Gene McGuckin, Member of the Vancouver Ecosocialists
After the Heat Dome Killings, What Is to Be Done?
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Greetings,
I am speaking to you this evening from the traditional territories of the Quay Quayt and Kwikwetlem First Nations in a place otherwise known as New Westminster, BC.
The climate mobilization in Canada, as I’ve written in previous columns, has yet to feel like a grand societal undertaking. Among the bold initiatives that would send such a signal — a Youth Climate Corps.
Remember during the 2016 Democratic Primary when Hillary Clinton ineptly said she was “going to put a lot of coal miners […] out of business”? The Bernie crowd — myself included — had a good time with this gaffe, finding in it a microcosm of a certain centrist Democratic politics that touts supposedly progressive policy (in this case, clean energy) while treating the needs of working people as an afterthought, at best.
Efforts to radically transform existing social democratic parties are and have been difficult, maybe even impossible
This article is part of a series in which CD editors asked NDPers, current and former, to weigh in on the state of social democracy in Canada, and on Avi Lewis’s recent decision to pursue the party’s nomination in West Vancouver–Sunshine Coast–Sea to Sky Country. This is the first component of our coverage in advance of the upcoming federal election in fall 2021.