I’m a 16-year-old high school student in Burnaby, B.C. In 2019, I joined the youth climate strikes that brought a million Canadians out into the streets shortly before the last federal election.
Now, voters are headed to the polls again as many parts of the country are still reeling from a summer filled with wildfires, droughts, and deadly heat waves. Disasters like these are going to shape my future — so my generation and I are looking for leaders who have the courage to do what it takes to face the climate emergency.
The climate crisis is also a mental health crisis. Psychologists have known this for some time. But this week, preliminary findings from a massive new study have revealed that global warming’s impact on young people’s well-being is far more intense than anyone predicted. The worst part is that the kids’ distress isn’t irrational: The problem lies with their governments.
Young people are increasingly skeptical of our political system. Here’s how to restore our trust.
[Editor’s note: This is an abridged version of a story that first appeared in our pop-up election newsletter, The Run. Sign up here to get new issues sent directly to your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday until election day.]
Every election, young people get to hear all the latest platitudes about the power of the youth vote.
Two parties voted together more than 600 times in Parliament since 2004, blocking dozens of progressive bills, data shows.
“Liberal, Tory, same old story” is a familiar rhetorical refrain in Canadian politics. But we now have data to back it up.
Since 2004, the earliest date that online parliamentary records are kept, the Liberals and Conservatives voted together more than 600 times on bills, an analysis by The Breach has found.
Canada has a huge role to play in the global fight against the climate emergency — simply by not destroying the intact forests, grasslands and wetlands that naturally store carbon. Here’s how the major parties are leveraging everything from conservation goals to restorative agriculture to Indigenous Guardians programs in their campaign platforms
In 1990, Kanehsatà:ke land defenders barricaded a secondary dirt road to stop the expansion of Oka’s nine-hole golf course on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka homeland. It began the “78-day siege” of Kanehsatà:ke, including Kahnawake.
Pleased with her good fortune, the woman remarked, “We’d planned to go to Mexico this summer, but we didn’t need to. It was hot enough here!”
In a different time, it wouldn’t be such an unsettling comment to have overheard while out and about in Alberta, where summers were short and often cool.
But in the midst of a season marked by climate extremes and disasters, it made me wonder how well it’s understood that what we’re seeing is not some temporary aberration; this new summer heat is the sign of a lasting condition. And it isn’t one we should delight in.
