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With respect to the climate crisis, the future of Vancouver’s climate leadership hung in the balance in last weekend’s municipal election. Mayor Ken Sim’s defeat means his multiple efforts to roll back Vancouver’s nation-leading climate policies are mercifully done. This piece breaks down the Vancouver election results.

Prime Minister Carney has said, “Don’t tell me what you are against; tell me what you are for.” Well, with respect to the first part – tough! Telling the truth about the climate emergency requires saying “No” to new fossil fuel infrastructure. But with respect to the second request – done! The Canadian climate movement is telling the Carney government what we’re for & what we’re against.

Next week, unfathomably, marks the 3rd anniversary of the horrific October 7th Hamas massacre, and three years of the monstrous and heart-wrenching genocide that Israel has inflicted upon Gaza. In this piece, I offer reflections on this other emergency.

In this piece, I explore the concept of what I call “the new climate denialism.” Unlike old-school climate denial, this new form of denialism has our political leaders assuring us they understand and accept the warnings about climate change — but they are in denial about what this scientific reality means for policy and/or continue to block progress in less visible ways. I explain how the “new climate denialism” is holding back progress in the fight of our lives, and how PM Mark Carney has become its lead practitioner.

While many leaders are comparing the wildfire crisis to the Second World War, most fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action. Sadly, the emergency-level responses we have seen to date are purely defensive, rearguard actions. Beneath the urgency of the present lies a confounding paradox: we mobilize to put fires out, but not yet to prevent them. Far too absent from the public debate is a foundational truth: until we actually mobilize to dramatically expedite the transition off fossil fuels, we will never get ahead of the curve. We need a wartime mindset to fight the threat of wildfires.

Last November's federal budget said a YCC would commence with the 2026 fiscal year (which started April 1). It was the only climate bright spot in an otherwise dismal budget. We are now more than a quarter into that fiscal year with no YCC program launch and no details have been forthcoming. But the young people who have campaigned for this program for over three years aren’t giving up.

We are paying for oil and gas in countless ways. This piece covers but a few, including what is shaping up to be a massive public subsidy for yet another bitumen pipeline from the oil sands to BC’s south coast. All this will the country is being battered by another brutal summer of heat, wildfire smoke, and community evacuations. We need to break free of fossil fuels!

In this post, I share an obit my sister Naomi and I wrote, along with some other reflections. I didn’t follow my dad’s footsteps into medicine. But he was also passionate about research; evidence-based research that challenges the status quo establishment, and right from the get-go, research that went upstream to examine the public policies that shape our experiences and choices. He was dead set on changing policies and practices that needed changing. I suppose I did follow him on that path.

All the core planks of Canada’s climate policy are now gone, save one – a package of “clean economy investment tax credits.” Yet as this piece explains, the program is massively undersubscribed, exposing a policy that simply can’t meet the task at hand. The problem with federal clean economy tax credits isn’t merely the slow speed of approvals, it’s that the low application rate reveals a broken model. Only $1.6 billion in claims have been submitted! This despite a total budget allocation of $93 billion for the period 2022 to 2034. This package of ITCs is supposed to be the centerpiece of the federal government’s climate spending program. What is revealed by this pitiful take-up rate is a model that is simply not fit for purpose.

I was gratified to have this piece appear as my first ever column in The Guardian. It seems to have struck a nerve. For much of its publication day, it was the 2nd most-read opinion piece on the Guardian’s website. I figured it was time more of our international friends understood that Prime Minister Carney, is not the climate champ many thought he was, and it was important they heard some hard truths about how things are going here in Canada. Read on...

Those of you who follow my work have probably heard me say before that a key barrier holding back genuine climate emergency action – or, in truth, action at speed and scale to confront any number of crises we face – is a ubiquitous failure of imagination. This plagues political leaders, but it is just as often true of civil society leaders and organizations within our own movements. Our curse is that our sense of possibility is contained by what we know. In this piece, I offer three strategies to expand our sense of policy imagination, all involving storytelling at some level.

There is, in theory, nothing wrong with the idea of a sovereign wealth fund. Indeed, the logic behind such a fund is quite sound. The problem is that, in practice, the Carney government appears to be proposing a mirror reversal of what is generally understood as the guiding premise for these funds, both in how it is capitalized and in what it invests. This piece includes some interesting historical background on sovereign wealth funds in Alberta and Norway. It proposes better options for how to finance a state investment fund like this. And offers a hopeful insight from the great Bill McKibben.

Real climate action requires shifting from voluntary and incentive-based policies to enforceable, near-term mandates. The Carney government states its approach “is based on driving investment, not on prohibitions.” If so, it’s a strategy doomed to fail. Prohibitions and mandates work. The curse, however, of the regulatory mandates we have seen thus far is that the target dates for implementation are frequently 10-plus years in the future, making them politically fanciful. And now, federal and provincial governments are retreating from even these illusory decrees. In contrast, we've seen great success with near-term mandates, such as Vancouver's 2020 decision to prohibit fossil fuel heating in new homes. The bottom line: in an emergency, we can't hope for change. We have to make change happen.

With Prime Minister Carney having secured his coveted majority, and a federal election likely years away, now may seem an odd time to issue this appeal. But I beg to differ: here's my call to climate justice champions run for office. Whatever the jurisdiction, it’s vital that there are robust squads of true climate justice champions within the caucuses of multiple parties — people who genuinely get the emergencies we face and will insist on bold action. With our world on fire, we need to elect more political firefighters. Find, recruit and support your local climate justice champion. Send them this article as a way of saying, “I believe in you.” And if you can’t find one, be one.

This piece examines how to prevent the fossil fuels corporations from making a killing on the illegal Iran war, and put the revenues to better use. We've seen this movie before and know how it goes. As with the COVID pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a bunch of corporations will seize on the excuse of supply chain disruptions to make out like bandits, first and foremost among them the oil and gas companies. War profiteering is always the way, unless policy puts a stop to it.  

We have lost a giant, and a hero to countless social justice activists across Canada and around the world. In this piece, I share my thoughts and memories about the passing of Stephen Lewis (and include links to some of his speeches).

I did some digging into what's holding up a final investment decision for Ksi Lisims LNG - potentially Canada's next major 'carbon bomb.' Turns out, the American owners of the proposed project are hoping for public investment from the Canadian government. Read on for the state of play.

The horror now unfolding in the wake of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran reminds us of a central truth – oil & gas are a poison. A poison to our climate and environment. A poison to our health. A distortion to our economy and a barrier to our independence. These fossil fuels are the lifeblood of modern-day tyrannies (witness those in Iran and Russia), and a poison to our politics, democracy and peace. Oil is death. The day cannot come soon enough when we are liberated from this scourge.

In this post, I lay out why I think Avi Lewis should be the next NDP leader. Yes, I’m completely biased. Avi is my brother-in-law. But even if he was not, I’d still be all in. I am completely convinced that Avi is exactly the person we need for this role right now – not just for the NDP, but for building an audacious, powerful and even joyful counter-movement to the ascendant far right (and a federal Liberal party chasing after them). This post also offers some fun NDP convention history.

Prime Minister Mark Carney's promise to start building — and his promise at Davos to "build our strength at home" — would do well to draw on the example of former Canadian cabinet minister C.D. Howe, under whose guidance Canada established 28 new Crown corporations to expedite the mass production of military equipment during the Second World War. This piece outlines what isn’t working in the government’s current approach to economic independence, and offers up a list of proposed new generation Crown corps.