Avi Lewis Quotes
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One of the things that could be exciting about this next phase of Canadian politics is if we could maybe have co-leaders.
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The United States had eight years of Barack Obama. He made it incredibly clear that he was a right-wing Democrat. He cited Ronald Reagan lovingly in every stump speech for the last six months of the presidential 2008 campaign. And he made it clear that he was going to be a business-friendly Democratic president, and that he was not going to rock the neoliberal boat. And he didn't.
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I'm really changed by my research. This book ["This Changes Everything" ]is very different from what I set out to write.
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Catastrophic damage from climate-driven extreme weather is now an annual reality. The cost of not dealing with it will be much greater than if we try to pre-empt some of those disaster cleanups by actually investing in the shift now.
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The book and the film [This Changes Everything] fed into each other in ways that were compounding and very exciting. The pain was shared.
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I think people are losing that sense of security pretty fast, frankly.
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If you spend a lot of time with activists, as I have, they're just ordinary people who instead of Netflix are getting together in church basements and making posters or making phone calls doing organizing work. It really is about finding a community of other people.
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What we face in Canada are multiple overlapping crises. We have the climate crisis, which is screaming down on us - all of the predictions are coming true even faster than the scientists thought. We have the inequality crisis, where the Panama Papers are a great reminder that the one per cent have actually created their own economy. We still have the crisis of child poverty, which has never been dealt with despite decades of concerned words from politicians.
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I think Canada deserves a forthrightly left electoral alternative. I don't see the advantage for our democracy in having a number of parties crowded in the centre. The Liberals are experts at co-opting left language and framings during campaigns, and historically, we know they don't govern like that.
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The thing that our system is designed to do is keep us alone and isolated in our little consumer bubble. And the most revolutionary act of all might be finding a community of like-minded people where you can talk about these issues and figure out what to do together.
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Film 'This Changes Everything' is not a sad story. It's not a slit-your-wrists climate film. It's a story about people who are making change happen.
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I've always kind of hated films about climate change.
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So many people are on the front lines of this fossil fuel frenzy. It is infused with a sense of urgency.
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I personally feel very strongly that what it will take is not more disasters, it's that what it will take is a vision of the future that is better than our present.
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If you have a culture based on hunting and fishing and all the animals are disappearing and the fish are sick, then you can't live traditionally. Then your treaty is being violated. Obviously there are degrees of choice in terms of that decision to fight.
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If we could get proportional representation and open up roles for smaller parties in coalition governments, we could start intentionally breaking down the cult of personality that is one of the most distorting things about our electoral system in Canada. We had a constellation of social actors behind the Leap Manifesto. And we created something bigger than ourselves.
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Once you feel the desire to engage, think about what you're good at and what you can contribute. It's about breaking down the idea that there are activists and ordinary people.
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Find an organization, shoot them an email, call them up, find them on Facebook and say "Hey, I want to volunteer." And that first step could lead to a whole life of engagement. It could be a pretty exciting ride.
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I think that kind of urgency is what makes this stage of the climate movement really different from what it was even a few years ago when it was much more of the professionalized NGOs lobbying behind closed doors and maybe having a march now and then.
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We're dealing with a crisis of inequality, of joblessness, of underemployment.
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