A few chuckles resonated in the crowd on June 21 at Place de la Paix, where Cinema Politica hosted an audience of students, activists, and locals in the Downtown Screenings Under the Stars series, which featured Lewis’s documentary. It drew a sizeable crowd as Klein’s book has reverberated amongst environmental justice groups, inspiring initiatives like the Leap Manifesto as adopted by the NDP, the international COP21 agreement, as well as the sit-in and diploma returning ceremony organized by Divest McGill.

The audience peers into the climate activists’ worldviews […] without losing the main point of the documentary, a universal call to action.

As a populist climate action documentary, This Changes Everything neither calls for a political revolution nor a partisan solution, but rather a collective effort to rewrite the narrative that the Earth is an exploitable machine. Lewis and Klein expose extractive industries pillaging the Earth’s resources, and address a potential solution through the question: “what if the problem is a story, not people?”, calling for a revision of the dominant narrative that casts the planet as exclusively profitable.

The documentary puts ordinary people at the centre of the climate action solution. We witness five local yet universally relatable characters challenge the economic system depicted through anthropological snapshots: a young Indigenous activist named Crystal lobbies a mining company and leads a Tar Sands Healing Walk; American farmers Mike and Alexis resist a “fossil fuel frenzy”, a looming interconnected threat of oil, tar sands, coal mines, and railroad construction on their farmland; a Greek housewife Melachrini helps with leading a movement against a gold mine being built in Halkidiki, and Indian matriarch Jyothi leads villager protests against one of many power plant proposals in her country.

How is a movement united when one group’s success is linked to the continued constraints imposed on another?

A common theme among these five climate action leaders is resistance against police brutality and authority — with abundant media coverage and correspondence with fellow impacted groups, it seems that winning the fight is easy. The documentary galvanizes populist support of grassroots movements by insisting that global neoliberal policies can be changed. However, the depiction of the characters’ successes is too simplistic, diverging from the nuanced details of the book. The film doesn’t quite capture the reality of the time and perseverance it takes to rewrite the narrative that Earth is in our control, as sanctioned by years of neoliberal policies.

Moreover, the documentary doesn’t address how climate activists are constrained by international relations, even as their counterparts in other countries attempt to stand in solidarity. Klein brings us to Hamburg, where people took back the power through cooperatives generating electricity — a moment that serves as a paramount example in resisting capitalist doctrines. The film seems to hide transnational impacts of the movement. For instance, Germany’s pressure on Greece has induced draconian austerity measures and gold mine proposals for the latter, which is exactly what Melachrini was resisting. How is a movement united when one group’s success is linked to the continued constraints imposed on another? As such, the climate change issue is more nuanced than presented in the documentary.

The film doesn’t quite capture the reality of the time and perseverance it takes to rewrite the narrative that Earth is in our control […].

Klein also exclusively addresses a Global North audience to take action. The dominant narrative tells us that “we are the engineers of the Earth, a machine” wherein a seemingly inclusive “we” is used in an inherently exclusive way — the “engineers” were in fact historically dominant, colonial, and exploitative European states. The countries that are suffering most from climate change are formerly colonized and peripheral nations, the ‘Global South,’ so international environmental justice would feel like oppression for the countries who already hold power.

Global North activists recognize this paradigm created by colonialism, but it doesn’t justify inaction because the current climate crisis affects us all. The portraits of the five activists are varied in their provenance, yet similar in their collective desire to rehabilitate years of damage to Earth. Lewis and Klein capture the rewriting process through candid footage of activists resisting the police, company figureheads and politicians, juxtaposed against dreamlike melodies accompanied by idyllic footage of forests, lakes, and grasslands. The audience peers into the climate activists’ worldviews, as Klein narrates their local stories, without losing the main point of the documentary, a universal call to action.

This Changes Everything […] calls for […] a collective effort to rewrite the narrative that the Earth is an exploitable machine.

Klein’s book provides a good introduction to environmental justice, highlighting the effects of neoliberalism, capitalism, extractivism, and how our current economic system undermines our Earth. As a popular education documentary, the film avoids heavy ideological terms for ease of viewing and focuses on the stories instead. The result was inspiring, but it excluded some important details of the current climate crisis that may only be comprehensible in the book.

This Changes Everything is an accessible documentary that should be screened by student activists, organisations, and teachers to garner attention about a problematic narrative that has the potential to be rewritten – by us.

Downtown Screenings Under the Stars happens every Tuesday at 9pm until September 6.

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One of prime minister Justin Trudeau’s many promises during the election campaign was to reinstate the mandatory long-form census, allowing Statistics Canada to collect more accurate demographic data for policies that better reflect the needs of Canadian people. While this promise was indeed implemented, one of the census’s shortcomings is that it institutionalizes the marginalization of non-binary individuals by prescribing the intersexist and cissexist binary framework of gender, with female and male as the only possible options for people to select on the form.

Non-binary individuals – people whose gender is neither male nor female – already face social discrimination, and the format of the census ratifies their subordinate status by neglecting the importance of data in providing them specific social services.

Human rights groups and research organizations have demonstrated the socioeconomic marginalization of trans and non-binary Canadians, and specific services for them are negatively impacted if there is no federal data. Helen Kennedy, the executive director of the LGBT rights advocacy group Egale Canada, notes in an interview with Radio Canada International that, due to the limited census form, “there could be effects in terms of allocation of health funding, housing, work around education.” Greta Bauer, an associate professor in biostatistics at Western University who studies LGBT health, puts it more broadly, telling the Montreal Gazette that “we can’t accurately assess inequality for trans people if they’re not actually counted” in the census. Without official numbers, the marginalization of trans people can be swept under the rug that much more easily.

Quinn Nelson, a non-binary student at the University of Calgary, came forward to protest this exclusionary census by writing a letter to the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. The chief statistician at Statistics Canada responded to Nelson requesting that they leave the question blank and give reason for omission in the comment section. However, not everyone knows how to respond effectively to inadequate options that the census gender question provides; moreover, leaving it blank is actually an offence under the Statistics Act. This is a confusing and threatening question to people who don’t conform to the gender binary or who are questioning their identities.

A solution to the exclusion of a historically subjugated population is not something for which we should have to wait until the next census, which won’t be conducted until 2021. Crucial information will be lost in these five years, which will have a direct impact on the livelihoods of non-binary and trans Canadians.

For example, LGBTQ youth are more than twice as likely as other Canadian youth to be homeless. Yet, 1 in 3 trans youth will be turned away from a homeless shelter on the basis of their gender. Further, trans people, particularly trans youth, are also among the most vulnerable to mental health issues like social anxiety, depression, and suicide. Data on issues like these and other socioeconomic discrepancies largely comes from the hard work of advocacy groups. As the census fails to accurately account for non-binary and trans Canadians, it also fails to provide data that could help the government implement more meaningful, effective services to improve the situation of trans and non-binary people in Canada.

When the census is sent to 2.9 million Canadian households in May, the message that trans and non-binary individuals are outliers in a population will serve to reinforce their marginalization with respect to access to homeless shelters, jobs, and mental health services. The othering of this population serves as a reminder that its well-being is not a priority for the government.

It’s too late for us to lobby Trudeau’s government to count in non-binary and trans Canadians, so we are condemned to wait five more years to be able to most effectively seek justice for a marginalized citizenry. We are losing valuable information about how non-binary and trans people fare as a population, which is information we need in order to keep our government accountable.

Ashley Yu is a U0 Arts and Science student. To contact her, email ashly.yu@mail.mcgill.ca

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Because wealthy countries in the Global North have the most control over the decisions made in international negotiations, the INDCs are not an effective framework to fight climate change. Until richer countries commit to binding domestic regulations, international treaties won’t give poorer countries that are already facing the catastrophic consequences of climate change any opportunity to save themselves.

Historically, the impact of global treaties on climate change has been low. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an internationally binding treaty, was not ratified by the U.S., and Canada withdrew from it in 2011. Despite high hopes, the 2009 Copenhagen conference was not successful in producing an adequate replacement for the Kyoto Protocol; while an agreement was reached that asked countries to cut their emissions, it lacked a binding legal framework for its enforcement.

Richer countries have power over the terms of the UN negotiations, and they can thus manufacture consent among the poorer countries through bullying tactics. In January 2014, classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on several delegations during the Copenhagen conference. The Copenhagen climate deal was ultimately drafted by only five nations: the U.S., China, India, Brazil and South Africa. According to the BBC, when the U.S. announced the deal, “most other delegations had not even seen it.”

Richer countries have power over the terms of the UN negotiations.

The U.S. then incentivized a number of countries with aid to acquiesce to the terms of the deal. These coercive measures gave an unfair advantage to Global North countries in negotiations, which they used to manipulate countries from the Global South, eliminating an opportunity for them to protect themselves from further climate change. We should expect COP21 to be marred by such power politics as the interests of hegemons prevail yet again, rendering the conference futile.

It may seem premature to equate the disappointing Copenhagen talks with COP21. Indeed, a consensus seems to be building around the urgency of concerted action on climate change, as global decision-makers become aware that low-carbon economies yield notable economic benefits: a net increase in jobs, lower energy costs in the long term, and greater energy security. The development of sustainable biofuels would also boost agricultural production. Indeed, if the #COP21 Twitter hashtag is any indication, many seem to be convinced that COP21 is where leaders will finally take action to significantly curb global warming.

However, optimism doesn’t suffice to bring about change. The negotiations are rigged because interests of powerful corporate lobbyists undermine the richer countries’ will to develop INDCs that reflect the scientific consensus. For example, in Europe, industry lobbying groups BusinessEurope, the European Chemical Industry Council, FuelsEurope, Eurometaux, and the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers have lobbied aggressively to weaken the European Union’s 2030 Climate and Energy targets and obstruct the reform of its emissions trading program. Underneath the Global North countries’ power plays in international negotiations lie the entrenched interests of wealthy capitalists and fossil-fuel addicted lobbyists.

There is a painfully obvious discrepancy between the consequences of global warming in the Global North and in the Global South. If Global North countries were low-lying and at risk of rising sea levels like Bangladesh, for example, their INDCs would be much higher, and much more effective toward the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Instead, inadequate targets will prevail and they will lead to dangerous consequences: food production and water reserves will plummet; droughts in the Sahel region of Africa, southern Asia, and the Mediterranean will be aggravated.

In the upcoming climate negotiations, we’ll witness the same power dynamics at the international level that we have seen in the past. Unless the largest emitters like U.S. and China make commitments backed up by domestic laws, COP21 will change little about the current climate crisis. Global treaties have proved faulty in the past, and INDCs leave little room for at-risk countries to make meaningful change – as such, polluting states must focus on binding domestic regulations to contribute meaningfully to the fight against climate change.

Ashley Yu is a U0 Arts and Science student. To contact her, email ashly.yu@mail.mcgill.ca.

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