Illustration by Brintha Koneshachandra

Dear Mom,

The other day, I was making us breakfast and I reached into the fridge to grab the container of yogurt to eat with our puri. Now, you would think, having done essentially this every weekend of my entire life, I would not screech, “Ugh! Mom, where is the yogurt?! Why do you have to put the daar in the yogurt container?!” But here we are.

I shouted at you, irritated, yet knowing that I do the exact same thing. I save every yogurt and take-out container; I even have favourites.

If I ever need a container, I’d know exactly where to look. The dishwasher. “Dishwasher guilt” is nothing new. For a variety of psychological and economic reasons, refugees and immigrants tend to resist using this appliance. The idea of saving water and electricity is an important aspect. I turn the tap off when I am brushing my teeth. I turn the shower off when I am conditioning my hair. By this logic, the dishwasher is simply a nuisance. It is often used as additional storage—a glorified dishrack, the perfect place for mountains of reusable containers. There is even a common joke that not using the dishwasher for its intended purpose is the quintessential sign of one’s immigrant roots.

And as you can guess, Mom, when I moved out, I too did not use the dishwasher.

When I moved out, I didn’t downsize. I wear clothes from over 10 years ago. I love receiving hand-me-downs from my bhabi, even at 34 years old. Sometimes, even my close friend offers up clothing that she is ready to part with. I love thrifting. There is no shame in sharing.

And you, Mother, taught me that. I wore many hand-me-downs. But you made it my own. You put hairspray in my hair, lent me your pretty earrings, and told me I looked great. Your friends, with daughters quite a few years older than me, would give you bags of their unwanted clothes. Sure, I didn’t particularly love wearing clothing three sizes too big for me to school, but I certainly did make the most of it. In Grade 3, did you know my best friend and I wore those giant jackets together at recess and lunch? Her arm through the left, my arm through the right, holding each other in the middle. We would zip it right up and walk around scaring people: “We are the two-headed monster!” It really provided endless fun.

And, when I need to repair a beloved clothing item to prolong its longevity, Nani always has my back. Again, I know just where to look. The deep blue, circular Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookie tin. Yup, this is where you store the “sewing kit.” Nothing goes to waste.

There were never a lot of strict rules in our house, were there? But one was always implied, right? Don’t waste. Thanks, Mom.

Just like the chai you sip (and remove the single teabag to reuse throughout the day), our past is steeped in conservation. Maybe these practices support the stereotype that South Asian people are cheap. What most do not realize is how deeply these habits are ingrained in our history of imperialism, instability, and corruption. It is really no surprise that protecting our resources has been passed down through generations. From being forcibly expelled from your homeland with nothing, to living as a single mother—whether it is about scarcity or logic, this is how we live.

Looking back, our culture and communities have been practicing sustainability for centuries, perhaps respecting and appreciating the abundance of what we had, not the lack of it.

So, I am writing this letter to thank you, Mom, for teaching me about sustainability, long before it was cool.

With love and gratitude,

Saffina Jinnah

Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort when no school will hire her. An immigrant escaping the Lebanese Civil War, she has little alternative if she is to provide a semblance of security for her son, Omar, following her husband’s disappearance from the war-torn streets of Beirut.

Nasrallah, who teaches creative writing at Concordia University, elaborated on his decision to set his novel in the heyday of hotlines.

“There’s always an unsophisticated idealism baked into the possibilities of new mediums,” he says. “A little later on, everyone comes to a consensus about usage and conventions. But there’s a window of time in which people are still figuring [out] what can be done, and that was when this era of the hotline became appealing. It’s an obscure technology now, but in its heyday it spoke to that universal need to connect with others in ways we’ve emulated since with the internet and social media.”

Known for his politically charged writing in books like The Bleeds, Niko, and Blackbodying, Hotline sees Nasrallah taking inspiration from his own childhood, articulating some of his mother’s experiences working as a weight-loss call operator.

“The people who call Nutri-Fort’s hotline and speak to Muna experience the shame that comes with fatphobia,” he says. “They’d dedicated themselves to meeting the many expectations Canadian life was throwing at them, and along the way they gained weight, which set them even further back from where they wanted to be—that consensus ideal of happiness that hangs over all of us,” Nasrallah says.

“For Muna, xenophobia brings a similar shame, of not understanding the way the game is played here and the sense of being manipulated by circumstances [she doesn’t] yet understand. That shared sense of shame makes her sympathetic to the voices she counsels on the phone.”

Muna fears that her Quebecois clients struggling with loneliness and bereavement will sever their ties with her if they discover that she is a French-speaking Arab. This balancing act of appearing sympathetic to callers who would not deign to speak to her outside of a professional scenario is the lamentable if commonplace dynamic at the centre of the novel.

“The anxiety over these two forms of visibility—body image and race—were paired together for me by that situation,” Nasrallah explains. “It was only much later as an adult that I began to see how the two were linked and fit into this larger context of unattainable ideals that are a part of North America’s social fabric.” Nasrallah notes that fatphobia and xenophobia are both fears of the body. “Both come from the same intolerances and are hardwired into the social construct. Both devalue how people see themselves.”

At a time when borders are reopening and immigration numbers to Canada are beginning to rise following disincentives to travel, Hotline documents how social issues newcomers face have root causes that have not been completely addressed four decades later.

“In every historical setting in fiction, there has to be some resonance back to the current moment, something that connects the reader to the material and helps organize the story so that parallels emerge and serve to give the narrative layers of meaning,” Nasrallah says. “When we draw from the past, it’s to understand the present moment, and organize some understanding out of the parallels we see.”

Photos courtesy Jennifer David & Waubgeshig Rice

When Jennifer David decided to start Storykeepers, a podcast that spotlights Indigenous literature, she knew Waubgeshig Rice was her only choice for a co-host. He was an experienced journalist with CBC, a published author—most recently of the bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press, 2018)—and they were both passionate about uplifting Indigenous voices.

However, the first time David approached Rice about co-hosting in 2018, he had to decline. Although he was excited about the idea, he couldn’t take on a new project. He was working full-time at CBC and he had a new baby.

“I shelved it because I never pictured any other co-host. I did not want to go ahead unless I was going to go ahead with Waub,” David says.

David sees herself as a communicator. She has a background in journalism, she’s an experienced facilitator, and she’s the author of two books, including the podcast’s namesake, Story Keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal Writers (Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2004). She’s spent her career promoting Indigenous voices on television, radio, and in literature.

Early in 2021, David heard Rice was leaving CBC so he could write full-time. She approached him again and asked if this was a better time for him to co-host the podcast. He said yes. Right away, they got to work. They successfully applied for funding with the Ontario Arts Council, hammered out the details of what they’d like the podcast to be, and started planning the first season. The first episode aired in March 2021.

Rather than the typical radio show where authors are interviewed about their books, David wanted to do something different. Storykeepers is more like a book club, with a book being discussed in depth without the author present. They record one episode per month. The entire focus of Storykeepers is Indigenous voices: they discuss Indigenous writing across genres—fiction, memoir, plays, and poetry—with an Indigenous guest host.

“It’s a bit of a challenge to transpose that book club kind of vibe,” Rice says. “How we approach each episode is very informal and casual.”

Although they read the books, take notes, and discuss topics ahead of time, David and Rice keep the actual episodes unscripted. For Rice, the podcast was an exciting challenge after working at CBC for so long, where almost everything was scripted.

When planning the season, David and Rice started with a list of books they wanted to discuss, and then they made a list of potential guest hosts. Afterwards, they tried to match them up.

“What we try to do is identify somebody who has some sort of personal or professional connection to that book or to that author or to the Indigenous nation that it’s about just to open our eyes to perspectives we may not have considered either,” Rice says. They bring in voices from Anishinaabe, Cree, Inuit, Métis, and Two-Spirit backgrounds, among others.

They recorded 10 episodes for the first season, including a discussion with Cherie Dimaline about Eden Robinson’s Return of the Trickster, Duncan McCue about Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk, Rosanna Deerchild about Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, and more. To encourage listeners to engage with the podcast and interact with them online as if it is a book club, Storykeepers offers book giveaways. At the end of the season, David and Rice were thrilled when they realized the podcast had over 47,000 downloads.

Season two kicked off in January 2022 with a discussion of Katherena Vermette’s The Strangers with guest host Jamie Morse. Rice has taken a slight step back for season two, as he will be a judge for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize and he’s editing his forthcoming novel. Instead of participating in every episode, he’ll be co-hosting every second episode.

“I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. I want to do the books we feature in the podcast properly,” Rice says.

He expects to return to co-hosting every episode in fall 2022.

Listeners can look forward to hearing about an exciting lineup this season, including Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, and the podcast’s first episode featuring a graphic novel, This Place: 150 Years Retold.

David hopes the new season reaches even more listeners. She would like people to come to them and tell them what they’re reading. She’d be thrilled to hear from Indigenous writers and artists interested in being a guest host on the show.

“We can do this for 10, 20 years and still not get through all the books by Indigenous authors,” David says. “I feel like I kind of owe it to Indigenous authors to keep this going so that they can see themselves and their books in here. We’ve just touched the surface.”

Illustration by Julia Galotta

I’m a young woman, who can, to my knowledge, get pregnant and has long-held dreams of being a mother. When I was a child, I spent my days dutifully caring for my dolls—who were named Baby and Popstar. When I turned 13, I started babysitting the two toddlers who lived next door. When I moved to Ottawa to study, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood, spending my off-time supporting pregnant folks who were looking to explore their options. In other words: I’ve spent my life to date surrounded by themes of reproduction, children, and family planning. But, these days, when I think about being a mother myself in the future, existential anxiety creeps into me—a paralyzing fear of having children in a world in rapid ecological decline.

I am 22 years old. I want to have a child sometime in the next decade. But what will the world be like when my prospective child is growing up?

The planet is in trouble. We know this. Sea levels are continuing to rise, Arctic sea ice is in decline, and the earth just keeps heating up. In 2016, the late Stephen Hawking famously predicted that humans have 1,000 years left on earth. It feels like everything is falling apart around us.

A thousand years is a long time, but I think most conscientious, climate change-believing people, myself included, are less concerned about the number, and more concerned about the symptoms of earthly decline and what it means for the human species. Will my child’s world be plagued with wildfires, floods, and rapidly declining air quality? Will their favourite animals be extinct, and will rural landscapes be covered by skyscrapers and freeways? As the 1,000 year-mark draws closer, what will the symptoms of a climate apocalypse be, and how will this burden weigh on my child?

The crux of pre-parental climate anxiety is extreme uncertainty. Will my child wind up in the care of a spaceship operated by Jeff Bezos to transport eight billion humans to Mars? Or, more realistically, will they be able to afford the likely seven-figure price tag for the Apocalypse Express to escape this dying planet?

The dread of earthly decline is quite terrifying, and this kind of anxiety is hard to prepare for. I’ve had panic attacks over school, family, relationships—all of which can be soothed or reasoned with. But climate anxiety is different. I can talk myself out of alarmism, but the general concern over a dying planet is actually quite rational.

Let’s look at my parents’ generation—was ecological decline even a thought? Probably not. The dominant thinking was clear: so long as you weren’t out of wedlock and had the means to care for a child, you were all set. Granted, abortion access was limited, heterosexuality was compulsory, and the risk of disownment and/or ostracization in the case of having children out of wedlock was actually quite substantial. But still, this is the second terror of climate anxiety— there are really no elders to empathize with you. It’s a first-of-its-kind anxiety. Perhaps if you speak to the Cold War generation, you could get a little bit of insight into apocalyptic anxiety more generally, but the idea of the world dying beneath our feet is a novel prospect.

Cue the resentment. Why did I have to be born in the ’90s, the last generation for which climate wasn’t at the forefront of our tiny little childhood brains? And why does my prospective child have to be born in the 2020s or 2030s, when climate terror is probably going to be seared into their brain in utero? Feeling resentful about this timely predicament is something I’ve come to realize is quite normal. I’ve spoken to my 20-something girlfriends and it’s not unique. If we had been able to have children just one generation earlier, it seems like we could be mothers in blissful ignorance.

So here I am: ability to reproduce, likely. Typical childbearing age, check. Full confidence that my child will have a safe and sustainable environment to grow up in? No. I’m working through it. Alarmist thinking is common with climate anxiety. I don’t think anyone should feel guilty for having a child in 2022. In fact, I think new, unjaded, and change-focused humans are the most likely antidote to climate change. Also, if I’m being honest, these past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have made me even more certain that despite great loss, communal mourning, and pain, humans can make it through. We just need to be on the same page (which is a big feat, I know).

I also can’t ignore the bittersweet side to this climate anxiety: it’s made me infinitely more empathetic to my fellow humans, and to the earth I walk on. I’m grateful for things I don’t think earlier generations even noticed: the air I breathe, the water I drink, and so on. I also use this anxiety to fuel much of my everyday work toward climate justice. I don’t think I would be as interested in living sustainably and building community as I would be without climate anxieties. Climate anxiety and subsequent climate activism have, in many ways, helped me to unlearn the hyper-individualism that capitalism taught me. I can only hope that this belief in community and radical empathy is also passed on to my child and their generation.

So, it’s not all bad, but it can be pretty bad. But let’s be clear—if I didn’t want to work through it, I think that’s okay, too. If I didn’t want kids, then the childfree life would be for me. But that’s not me. I want kids, but I want kids in a world that isn’t doomed. So, until my child is brought into this world, I will be spending my time working toward creating a world where they will be safe and be able to thrive.

Photo courtesy Natasha Kuperman

In Hazelton, B.C., one organization is undertaking an ambitious project: to regenerate the public forests of Canada’s north. Seed the North, founded in 2020 by infrastructure developer and architect Natasha Kuperman, isn’t the first to tackle reforestation. However, it has set out to do so with a fresh approach that combines clean technology with deeply rooted Indigenous knowledge.

Seed the North’s core mission is to gather seeds with value to the local ecosystem, encase them in a biochar-based coating (a carbon-rich soil enhancer made from agricultural waste), and then use drones to distribute them across thousands of hectares. Kuperman explains that the coating makes seeds drought-resilient and less likely to be eaten by predators. “Those are the two greatest contributors to seed in the wild not having [a] sufficient survival rate,” she says.

Kuperman and her team focus on areas that are overlooked by conventional reforestation strategies, like planting nursery-grown seedlings that are commissioned and paid for by logging organizations. But the more remote and further north an area is, “the more expensive and logistically difficult it is to seed at scale,” Kuperman says. That’s why Seed the North uses drones—they are the lowest carbon impact tool that can efficiently and affordably seed such large swathes of land.

Many of these areas are also home to Indigenous communities, which face the consequences of compromised ecosystems—for example, habitat loss reduces access to traditional food sources. Currently, Seed the North works with, learns from, and employs people from multiple communities of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan, particularly the Kitselas First Nations and the Luutkudziiwus Wilp. These communities’ knowledge about local ecosystems is then incorporated into Seed the North’s work.

Kuperman says that Seed the North is different from other reforestation efforts because it doesn’t just focus on the trees, or even the forests—it is concerned with landscape-level analysis. That means accounting for the full ecology of an area and identifying patterns that can reveal the impacts of past disturbances. Understanding a forest’s past then enables better planning for its future.

The organization’s scientific approach also sets it apart. “Historically,” Kuperman says, “direct seeding—like broadcast seeding from an airplane or helicopter—has largely been a failure.” But she chalks this up to a lack of precision, offering up birch trees as an example.

A birch seed has a 25 percent chance of viability: three out of four seeds have no embryos inside. So, when past direct seeding restoration projects have used birch seed, it’s likely they’ve been planting blanks. But Seed the North’s approach is to rigorously process the seeds and examine them for viability and germination value. The birch seeds are then planted with companion plants like alder that fix nitrogen in the soil, helping birch trees divide.

In the bigger picture, the care that Seed the North takes with its seeds matters because birch trees have high albedo, a quality that measures how much a surface reflects light. Snow and ice also have high albedo, but as winters shorten and the amount of snow declines, that amount of albedo decreases. In the north, albedo is the single greatest source of climate feedback. As reflectivity declines, the surface of the Earth absorbs more solar radiation, therefore increasing temperatures and causing more ice to melt.

“We can’t exclusively focus on tree planting,” Kuperman says, emphasizing that we need to understand these “larger governing forces” in order to make meaningful change.

Looking ahead, Kuperman hopes to continue building a “robust workforce” in Hazelton. In her vision for Seed the North’s future, the organization will also expand into small towns across Northern Canada and work with those communities to collect and process seeds that will help address local disturbances to the landscape, like wildfires or road building. Kuperman hopes there will be “a constant exchange of knowledge” with these communities: Elders will share what they know about the forest, and Seed the North will reciprocate by providing services, training, and funds.

All this community-based ecological restoration work, Kuperman hopes, will “help mitigate this ticking time bomb that’s called climate change.”

Graphic by Valerie Thai

Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis, and one perpetuating factor is the skyrocketing cost of rent. Rent control is a type of provincial rent regulation law that limits rent increases. While every province and territory restricts the frequency of rent increases, only four provinces have some sort of policy that caps the percentage by which rent can increase. Although some provinces enacted a freeze on rent increases at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, only a couple extended the freeze as the pandemic continues. Here is a closer look at rent control policies across the country.

British Columbia

The B.C. government enacted a rent increase freeze at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Although the rent freeze came to an end on January 1, 2022, the Vancouver Tenants Union has advocated to reinstate the freeze since many tenants remain in precarious conditions due to the ongoing pandemic.

Manitoba

The Manitoba government’s rent freeze, a temporary measure first enacted in April 2020, has been extended until the end of 2023, but critics have concerns over the actual implications of this policy. The province’s Residential Tenancies Branch has the authority to approve ad hoc requests to increase rent—a power which they exercised 100 percent of the time during the 2019–2020 fiscal year, according to a document obtained by the Opposition NDP through a freedom of information request.

Ontario

Much like B.C. and Manitoba, the Ontario government passed legislation in October 2020 to freeze rent until the end of 2021. Organizations such as the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario and the East York chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) have noted the importance of reinstating the rent freeze.

Quebec

Although the Tribunal administratif du logement has a system for landlords and tenants to agree on a rent increase, the process is not legally required. Moreover, tenant advocates, including the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec and the Comité d’action de Parc-Extension, note that the power imbalance between tenant and landlord can result in inequitable rent increases, and are lobbying for better laws to protect tenants in Quebec.

Nova Scotia

In November 2020, the government of Nova Scotia passed rent control legislation due to the state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a temporary measure though: it first expired in late 2021, but the two percent annual cap has been extended until the end of 2023 as a result of the work of community organizers, housing advocates, and tenants.

Prince Edward Island

P.E.I.’s unit-based, rather than tenant-based, rent control means that the amount of rent increase should be the same regardless of whether the property changes hands. But housing advocates, such as the P.E.I. Fight for Affordable Housing, note a lack of systemic accountability that can result in unlawful rent increases. Moreover, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that average rent hikes in 2020 were well above the rent increase guideline.

Photo by iStock; Design by Valerie Thai

In August 2021, the UN Secretary-General declared the findings of a recent global climate report “a code red for humanity.” In response, a team of journalists and researchers released the “Climate Coverage in Canada” report in November, which heard from 143 scientists, 148 journalists, and 1,006 members of the public on how they perceive news about climate change.

While early findings indicate scientists and journalists agree that the earth is growing warmer due to human activity, the Canadian public seems less sure—only 80 percent of those surveyed said the earth is warming because of human activity, as compared to 97 percent of scientists and journalists. Sean Holman, an author of the study and professor of environmental and climate journalism at the University of Victoria, says that if journalists and scientists are in consensus about climate change, it’s worth examining why Canadian news coverage doesn’t reflect the severity of the crisis at hand.

Canadian news management isn’t on the same page

The study found a disconnect between what journalists want to cover and what they’re assigned. Of those less willing or able to cover climate change, 44 percent of journalists cited a lack of interest from newsroom management. “Journalists on the ground understand how climate change is affecting Canada,” says Holman. “But those running Canadian newsrooms might not have the same understanding.”

Neither journalists nor scientists have faith that current coverage properly equips voters to make political decisions about climate change. Only 18 percent of scientists and 21 percent of journalists believe the public knows enough about climate change to make informed voting decisions. Beyond providing more climate coverage, scientists and journalists agree newsrooms shouldn’t provide a platform for op-eds that reject climate science findings. Holman remarks that while media organizations such as the BBC and the Los Angeles Times have policies against climate science rejectionism, some major Canadian news media outlets seem to be in the business of promoting it.

More cooperation is needed between scientists and journalists

Though scientists and journalists surveyed had similar understandings of climate change, nearly half of the scientists said concerns about being politicized or misrepresented kept them from doing media interviews. Both groups say climate scientists should be consulted in editorial decision-making about related coverage.

“There’s an opportunity there … for scientists and journalists to be talking more,” Holman says. “We need to be creating a shared community to support evidence-based decision-making.” One solution with widespread support was forums hosted by journalists, where the public can directly ask scientists questions about climate change and its impacts.

What comes next for climate coverage?

The study explored how regular news coverage can better incorporate climate change information. More than 90 percent of scientists and journalists wanted to see stories about natural disasters and extreme weather that explain how those events are likely to increase, both in severity and number, because of climate change.

From the 175 open recommendations submitted by scientists and journalists, the study heard support for another strategy: localized rather than globalized coverage. “Climate change often feels like it’s something happening far away rather than something close at hand,” Holman says. He emphasizes specific and regional information should be available, so people feel like they can make a difference in their everyday lives.

Photo by XURZON; Design by Valerie Thai

At least 595 people died in B.C. from heat-related deaths during the summer of 2021. Most of these occurred during the province’s “heat dome” event, which took place from June 25 to July 1, and saw temperatures rise as high as 49.6 degrees Celsius. Many climate activists and researchers believe that was just a taste of what’s to come as extreme weather events cause mass death with increasing frequency.

When climate-related mass deaths come, they’re expected to affect disabled people in greater numbers. While a full coroner’s report detailing how many of those who died in the 2021 heat wave were disabled has yet to be released, Sébastien Jodoin, a Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment at McGill University in Montreal and the founding director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program (DICARP), expects it to mirror the coroner’s data from Montreal’s 2018 heat wave. That event killed 66 people, 72 percent of whom were chronically ill.

“When you looked at the coroner’s report of people who died,” says Jodoin, “they found that a quarter had schizophrenia.”

Jodoin, who pivoted his research to looking at how disabled people are left out of climate planning after he developed multiple sclerosis (MS) at 33 years old, notes that a common medication that schizophrenics take makes them more sensitive to heat. However, he believes that what ultimately increases schizophrenics’ risk is that they are often poor, isolated, and harder to reach when it comes to government communication.

“They actually would have needed some sort of additional measures to be safe during this period and there was nothing in place to protect them,” Jodoin explains. “So, it kind of illustrates both that there’s vulnerability and … lack of planning.”

Climate change is currently affecting disabled people in Canada and around the world especially hard. Rolling blackouts caused by overtaxed power grids are disrupting the use of ventilators or other assistive devices, extreme temperatures and smog are causing flare-ups for people who have respiratory or autoimmune disabilities, and emergency response planning for extreme weather events often do not consider the needs or particular vulnerabilities of disabled people. Even increases in the toxicity of controlled drugs causing more disabled people to die from overdoses can be linked to the climate, since climate change has been linked to increased drug use. The climate future is likely to be filled with preventable deaths of disabled people. Yet, climate change planning rarely includes disabled people, many of whom are vulnerable in multiple ways because of poverty or other intersecting marginalizations.

Jodoin, who has analyzed climate adaptation policies around the world, found that disability was rarely mentioned in these critical national and international documents. What’s more, disabled people are sometimes physically excluded from the negotiation table.

“[Climate negotiations are] not accessible sometimes to wheelchair users,” Jodoin says. “There was an incident last November where an Israeli minister [Karine Elharrar] … was not able to enter the negotiation room because she was a wheelchair user.”

Jodoin notes that disabled people aren’t discussed in most of Canada’s national adaptation policies for climate change, the set of government publications that cover everything from policy frameworks, to platforms, to in-depth plans for specific departments or ministries. He says these frameworks do, however, often mention Indigenous people and women as potentially being more at risk.

That omission means that disabled people will be less likely to get centred in planning. But Susana Deranger, a climate and disability activist of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and a member of the Indigenous Climate Action steering committee, an Indigenous-led organization working to find solutions to climate change, also believes it neglects the fact that disabled people are disproportionately Indigenous.

“Systemic racism makes experiences of disability much worse,” they say. “Thirty percent of Indigenous people are disabled…. That’s an extremely high number.”

Deranger worries that climate change or climate emergencies will make it harder for disabled Indigenous people to access health care, traditional foods, and even medical care and supplies in remote Indigenous communities.

Deranger isn’t surprised that disabled BIPOC people are being left out of these plans. They believe that the same forces that motivate ableist beliefs that disabled people are disposable are also what led us to the climate catastrophe—the colonial belief that the land and people are important only in how they’re instrumental to capitalism.

“Capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand and are linked to everything that’s wrong,” they say.

Andrea McDowell, who works on air quality and climate change at the municipal level, believes more preparation needs to go into protecting disabled people from climate impacts.

“Disabled people are the largest minority group in Canada,” she says. “That’s a very large number of people who are being left out of important and even life-saving work.”

McDowell’s 18-year-old, Echo McDowell, has a rare form of dwarfism and worries about the ways she’s already being left out of emergency planning. Echo recalls an example where she was left behind during a school fire drill because no one knew what to do to get her to safety.

“I had to spend a while making specific plans with the administration so that they wouldn’t end up leaving me in the building,” she explains.

Being left behind in an emergency is McDowell’s fear for all disabled people. “You look at Hurricane Katrina and the people who died were often disabled and that was largely because the response didn’t take … the needs of disabled people into account,” she says. “If the response isn’t accessible, then disabled people will die.”

It seems like governments aren’t making evacuating disabled people a priority, are creating emergency shelters that aren’t accessible, are not planning for medical care or vital medicines, and are stockpiling food that disabled people with dietary requirements can’t eat. There are so few ways that disabled people’s needs are being included in climate emergency planning.

“[People often say] we need to consider disabled people. But there’s so little representation in the organizations and the committees that are making those decisions,” says McDowell.

While a diverse representation of disabled people should be centred in climate movements, disabled people are not just often left out—they’re also sometimes seen as the problem.

For example, bans on plastic straws have trampled over disabled people’s needs, single-use plastics that save disabled people’s lives are often demonized, and one Ontario doctor has called for a reduction in inhaler prescriptions to combat climate change. Climate movements often target the things disabled people need to survive—something that’s been referred to as “eco-ableism.”

“My life is dependent on single-use plastics,” says McDowell, who is a Type 1 diabetic (T1D). “So, I spent a lot of time thinking about the environmental movement … and ableism.” Due to the use of testing strips and needles, managing T1D requires the use of a significant amount of single-use plastics.

She believes that climate justice and environmental groups need to do more to reach out. “Look around the table. Recognize that there’s a very large and important constituency that’s not being included, and fix it,” she says. “We have completely overlooked disability for the past several decades or centuries. Maybe it’s time we find some local visibility initiatives relating to the environment or climate and support them.”

Deranger agrees that the environmental movement is not doing enough to make space for disabled people—or to include those who are marginalized in other ways and who are also disabled. Despite efforts to include more Indigenous people and people of colour in climate activism, they say it often leaves out disabled people in those groups. “There’s nothing like Braille or ASL or anything for them to participate,” they explain. “When they’re planning venues, they’re not thinking about disabled people. If there’s rallies and marches and people can’t walk very far with them, they’re never planned [for].”

Deranger doesn’t believe it has to be that way, citing an experience at a rally in Mexico where there was a truck participants could hop onto if they couldn’t walk or got tired. “But I don’t see that [here],” they say.

The movement loses out when it doesn’t include everyone, according to Deranger. “The solution to climate justice is to listen to Indigenous Peoples but listen to Indigenous disabled people as well,” they assert. “[Inclusion is seen as] another burden to fighting rallies, fighting marches, planning events.… It’s already overwhelming. So … we can’t add that on. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the capacity. Well, make it.”

In 2020, American disability activist Alice Wong gave a talk called “The Last Disabled Oracle.” In it, she discussed how disabled people sounded the alarm during the pandemic about the importance of masks, accessibility, and interdependence.

“It became very clear who was considered disposable and who was not,” she said in her talk. “The casual ableism, racism, and ageism went unchecked in debates around restarting the economy with terms such as ‘acceptable losses’ and ‘high risk’ as if those lives weren’t worth living or saving.”

Wong later tweeted: “Disabled people know what it means to be vulnerable and interdependent. We are modern-day oracles. It’s time people listened to us.”

Many activists are worried that the disregard public health officials are showing to the concerns of disabled people during the pandemic will be mirrored in the climate future. But, that future could be made easier if only more people listened to disabled people. Rather than being sidelined, many disabled activists argue, they should be leading government efforts to adapt to a changing climate.

“[As a disabled person,] you’re already existing in an environment that is hostile towards you, and that’s not an experience that abled people have,” says McDowell. “I think there’s a lot to learn there about the kind of adaptability and resourcefulness and problem solving that disabled people often need to do just to exist in the world.”

Deranger also sees disabled people as holders of wisdom others could benefit from. “Everybody has to realize that disability is … a social justice issue just like climate change is,” they say. “Listen to disabled people—disabled people live with and recognize climate change just as much as anyone else andif you want to learn about coping mechanisms and resilience, go to disabled people, listen, and learn.”

Photo by byNRQEMI; Design by Valerie Thai

Over a century since their introduction, cars dominate the streets of cities and towns across Canada to such a degree that many people feel there is no real alternative. In January 2022, Turo Canada in partnership with Léger found that 83 percent of Canadians have their own or lease a vehicle and 81 percent of vehicle owners feel it would be impossible not to. There’s a reason for that: car-dependent communities are the product of decades of collaboration between industry and government.

Today, the supremacy of the automobile can feel like an immutable reality—but it wasn’t always that way. In 1913, there were only about 50,000 motor vehicles on Canadian roads, but the year prior, the Canadian Highway Association had already started pushing for a national highway system. By 1919, they were starting to get their way. The government of Robert Borden passed the Canadian Highway Act that year, directing highway funding to the provinces, followed by even more during the Great Depression. Finally, in 1949, the government of Louis St. Laurent passed what became known as the Trans-Canada Highway Act to set federal standards and provide federal funding, which reached up to 90 percent on some segments. The Trans-Canada Highway was considered complete, as per the Act, in 1971.

The history of highway funding is one example of the central role that governments have played in enabling the automobile-dependent society we live in today, but it is not the only one. Over the years, federal and provincial governments expanded road networks, provided incentives for automotive manufacturing, and created the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation to make mortgages more accessible to people, while setting standards that encouraged suburban development. This partnership between industry and government was mutually beneficial, but it hasn’t been without consequences.

Vehicle ownership costs on average between $8,600 and $13,000 a year, according to the Canadian Automobile Association, and that was before recent inflation. Meanwhile, 1,762 people were killed by motor vehicles in 2019, and another 8,917 people were seriously injured. The environmental toll is also significant, with suburban living having a bigger carbon footprint than urban dwelling, and transportation accounting for 25 percent of national emissions in 2019, second only to the oil and gas sector. Those emissions grew by 54 percent between 1990 and 2019, in part because of the increased number of large trucks and SUVs on Canadian roads.

To address the transport sector’s contribution to climate change, the Canadian government and its provincial counterparts have coalesced around a plan to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, with a goal of reaching 100 percent of passenger car and truck sales by 2035. To incentivize that shift, the federal government is offering rebates of up to $5,000 for the purchase of a zero-emissions vehicle, subsidies for the construction of electric vehicle chargers, and is working with industry to ensure production facilities are in place.

On its face, electrification seems universally positive since it will be essential to any transition in the transportation sector—but it also signals a lack of vision. “Automobility as a technology and as a set of desires is never fundamentally challenged,” explains James Wilt, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. Instead, Wilt says, the government’s policy assumes “all you need to do is get people out of an internal combustion engine vehicle and into an electric battery vehicle.”

That is in part because of a common assumption that electric vehicles are without environmental cost since they do not produce tailpipe emissions. It can be seen in the language of “zero emissions.” Yet, as Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) professor John Sandlos says, “To conceive of those vehicles as being ‘green,’ wholly green, and without cost, that would be a mistake.” In most scenarios, an electric vehicle has a lower emissions footprint than one powered by gas or diesel, but that does not mean they do not have an adverse impact of their own. A greater share of their emissions are generated in the production stage rather than from their use, and their batteries account for a significant portion of that environmental cost.

As part of the federal government’s push to grow electric vehicle production, it wants Canada to become a key node in the mineral supply chain for the batteries that power them. Former Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Navdeep Bains calls this Canada’s “competitive advantage,” explaining that “we are the only nation in the western hemisphere with an abundance of cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel, the minerals needed to make next-generation electric batteries.” The 2021 federal budget was praised by the Mining Association for introducing new funding and tax incentives under the government’s Mines to Mobility initiative. U.S. officials have also referred to Canada as a “51st state” for minerals after a concerted push by the Liberals for an integrated supply chain.

For government, the expansion of domestic mining is positioned as a significant economic opportunity, while “the mining industry sees that as an opportunity to portray themselves as clean and green,” says Sandlos. But in order to lay the groundwork for increased extraction, the costs are being downplayed. “Part of the problem goes back to our measures of what is economic success,” explains MiningWatch Canada communications and outreach coordinator Jamie Kneen. “The reason that these things look like good economic options to governments is that there are big dollars invested and high-paying jobs are created, but not that many jobs, and a lot of the real costs of mining are externalized.”

According to Wilt, such a plan “is premised on the continued dispossession and underdevelopment of Indigenous nations, especially in the North.” While mining can provide opportunities like high-paid jobs and training, it also comes with many consequences, and communities—be they Indigenous or non-Indigenous—are not always able to effectively assert their rights to ensure mining developments minimize the harms and deliver the promised benefits.

The government is championing its strategy, but it’s still early days. Kneen explains that opposition to lithium and graphite projects in Quebec is already mounting, and most existing Canadian mining is still for minerals that wouldn’t be going into batteries. That means there’s time to ensure mining projects must meet a more rigorous standard. “It’s a question of having much stricter and much more effective regulations in place,” says Kneen, “including things like free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous communities and processes that provide meaningful democratic engagement and that respect Indigenous authorities and their decision-making, so that people are not being asked to sacrifice beyond what’s already been stolen from them.”

Sandlos warns against “a Wild West rush” for battery minerals and asserts the need to learn from the mistakes made during the oil boom earlier in the 2000s. In her book Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada’s Petro-Provinces, University of Waterloo professor Angela Carter describes that period as one in which provinces were “neglecting the environmental risks and impacts of oil extraction in their rush to capture the spoils.” In her research, Carter outlines how, in seeking to capitalize on high oil prices, governments subsidized oil companies, rolled back environmental regulations, and even stifled environmental research. Those actions not only had impacts on local environments and the climate, they were also accompanied by the oil industry having greater influence over policy and growing inequality, particularly in the provinces where that extraction was taking place.

As we look forward to a potential mining boom driven by electric vehicles, an environmental assessment process that gives people real power over resource developments could be one way to avoid a similar fate. “If there are communities near a mining development, those communities should be involved in the planning,” Sandlos explains, “especially if this mining is happening in the proximity of Indigenous communities which have particular rights to land, and culturally I think they would say they have certain obligations to the land as well.” In his view, that process could require companies to sign agreements that create community-controlled oversight bodies to audit the mines.

Each of these projects should also have to do a full accounting of their costs, says Arn Keeling, an MUN professor and collaborator with Sandlos on the Toxic Legacies Project. “If we’re going to talk about electrification, what’s the true cost?” he asks. “Well, the true cost means paying every dime” of the social, environmental, and infrastructural costs, not being distracted by “promises of windfall profits that usually get privatized anyway.” There will be opposition to higher standards for mining projects, but they are essential to responsible development. “The neoliberal way of thinking about this is to see all this as red tape,” says Sandlos, but “it’s the way of imposing a land ethic on doing this kind of development and being willing to put the brakes on developments that don’t make sense.”

Beyond ensuring mining is done in a more responsible way, the government’s transport policy needs a broader rethink. “The first of the three Rs is reduce,” says Kneen. “Reducing demand through efficiency and technology is great, but we also need to look at the structures of the way we do things.” The suburban, auto-oriented communities we have today are the product of decades of government policy that encouraged us to live that way, and a transport policy that meets the scale of the climate crisis requires a similar level of ambition. “I wouldn’t want to see electric vehicles become an excuse for more suburban development,” says Sandlos.

As an alternative to requiring most Canadians to buy electric vehicles, Wilt argues for a “radical decommodification of transportation” where governments prioritize policies and investments that encourage people to ditch their cars—whether gas, diesel, or electric—in favour of taking public transit, riding a bicycle, or walking where it’s feasible. In practice, that means directing significantly more funding to expand transit systems and cycling infrastructure in urban, suburban, and even rural communities across the country. It also requires federal and provincial governments to not just pay the capital costs of buying new buses or building new subway lines, but subsidize the daily operating costs usually shouldered by cash-strapped municipal governments.

Finding success with such a transport policy requires thinking about the broader community too, in the same way the automobile incentivized suburbanization. “All levels of government are focused on profit opportunities for shareholders,” explains Kneen, “and it’s not a policy that’s really responding to people’s needs.” Instead, Wilt argues such a shift “requires densification and socialization of housing” to ensure investments in transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure don’t just serve to further gentrify cities with new condo developments and prices that many people can’t afford. “It really does revolve around understanding mobility as a fundamental right and responsibility for all of us to collectively share,” he says.

The government is embarking on a project that continues to centre automobiles, while requiring a significant increase in resource extraction at home and abroad—extraction that will have consequences for communities and local environments. It’s a policy that doesn’t fundamentally challenge the status quo, other than swapping internal combustion engines for batteries, even as our reliance on automobiles has created inequities and harms that this transition offers us the chance to address. The transition away from fossil fuels will require minerals, but the amount depends on the path we ultimately pursue—and one that reorients mobility toward public transit is far less resource-intensive than one where many Canadians continue to rely on automobiles.

As Wilt puts it, “The question is not so much whether the policy can or will be effective, it’s more, ‘Is this the future that we want?’” We have a rare opportunity to think seriously about how we want to live in the century to come. It would be a shame to let mining and automotive companies make that decision for us.

Photo by Jim Feng; Design by Valerie Thai

Severe and increasingly regular hurricanes, increased temperatures altering fishing grounds and crop development, drastic shoreline erosion, and the destruction of vulnerable ecosystems. These are all climate change impacts that are already happening on Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) and will only get worse in the future without immediate climate action.

As a low-lying island province nestled in the Atlantic, P.E.I. is heavily romanticized in pop culture and tourism ads as an idyllic, pastoral province. With a major housing crisis, an underfunded healthcare system, high levels of poverty and food insecurity, and a fragile economy that is very vulnerable to climate change, the reality for most islanders is very different from this romanticized picture.

P.E.I., also known as Epekwitk by the Mi’kmaq, is a largely agricultural province, with almost half of the island used as farmland. Agriculture as a sector is highly susceptible to climate change due to unpredictable weather and rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures. According to Sally Bernard, a certified organic grain farmer on P.E.I., “climate change is just like this concrete umbrella that we’re carrying around. It’s just looming at all times.”

Agriculture on P.E.I., and most of Canada for that matter, is largely industrial and conventional agriculture, which is characterized by the heavy application of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, intensive irrigation practices, and the use of monocropping, which is the practice of planting a single crop on vast areas of farmland year after year. Farms on P.E.I. are shrinking in number but growing in size, and this consolidation of farmland has been ongoing for decades. The local agricultural sector is dominated by agribusinesses, which are corporations that produce or distribute goods and services related to farming and the farming itself. While P.E.I. has several main crops, these agribusinesses have entrenched the monocropping of potatoes into P.E.I.’s land use patterns with devastating environmental consequences. In recent years, the island has borne witness to a drastic reduction in soil health, a significant loss of crop diversity, and many fish kills (which result when fertilizer or pesticide runoff creates an anoxic event in local waterways, thus destroying an aquatic ecosystem including fish and other organisms). When farmers work under a contract with these agribusinesses, they are generally expected to yield a certain amount of crop. This is not to say that local potato farmers disregard the environment, but rather that they face many external pressures and often work within tight profit margins. There are many local environmental organizations, including watershed groups whose mandates are to help manage and restore a local ecosystem, working with farmers to improve environmental outcomes. According to a representative of a local watershed group who wishes to remain anonymous, “[Farmers] are often very willing to work for [environmental] groups or with groups. They don’t want fish kills. They’re community-minded…. But there’s also a lot on a farmer’s radar.”

While industrial agriculture is the dominant form of agriculture on P.E.I., monocropped agriculture is not economically or environmentally resilient and small shocks can disrupt the sector. This vulnerability is evident in the current potato export crisis on P.E.I., as millions of pounds of potatoes are unable to be shipped to the U.S. due to the discovery of a contagious crop disease on a local farm. Crop diseases are often associated with industrial agriculture through poor soil quality and a lack of crop diversity. Despite high rates of food insecurity on P.E.I., these farmers have been forced to destroy over 136 million kilograms of edible potatoes.

The dominance of industrial agriculture on P.E.I. is being challenged by local agroecological farmers. Agroecology is a social movement, body of knowledge, and agricultural mode developed in concert with the transnational peasants movement La Via Campesina and their mission to empower small farmers, fishers, and Indigenous land protectors globally. This style of farming prioritizes on-farm biodiversity, livable wages for farmers, and respect for the non-human environment.

In short, agroecology is the practice of ecological farming while working within the confines of one’s natural ecosystem, thus promoting resiliency through biodiversity. Agroecology can be thought of as a large umbrella term that many farming methods could fall under, including intercropping (growing multiple crops together to promote soil health), agroforestry (growing crops in cultivated forests to promote carbon capture in soil), planting trees near bodies of water to prevent fertilizer runoff, crop rotation, utilizing cover crops to prevent soil degradation in the winter, rotational grazing of livestock, using organic manures, and many more. Nancy Sanderson is a small-scale farmer who grew up on a conventional farm in Saskatchewan and began farming agroecologically with her partner after moving to P.E.I. She describes agroecology as “trying to work with nature rather [than] fight against it wherever possible.” These farming methods create vibrant agro-ecosystems and provide natural ecosystem services including pollination, pest control, and nutrient cycling.

Agroecological farming can also sequester carbon through improved soil health, making it a powerful tool in the fight against further climate change. Methods such as no-till or low-till farming, planting cover crops to prevent soil erosion, and rotational grazing of livestock have all been demonstrated to capture atmospheric carbon and store it in soils, similar to the way that trees store carbon during their life cycles. Adam MacLean is a sheep farmer from central P.E.I. “My role as a farmer is to harness as efficiently as possible the sun and the rain and sequester a … ton of carbon,” says MacLean. Genuine resilience to climate change does not just mean the ability to weather vulnerabilities, it also means removing or mitigating the root stressors causing harm in the first place.

Agroecology shares some methods with Certified Organic farming in Canada, a system where farmers are certified by an outside body as using certain environmental practices on their farm, including forgoing non-organic pesticides. Agroecology takes additional steps toward promoting ecosystem health, however, and encourages community-based agricultural values like collective land ownership, respect for Indigenous knowledge systems, and achieving gender and racial equity within agriculture and beyond.

From an economic perspective, agricultural research also indicates that agroecology can be far more productive per hectare than conventional monoculture methods. Agroecological farming is also greatly resilient to economic and environmental disasters. Multiple studies and surveys conducted across South and Central America, where agroecology is more common than it is in Canada, found that agroecological farming is much more resilient to hurricanes and other “natural” disasters that are becoming more frequent and severe in the ongoing climate crisis.

This resilience is noteworthy for agriculture on P.E.I., as weather variations that impact crops are becoming much more regular. In early September of 2019, Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Canadian Maritimes, causing widespread devastation and crop loss. With sustained winds of over 155 km/h and heavy rainfall, many Maritime farmers reported major crop damage.

From a climate justice perspective, P.E.I.’s total greenhouse gas emissions are negligible compared to the rest of Canada, but P.E.I. will be disproportionately impacted as a geographically and economically vulnerable province, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. Resilience is an increasingly relevant concept to conversations on climate change. While neoliberal governments and corporations attempt to individualize the concept of resilience and make it a matter of personal responsibility to prepare oneself for the climate crisis, climate change is a systemic problem that requires increased system resilience. While individual agroecologists are making meaningful efforts to improve their on-farm environmental outcomes, they often lack governmental support and are also frustrated by governmental inaction on climate change in Canada and beyond.

Despite the clear benefits of agroecology, various levels of government have failed to provide enough support for the growth of agroecology as a movement on P.E.I. due to the disproportionate power of the agribusiness sector and the Canadian export model of agriculture. There are many powerful agribusinesses on the island, and a few are vertically integrated, meaning that they control all stages of the production process including seed development, agro-chemical application, packaging, shipping, and processing.

Many agroecological farmers and environmental groups believe that the provincial and federal governments favour local agribusinesses and their contracted growers over agroecologists. During the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, little relief was offered to smaller-scale and agroecological farmers who also could not access many federal or provincial supports designed to support industrial-scale farms and agribusinesses. Many local agroecologists found this hard to swallow, as they believe that subsidizing larger-scale producers allows those producers to maintain artificially low commodity prices that make agroecological goods seem highly priced in comparison to consumers.

Agriculture in Canada, including in P.E.I., is largely export-oriented, meaning that the majority of food produced in Canada is produced for export to other countries while we also import a great deal of food. Canada is the fifth largest agricultural exporter in the world and is the dominant exporter of common crops such as durum wheat, soy, canola, and oats. This export orientation means that government subsidization tends to prioritize monocropping these cash crops over more environmentally sound methods.

Jordan MacPhee is an agroecological vegetable farmer from central P.E.I. who farms with carbon sequestration in mind. According to MacPhee, agroecological farming produces many positive externalities for the environment and the broader community: “You’re … rehabilitating [the land] and you’re bringing carbon in from [the] atmosphere, you’re … not leaching [contaminated water] out into the waterways, you’re not poisoning … the lungs and the intestines of your neighbours by putting nitrates into the groundwater and air … there’s so many side benefits that are invisible in the short term.” However, these benefits often do not result in financial gains for those agroecologists, especially in the early years of farming. “When you get home from the market, and you’ve worked 80 hours that week, and you only make 200 bucks, and you do the math and you made $2.50 an hour. That’s when it’s like, what am I doing?” he says. MacPhee mentioned that with experience and shared knowledge, agroecological farming can provide a livable income even in the current economic system. However, many individuals who are willing to provide their communities with environmental and social benefits through agroecology do not survive the initial startup phase of farming due to a lack of financial support and the exceedingly low number of agriculture schools in Canada that teach agroecological methods.

There are certainly local and federal government programs aimed to support the growth of smaller-scale agroecological farming, including small grant programs, a provincially funded mental health program for island farmers, and bureaucratic positions to oversee the growth of agroecology on P.E.I. However, many farmers view them as inconsequential and piecemeal strategies relative to the resources and financial support received by industrial-scale farms. Many local agroecologists believe that helping to provide farmers with a livable income whether through a universal basic income, direct farmer subsidization, or better grant programs is a way to support community resilience in the fight against climate change. Financial security allows farmers to weather the impacts of climate change, invest in mitigation strategies, and choose farming methods that sequester carbon over conventional farming methods that often provide a steadier income.

While the provincial government of P.E.I. has adopted some of the most ambitious emissions reductions and climate change mitigation targets in the country, with commitments to reach net zero energy consumption by 2030 and net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, 25 percent of provincial carbon emissions come directly from the agricultural industry. Instead of adopting agroecology as a climate change mitigation strategy or compensating agroecologists for their positive environmental externalities, the provincial government continues to subsidize a style of agriculture that degrades soil quality, releases significant greenhouse gas emissions, and often harms local biodiversity.

Agroecology is certainly not a silver bullet to climate change, but its burgeoning success can provide hope amidst a time of converging climate, economic, and health crises born of the capitalist world order. While we should hold our governments to account and expect them to support drastic climate change mitigation policies, including the pursuit of agroecology, the past several years have shown that we cannot wait for colonial, capitalist governments to set the pace of change required to combat these converging crises. Agroecology in Canada as a movement still has not reckoned with its role in the climate justice movement, how agroecologists can support Land Back and Indigenous sovereignty while farming in a colonial country, and how to adopt food justice frameworks that prioritize the food needs of marginalized communities. To spread the seeds of agroecology further, agroecologists and their allies can work in concert with the climate justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements to promote and adopt food systems that are rooted in community, equity, and food justice instead of the environmental and labour exploitation borne under the industrial international food system.