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There is certainly nothing wrong with being a feminist or a fruit-juice drinker or even a sandal-wearer but this does bring us straight to the business of the national gathering of the New Democrat Party in Edmonton last weekend.While we’re banging on about the Leap Manifesto, can we at least be straight with one another about who we’re really talking about here?

Celebrity anti-globalization activist and prize-winning author Naomi Klein and her husband, the CBC and Al Jazeera celebrity-presenter Avi Lewis assembled a variety of animateurs and enthusiasts from the “indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labour” movements in Toronto last spring. They talked a great deal about what could be done in Canada in light of the global climate crisis. They wrote things down.

It is helpful to recall that the thesis of Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, is that the soaring success of the free market in recent decades is attributable to the way neoliberalism has taken advantage of nation states suffering such shocks as terrorism, natural disasters and war and applied the “shock therapy” of its economics to ward off alternatives. And that Klein takes this purportedly right-wing vice and employs it as a left-wing virtue in her award-winning 2014 doorstopper, This Changes Everything.

The problem of catastrophic global climate change is not carbon, it’s capitalism, so Klein’s argument goes. The trick is to “seize this existential crisis” and turn the tide back against neoliberalism. Thus the Leap Manifesto’s underlying proposition that “small steps will no longer get us where we need to go,” and by 2050 the entire oil and gas industry should be substituted with infrastructure projects, high-speed trains and electric buses, daycare centres, locavore-centred farming systems, social work, public-interest media and “the arts.”