VANCOUVER—A plan to shift Canada’s entire economy to battle climate change has been launched in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

The proposed Green New Deal is being endorsed by David Suzuki and 60 signatories — including the largest unions, youth leaders, Indigenous groups and environmental economists.

It’s been inspired by some U.S. Democrats’ call to shift jobs and the economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy and infrastructure.

And just as that American version has been called unworkable, unrealistic and even “socialist” by conservatives there, Canada’s nascent iteration will likely come under attack in the months leading up to this fall’s federal election.

That doesn’t deter Nayeli Jimenez, 28, a Vancouver-based member of the youth-led national climate group Our Time.

“We can’t afford not to do this,” the art director for a publishing house told Star Vancouver ahead of the plan’s unveiling Monday.

Read more:

Majority of Canadians support a ‘Green New Deal,’ poll finds

Jason Kenney’s Alberta election vow will not derail national carbon tax, says environment minister

Canada warming faster than the rest of the world, says Environment Canada

“We’re feeling an intense sense of emergency and anxiety because our futures are on the line.”

The Pact for a Green New Deal, according to its founding document, aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically — by half in the next decade. Its creators insist that by shifting spending and by protecting and retraining workers, governments can create a million jobs.

Details will be hammered out after a nationwide series of town halls, but four pillars have been set out for the framework: that it apply science in meeting the scale and urgency of the climate crisis; that it focus on job creation and ensure workers in oil-and-gas sectors receive retraining; that it ensure the transition is socially just and doesn’t hurt those at the bottom of the economic ladder; and that it respects Indigenous rights.

The essence of the plan is to focus on job creation, clean infrastructure such as transit systems, renovating buildings and boosting green technology development.

“We’re not asking for something radical — we’re asking for something that’s actually very rational,” Jimenez said. “It’s about moving investments from fossil fuels into clean infrastructure that will create far more jobs.”

The federal government estimates that Alberta’s oilsands employ 400,000 people directly and indirectly. And the country’s entire energy sector employs more than double that, or roughly 900,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Asked about concerns such a dramatic industrial proposal is unrealistic, Jimenez said it will actually save the country billions.

“You question how you’re going to pay for it, how you’re going to be able to pull it off,” she replied. “It’s a really valid question — but why aren’t we asking how much our inaction is going to cost us?”

According to energy economist Marc Eliesen — former president and CEO of Ontario Hydro (now Hydro One), BC Hydro and Manitoba Hydro — moving away from fossil fuels is both inevitable, and already happening amongst investors.

But, he warned in an interview Sunday, while “the transition has to take place, it has to be more than slogans.”

During his time as Ontario’s deputy minister of energy, Eliesen also sat on the board of director of Calgary-based Suncor Energy Inc., Canada’s largest oil company which also runs the country’s largest biofuels plant and produces 111 megawatts of wind power.

He said when it comes to renewable energy, “the first to call the tune on this are investors themselves,” not governments. When told of the Canadian Green New Deal’s aims, he agreed it’s essential that workers be protected as the economy shifts.

“No one from economics’ ‘green school’ or investors in the oil industry are suggesting we stop producing what we’re producing,” Eliesen told the Star. “The transition is clearly not going to come immediately — you’ve got an oil worker who’s been working for decades, the retraining process for someone like that is going to take time, let’s be honest about that.

“There must be some support mechanisms for people undergoing retraining for new areas of generation electricity or transportation.”

The Green New Deal’s plan to substantially achieve that workforce shift, while investing billions in renewable energy and green infrastructure, is “quite frankly the only way to go,” Eliesen believes, as the oil sector heads toward what he called “an era of strangled investments” despite billions in government subsidies.

“In my judgment it’s not a cost, it’s an investment,” he explained. “Any efforts with regard to retraining or going into new areas of renewables can only be good, both from an economic point of view, and an environmental point of view.

“More and more banks and other institutions are switching towards renewable areas for their future energy development, and in the last three or four years major companies are pulling out of the oilsands. That trend is taking place everywhere.”

The original Pact for a Green New Deal has been championed by some Democrats south of the border, including Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been a lightning rod for conservatives.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The plan takes its title from U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal legislation, which lifted the country from the Great Depression through massive public works projects, employment programs and stricter financial controls.

While Canada’s version will undoubtedly be controversial, many appear sympathetic to the ideas behind it. A poll last month by Abacus Data found that 61 per cent of the survey’s 1,000 respondents said they either support or somewhat support such a proposal, described as “a massive government jobs program and investment in clean energy, green technology, and electrification.”

In another Abacus Data poll released Friday, 87 per cent of 15-to-30-year-olds said “solving climate change” was a serious issue — four-in-10 “extremely serious.”

The May 2 survey of 1,000 young people found the concern about the issue was “consistent across age, gender, education and income.” But the survey also found that six in 10 young people believe they “don’t have a say in what the government does,” 18 per cent of them believing that strongly. The older the youth, Abacus found, the “much more likely to feel disenfranchised.” (The survey used online panels and had a margin of error equivalent to 3.1 per cent).

Still, the deal might well be dismissed by politicians or many Canadians.

That’s what happened with Canada’s earlier Leap Manifesto. Backed by prominent activists and academics — and debated, though not adopted by the federal NDP due to intense internal divisions — it was one of the most controversial environmental proposals in the past decade and called for a complete revolution in Canada’s economy away from fossil fuels. The Leap Manifesto website has endorsed the proposed Green New Deal.

More than its American namesake, the Canadian deal’s bigger inspiration is Quebec’s Le Pacte, organizers said — a manifesto which has gathered 270,000 signatures to date. Le Pacte calls for a 50 per cent emissions cut by 2030, and requiring that all levels of government legislation pass a “test of their climate impacts.”

Even in some resource-dependent ridings of B.C., the “green new deal” catchphrase has seen buy-in from politicians. For instance, after Revelstoke, B.C., saw students join climate protests, Kootenay-Columbia MP Wayne Stetski, with the NDP, praised the youth’s message.

“We need a bold plan that reduces emissions while creating sustainable jobs for workers,” Stetski said on Friday in the House of Commons. “We can do this by committing to renewable energy, retrofitting homes, expanding public transit and investing in clean manufacturing.”

According to analysis of Hansard debate transcripts by the Star Vancouver, so far this year the phrases “climate change,” “greenhouse gases” or “global warming” have been uttered in the House of Commons by 103 members of Parliament, half of them Liberals, and nearly one-third by New Democrats.

By contrast, just 15 Conservative MPs have uttered any of those phrases this year so far — but over the same four months four times that amount, 60 Tory lawmakers, used the words “carbon tax.” (Three New Democrats and the Greens’ Elizabeth May used the phrase, but Liberals entirely avoided it).

The only MPs who have spoken of a “green new deal” in Parliament have been three from the NDP. May unsurprisingly joined the call for such a “transformative” plan.

The federal Liberal government maintains Canada will meet its target under the Paris Agreement to fight climate change, which is to reduce national emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. As of 2017, Canada’s emissions were two per cent below what they were in 2005, according to the national tally submitted this week to the United Nations.

To close that gap, Ottawa enforced a minimum carbon price across the country this year, which will rise from $20 per tonne of emissions to $50 per tonne in 2022. The federal government is also phasing out coal-fired electricity by 2030, when it aims for 90 per cent of electricity in Canada to come from emissions-free sources.

At the same time, the Liberal government has earmarked millions for green technology and infrastructure.

Earlier this month, federal scientists released a report that said Canada is warming at twice the global average because of climate change, and that action to reduce emissions can only mitigate the severity of the consequences, which are likely to include disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost, rising sea levels in coastal cities and more frequent floods, heat waves, summer water shortages and wildfires.

For Jimenez, who is originally from Mexico, climate change is more than an environmental issue, but one that will cause devastating damage to the world’s economy, harming the poor in the Southern Hemisphere the most.

“The effects of climate change don’t care if you can vote or not,” she said. “This election is so critical, because if we are to meet the target of cutting carbon emissions by half in 11 years, the people in power for the next four years will be in charge when that needs to happen.

“This election could be our last chance. Otherwise we won’t make it. We need to make sure it happens.”

With files from Alex Ballingall

David P. Ball is a Vancouver-based reporter covering democracy and politics. Email him or follow him on Twitter: @davidpball

Read more about: