Leap day is coming up at the end of the month – remember this one?

“Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November.

All the rest have thirty one,

except February, on its own,

which has twenty eight most times.

And in a leap year, twenty nine.”

I got interested in leap years a few months ago when a group of us in Canada were trying to come up with a title for an independent political platform we had just drafted. The document – launched during our recent federal election and signed by tens of thousands of Canadians – was a roadmap to get the country completely off fossil fuels by the mid-century or sooner, in line with what many scientists are telling us we must do, and what engineers are telling us we now can do.

And we wanted to go further: the plan argues that in the process of fundamentally changing our country to make it “green”, we also have a once-in-a-century opportunity to make it fairer. We could redress terrible wrongs done to indigenous peoples; radically reduce economic, racial and gender inequalities; eliminate legal double standards for immigrant workers; and create a whole lot of stable, well-paying jobs. In very un-Canadian fashion, we even dared to hope that the manifesto might become a model for similar broad-based alliances in other countries.

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The text we came up with was unabashedly radical, and it went on to be endorsed by more than 100 organisations. An array of Canadian celebrities also added their names: Leonard Cohen, Donald Sutherland and Ellen Page, among others.

Our first challenge was what to call it. We wanted to convey the need for speed, since as Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said recently: “Where capital goes in the next five years will decide what kind of world we have.”

One suggestion was “The Leap”. And yes, we worried about inevitable comparisons to Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. But what ultimately tipped the balance in its favour was when we realised that 2016 is a leap year.

It wasn’t just good timing, we thought, but a powerful analogy. After all, we periodically add an extra day to our calendars because if we didn’t, the seasons would gradually fall out of alignment and eventually the seasons would go wacky. Imaging New Yorkers doing their Christmas shopping in T-shirts (oh right, that happened).

It was Julius Caesar, in 46BC, who decided to bring the 365-day solar calendar to the Romans, throwing in that extra day every four years. He wasn’t known as a humble man, but even a “dictator in perpetuity” realised that it was easier to change rules written by other humans than it is to change the laws of nature.

That’s a lesson worth re-learning – and fast. Like the Romans with their failing calendar, we find ourselves trapped within multiple failing systems: economic, political, even spiritual. And all these system failures have put humanity on a collision course with the planet, which warms and writhes the more we refuse to recognise its limits.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘To much fanfare, our governments unveiled a global climate deal in Paris.’ Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

We all received a vivid reminder of this problem a couple of months ago in Paris. To much fanfare, our governments unveiled a global climate deal that pledged to keep warming levels to 2C – or better yet, 1.5C. Then many of those politicians went home to hand out new drilling leases, new pipelines, and new highways.

That’s why we chose The Leap as the name for our manifesto: the gap between where we are and where we need to be is so great, and the time so short, that small steps simply will not cut it.

With this in mind, the manifesto not only calls for a rapid shift to 100% renewable electricity, it insists that these new energy projects should be democratically controlled – and that “indigenous peoples should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects. So should communities currently dealing with heavy health impacts of polluting industrial activity.”

To pay for all this, we called for dramatic changes to how public revenues are collected and spent, from an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and higher royalty rates on fossil fuel extraction, to cuts in military spending. And those are just a few of its 15 demands.

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The plan captured the imagination of many Canadians. Burned out by decades of fighting against what they don’t want – tar sands pipelines, exploding oil trains, draconian security bills – they seized on the chance to rally around a vision for the world they actually do want. On leap day later this month, there will be meetings, teach-ins and other events across the country, all of them pushing our new government to adopt a holistic approach to the twin crises of climate change and inequality.

And as we had hoped, it is spreading beyond our borders. Platforms partly inspired by The Leap have been launched in Denmark and across the European Union, and others are in the works in England and Australia. Even one in Nunavut. Several groups in the US are looking at drafting regional leap manifestos.

Two millennia ago, Julius Caesar realised that there was something even more powerful than his empire: the planet’s revolution around the sun. Today, we need a different kind of solar revolution, one that doesn’t just change how we generate our power, but also who benefits.

Here’s the good news: we have the momentum to make that leap – from the recent victories against Keystone XL and Shell’s Arctic drilling, to the surprising strength of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

So take a minute or two to think about the extra day at the end of this month. It’s a reminder that people can indeed come together to change a failing set of rules. The laws of nature, not so much.

Then let’s make this 2016 the year we started to bridge the chasm between what is, and what must be. Let’s make it the year we started to leap.

• The Leap Manifesto, along with a list of its original signatories, can be read in 10 languages here. To find out about leap year activities visit leapyear2016.org. On Friday 5 February, Naomi Klein is co-hosting a leap year-themed Google hangout with Bill McKibben of 350.org, Asad Rehman of Friends of the Earth and others. Register here.