Seth Klein is a public policy researcher and writer based in Vancouver, BC

Seth served for five years (2021-2025) as founder, Team Lead and Director of Strategy of the Climate Emergency Unit. Prior to that, he served for 22 years as the founding director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a social justice think tank. He is now a freelance policy consultant, speaker, researcher and writer, and author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. Seth is a regular columnist with Canada’s National Observer, an adjunct professor with Simon Fraser University’s Urban Studies program, and serves on the board of the BC Society for Policy Solutions.

The Book - A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency

In A Good War (ECW Press, 2020), Seth Klein explores how we can align our politics and economy with what the science says we must do to address the climate crisis. But Klein brings an original and uniquely hopeful take to this challenge. The book is structured around lessons from the Second World War – the last time Canada faced an existential threat. Others have said we need a “wartime approach” to climate change, but this is the first book to delve into what that could actually look like. Canada’s wartime experience, Klein contends, provides an inspirational reminder that we have done this before. We have mobilized in common cause across class, race and gender, and entirely retooled our economy in the space of a few short years.

Book launch events from 2020

About the Climate Emergency Unit

The Climate Emergency Unit was launched in January 2021 as a five-year project of the David Suzuki Institute. After the publication of A Good War, Seth and the David Suzuki Institute board conceived of the Climate Emergency Unit as a time-limited project to initiate joint campaigns and coalitions to advance the emergency policy ideas proposed in the book.

The overarching goal of the Climate Emergency Unit was to press for the implementation of wartime-scale policies to confront the crisis, like we tackled an earlier existential threat – the rise of fascism during the Second World War. The CEU’s mission was to mobilize Canadians to press politicians to implement climate emergency legislation and policies that would dramatically reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. The project sought to press leaders into genuine emergency mode by building coalition tables – federally, provincially, and sectorally – around transformative emergency ideas. 

With a team of between 7-8 people for most of the five years, the CEU worked to build public understanding of the necessary speed and scale of government action using its “6 Markers of Climate Emergency” framework. The project’s contention (like Seth’s book) was that to achieve change at the speed and scale required, the climate emergency requires a new mindset to mobilize all of society, galvanize our politics and fundamentally remake our economy. All the campaigns were chosen because they hit multiple markers within this framework.

The project also gave special attention to various elements of just transition, believing that failure to provide workers and communities that currently feel tied to the fossil fuel economy with a compelling counter-offer represented a core barrier to successful climate mobilization. Consequently, flagship CEU campaigns sought to successfully win a federal Youth Climate Corps (YCC) program and a Just Transition Transfer (JTT), while the Fair Shares project drew attention to the urgent need for Canada to meaningfully contribute to global just transition.

A final report on the CEU’s 5-year mission is available here.

Learn more about the CEU’s numerous campaigns here. Check out the CEU’s podcast Break in Case of Emergency here. And explore the CEU’s many videos here.