How student movements transformed the climate narrative in Quebec.
On Sept. 26, 2019, the streets of Montreal were flooded with colorful blue planet signs and urgent calls to action. Half a million people wearing blue and green makeup screamed, sang and danced to pressure the government to act against climate change.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg led the largest protest in Quebec history, with teenage activists as her bodyguards. “We held on by the hands, arms in hooks to form a circle around her. We were also in the middle of a procession of Indigenous delegations. That was special,” activist Albert Lalonde recalled.
Lalonde has been at the root of student-led climate activism in Montreal since 2019. Acting as Thunberg’s bodyguard on that sunny day represented the culmination of a year-long climate mobilization.
“There was a kind of richness, a moment of collective education. There was an incredible force to that,” Lalonde recalled.
Half a million people attended this march. This year’s climate protest in September, led by the anti-capitalist group Rage Climatique, gathered only 1,500 protestors.
In 2019, Lalonde co-founded La Coalition Étudiante pour un Virage Environnemental et Social (CEVES), a non-hierarchical group uniting climate activist groups across Quebec. The CEVES transcended the traditional normative structure of unions by organically rallying individuals around the same values: acting quickly through direct actions and taking responsibilities for the environment.
For spring 2020, the CEVES had planned a full Transition Week strike to engage even more people.
And then, COVID-19 hit.
The uniting strength of the CEVES’s non-hierarchical structure became its weakness. Students couldn’t gather anymore, and the movement lost momentum.
Last October, the CEVES in Montreal announced its dissolution.
That same month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the world is going in the wrong direction to keep global warming below a 1.5°C increase.
In November, the +2°C critical warning threshold was surpassed for the first time. A symbol, as states had sworn not to exceed the +2°C during the Paris Agreement in 2015. A federal audit also declared that Canada is not on track to meet the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan.
The COP28, which will take place at the end of November, will discuss the loss and damage created by the boiling era. This is a term recently used by the United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres, who said: “Global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.”
In light of these events, Louis Couillard, one of the first members of the group La Planète s’invite à l’Université, believes renewed mobilization is necessary. “The government sees that, in 2019, we were half a million in the street. Today there are maybe 3,000. We need to put pressure again,” he said.
La Planète s’invite à l’Université was created in early 2019, uniting students from Université de Montréal, McGill, Concordia and UQAM around a desire to act against climate change.
Together, they urged their institutions to implement significant environmental measures, such as cutting fuel investments, implementing measures to cut methane and carbon emissions, and co-creating an awareness program about the climate crisis.
According to Couillard, these demands were ambitious. “Today, if you really look at it from a completely mathematical point of view, have our objectives been achieved? No,” he said.
Before co-creating the CEVES, Albert Lalonde started school strikes and walk-out early 2019 through Pour Le Futur Mtl, which echoed Greta Thunberg’s worldwide movement, Fridays For Future.
Lalonde felt that the government didn’t hear the warning sent by the student movement momentum, and that it instead used the call as a political recuperation.
Lalonde cited the federal government’s “2 billion trees” program, which was recently criticized for skewing their calculations of the trees planted. According to Lalonde, this feeds into a pattern of governmental hypocrisy around environmental action.
“The government declared a climate emergency one day, yes, and voted to buy back the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion the next day, within a 24-hour window,” they said.
Sebastien Jodoin, an environmental lawyer and professor at McGill, took part in the ENvironnement JEUnesse (ENJEU) lawsuit against Canada in 2019, aiming to represent Quebecers under 35 who were directly impacted by the lack of government measures against the climate crisis.
Two years later, the Quebec Court ruled against them. “It is a very disappointing decision,” Jodoin said. “It is contrary to everything we know from research, which shows the disproportionate impacts of climate change on young people.” Similar lawsuits are currently underway in Ontario.
Through successes and defeats, the student coalition ignited the environmental consciousness and deeply changed the media and political narrative. However, “this has become green economic development,” Couillard said. “That’s not at all how we wanted it to go.”
This “green economic development” is a greenwashing narrative that gives unearned environmental credit to political decisions and corporations. During the pandemic, La Planète s’invite à l’Université and the CEVES re-focused their messages toward criticism of capitalism and recognition of social issues.
Lalonde recounted the Gazoduc blockage in British-Columbia by the CEVES. “If there is no more propane supply because we block the trains, that’s a win,” Lalonde said. This event in co-mobilization with the Land Defenders Wet’suwet’en led to the Memorandum of Understanding signature that recognized and legalized the hereditary rights of Wet’suwet’en Chiefs in British-Columbia.
That event was a significant turning point in the message of the CEVES. “We really wanted to bring the imperative of this transition outside of capitalism,” Lalonde said, explaining that climate justice cannot be discussed without social justice. “The communities most vulnerable to the system are those who suffer the most.”
Couillard, who is now working for Greenpeace, emphasized the importance of students remaining active and voicing their concerns through mobilization. His optimism goes to the Coalition de Résistance pour l’Unité Étudiante Syndicale (CRUES), an inter-university student union created this year with strong social and environmental values.
However, he believes environmental activists have to collaborate on a bigger scale, through three levels of mobilization: students clubs, civil unions and larger NGOs. He thinks that bigger NGOs have the responsibility to help Indigenous groups and student movements to gain knowledge and independence.
Lalonde, now the communicator and events coordinator at David Suzuki Federation, learned from the successes and failures of the CEVES to create Horizon Commun. This project is slowly being launched after three years of incubation. It aims to empower regional communities, particularly Indigenous nations, with independent political structures. The initiative seeks to reshape social organization with climate-merging measures.
For environmental lawyer Jodoin, these social ideals aren’t realistic for the general society.
“Social change takes a lot of time, we don’t have that much time to solve the problem,” he said.
Jodoin sees the climate dilemma in a more pragmatic way, where people have to act at the individual level through their own financial and physical capacities. For him, technology, geo-engineering projects or innovative businesses are part of the solution. Jodoin thinks anti-capitalist speeches and grassroot activism are important, but not enough. “It will continue to play its role, but there are other initiatives that must be developed at the same time.”