, nor can it achieve legitimacy without a process of debate, not to mention a vast organizing project.

But the Americans have done us a huge service by laying out the principles on which this epic agenda rests, and by showing us how much political momentum can be built behind an unabashedly ambitious approach.

The resolution begins with science — specifically, last fall’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which gives the world 12 years to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or face a near future of mass migration, trillions of dollars of costs, and hundreds of millions of people exposed to poverty, hunger, and water shortages. The scientists go further and make explicit that this rapid reduction of carbon pollution will require “profound societal and systems transformations.”

But the Green New Deal also foregrounds the everyday crises that face the majority of people (and these are as familiar in Canada as they are everywhere else.) Basic needs like affordable housing, quality health care and drugs, education, and a dignified retirement remain out reach for a large and growing number of people. Structural racism leads to continual attacks on Indigenous communities and communities of colour. Young people today are the first generation in many decades who face an economic future that is worse than their parents’.

And so the Green New Deal seeks to create millions of good, high-wage jobs, secure clean air and water, and to stop, prevent and repair “historic oppression of front line and vulnerable communities.” It does all this by means of a 10-year national mobilization — the likes of which have not been seen since the original New Deal of the 1930s and the war effort of the 1940s.

Yes: this will be expensive. Like a war. Or a tax cut for the rich. Or bailing out banks and automakers. Unlike those expenditures (which are never subject to the “but how will we pay for it?” smackdown) this plan will massively increase the tax base, create full employment for a generation, improve everyone’s quality of life, and save our collective skins. It’s tempting to believe this is what government is actually for.

The specific projects outlined by the Green New Deal resolution (each of which would require many pieces of enabling legislation) include getting to 100 per cent renewable energy in a decade, building a national smart grid, upgrading every building in the country to be energy efficient, and transforming agriculture in favour of family farms, healthy soil, and non-industrialized food for all.

Transportation and manufacturing would be the target of historic public investments to clean and green those systems, and Indigenous communities would be guaranteed free, prior and informed consent over industrial activity on their traditional territories.

It’s the Leap Manifesto, with increased altitude and velocity.

To make all this change in a hurry, a huge number of workers will be needed — and so the Green New Deal includes a federal job guarantee with family-sustaining wages, medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security. Workers affected by the transition are guaranteed wage and benefit parity, and the right to unionize without interference is enshrined.

What does this vast expansion of the political imagination in the U.S. have to do with Canada? Maybe everything.

Canada is in a moment of maximum political peril, and we’ve seen this movie before. The Liberals got elected on the back of popular progressive promises, largely lifted from the NDP. Once in government, those promises melted into air, and instead of the change we voted for, we’ve watched the same old spectacle of corporate welfare (this time, TransCanada) and worse (SNC/Lavalin?) Meanwhile, the gains of economic growth have gone lopsidedly to the rich, and 46 per cent of Canadians are now $200 away from financial insolvency. People are rightly scared.

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And who is trading on that fear, scapegoating immigrants, “foreign-funded radicals”, or whoever else is to blame? (Other than the 1 per cent, of course …) The resurgent right wing, with newly emboldened white supremacists in tow. And if the justified exhaustion with Liberal corruption leads to a Conservative government, as it did in Ontario last year, we can expect even more surging intolerance, not to mention the prospect of those universal public services that we watched wither under the Liberals being further cut and privatized by the Tories (see Mike Harris, Stephen Harper, Doug Ford.)

How to stop this sickeningly familiar cycle? The one thing we haven’t tried yet in Canada: a true national project — a transformative agenda for the many, not the few. A progressive program enacted at a speed and scale to actually solve the problems created by decades of inequality and austerity, not to mention the existential threat of climate cataclysm.

A mission moment like this, sparking a decade of unprecedented public investments and new programs, could save us from looming Trumpism in Canada. More importantly, a Canadian Green New Deal could just help save the world as well.

Avi Lewis is a documentary filmmaker and Strategic Director of The Leap.

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