Special election episode: Making sense of the Trump assaults and unpacking Canada’s ‘Shock Election’ (w/ Seth Klein & Naomi Klein)

In this special election episode, co-hosts Anjali Appadurai and Erin Blondeau interview siblings Naomi Klein and Seth Klein to discuss the current political climate in Canada leading up to the federal election, unpacking the nuances of a nationalistic response, the role of fossil fuel corporations, and the need for effective and transformative climate policies.

Seth and Naomi provide insights into the shock doctrine, right-wing populism, and what we’re hearing (and not hearing) from the main party leaders. The conversation emphasizes the importance of organizing for climate justice and the need for imaginative policy solutions. The speakers discuss the role of social movements in shaping political vision, the impact of neoliberalism on public imagination, and the question of strategic voting in this federal election.

The discussion also touches on the influence of conspiracy culture on climate action, the significance of Palestinian resistance and global solidarity, and the challenges of fostering internationalism in Canadian politics.

This episode aired on April 4 2025.

Credits:

Produced by Doug Hamilton-Evans, Emiko Newman, Erin Blondeau and Anjali Appadurai. Hosted by Anjali Appadurai and Erin Blondeau. Featuring Naomi Klein and Seth Klein. Music by Anjali Appadurai. Audio editing by Blue Light Studios. Artwork by Geoff Smith.

Transcript

Anjali Appadurai (00:05)
Hello and welcome back to Break in Case of Emergency, a podcast about mobilizing Canada for the climate crisis with audacious solutions rooted in justice and workers' rights. I'm Anjali Appadurai.

Erin Blondeau (00:19)
And I'm Erin Blondeau.

Anjali Appadurai (00:21)
And here we are. It has finally happened. We are in an election period and Canadians go to the polls on April 28th. So for the last two years, it looked like Pierre Pollievre and the Conservatives were a lock, riding high in the polls, exploiting anger about cost of living and the housing crisis, and of course, the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau. Now, Trudeau is out. Donald Trump is initiating a trade war and threatening Canada's sovereignty.

Mark Carney is in as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and he is the current Prime Minister. Nationalist patriotism is the political vibe right now and ideas of energy independence through zombie fossil fuel projects are rising up and percolating in the mainstream political discourse. To help us think through the Canadian election, our relationship with the United States and the world at large, and how to elevate climate, economic, and social justice in these times of crisis, we have two very special guests today. Naomi Klein is the co-director of the Center for Climate Justice and associate professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, as well as a filmmaker, activist, and author of massively influential books like The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, Capitalism Versus the Climate, and most recently, Doppelganger—books that our generation really found so influential that we basically grew up on. She's also the sister of our other guest, Seth Klein. Seth is the team lead at the Climate Emergency Unit, a columnist with Canada's National Observer, an adjunct professor with Simon Fraser University's Urban Studies Program, a board member for the BC Society for Policy Solutions, and author of A Good War, Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Crisis.

Welcome to both of you.

Seth Klein (02:16)
Hi. Good to be with you.

Naomi Klein (02:16)
Hey, this is fun.

Yeah. Glad you're doing this. I'm glad you're doing this podcast and helping us understand this moment.

Anjali Appadurai (02:26)
Yes, and thank you so much for being here with us. It's great to make it a family affair. Before we dive in, in the interest of transparency, it's only right that we disclose that Naomi's husband, Avi Lewis, is running as an NDP candidate in Vancouver Center and that our colleague at the Climate Emergency Unit, Bushra Asghar, is running as the NDP candidate for Mississauga-Streetsville. However, I do not think that this will hold us back from being critical about the NDP and all parties and candidates. All right, so let's jump into this moment here. The big conversation, I mean, as we said, nationalist patriotism and the elbows up fever is the vibe right now. And the biggest conversation is about tariffs. I've heard everything blamed on tariffs from the price of eggs to your foot pain.

And so that's the big conversation right now, but it's so much bigger than tariffs. We are now in what we're dubbing in honor of you, Naomi, the shock election. It's our first national election since the chaotic start of Trump's second term. And we're seeing a lot of things get rammed through, a lot of major sweeping changes coming from the world's greatest military powers at the border.

So can you help us unpack this moment? What is the nature of the shock that we're in right now?

Naomi Klein (03:58)
Yeah, it's big and I find I'm sort of torn between what Trump is doing in the United States and what Trump is doing globally because they're related but they're not exactly the same and then there's Canada's reaction to it. I think just focusing on Canada, we, I think we, many of us are shocked that there's a US president who is ripping up all kinds of agreements. mean, this is a sort of a violation of, many ways, the neoliberal economic order, the tariffs that we have opposed in the first place. So it's a little bit confusing because we don't want to just uncritically defend agreements that we opposed for many years. But the way he's doing it is, you know, I've called it a kind of a mafia polar world, right? Like it's not a multipolar world. It's this kind of

I think it's a return in some ways to the sort of great game era of colonial politics where the big powers just divide the world up between them based on pure force. And I think that's a way to understand Trump's sort of affinity for Putin, where it's just like, if you've got the nukes, if you've got the army, if you've got the raw force, you can do what you want around the world.

But I don't even think that that is exactly what we're dealing with when we're dealing with somebody like Trump or Musk, where it really is this kind there's this kind of mafia quality to it. And there's this kind of almost end game pillage to it, where I feel like they, I feel like this is the end of the road for the capitalist project in lots of ways. And now it's in a kind of a prepper mindset where things are going down and what they're trying to do, what these great powers are trying to do is sort of prepare for the shocks that they themselves have unleashed, right? The climate shocks, the migration shocks. And so they're fortressing and they're also stockpiling, right? So if we think about the way, you know, individuals respond to like the pandemic or a disaster, it's like, you want water, you know, you want supplies, you want canned goods. And I sort of feel like that's what Trump is doing, but like with the Great Lakes, right? Or with trade routes. that's the way I understand the sort of global map.

In Canada, know, like a moment of shock is a moment of vertigo, right? Like we thought we had one neighbor, we've ended up with another. The rules of the road are changing. The ground underneath our feet is shifting. And those are moments where we look for certainty. And so the flag is waving.

And we should fight back, we should absolutely fight back against this, but how do we fight back, right? And there's a way in which the flag, I was thinking like, it's almost like become like this weighted blanket where we, where it's like this, we don't have to think about anything complicated, right? It's just so simple. And the risk is that we fight this hyper nationalism with our own hyper nationalism. fight.

their oligarchy with our oligarchy, and just deliver our wish list to our multinational corporations who aren't loyal to us, they're loyal to their bottom lines just like the Americans' multinationals are. Yeah, so that's a little bit of how I see it.

Anjali Appadurai (07:35)
fascinating. I hadn't thought of it in terms of prepper mode, but it's true. There's this sort of extreme wealth hoarding that's happening right now. There's this sort of like cracked the code of wealth polarization and now they're sort of squirreling away their pile of gold. Yeah, so I just wanted to ask a little bit about this, the flag itself, you know, the

this moment of Canadian nationalism that we've seen. And just been thinking about how the flag has really been through the ringer over the past couple of years, being used as a symbol for, know, first it was this, the trucker convoy and the, the ultra-nationalists in that moment. And so then the sort of folks like us who are on the more progressive side are sort of like,

I don't want to be seen with the flag right now. This is a symbol of something that I'm not. And now suddenly it's, there's a Canada flag on everything that you buy and in every window of every house. So it's just been, it's the symbolism of the flag has just evolved so abruptly over the last couple of years. But we know that that is deeply linked with the fossil fuel.

industry here in Canada that the sort of petro-nationalism is a carefully constructed, I wouldn't call it a movement, but a culture that industry has cultivated. A culture, a national identity that is, that with oil and gas firmly at its center. And I wonder if you can speak a little bit to this moment where we're seeing that sort of come to life. We're seeing nationalism surface.

and we're seeing how much oil and gas is a part of

Naomi Klein (09:31)
Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing, as you said, all these zombie fossil fuel projects be dusted off, you know, in the name of fighting tariffs. I think the impulse to diversify our economy and address our extreme dependence on a single trading partner is a good impulse, but we're not diversifying it in the right way, right? I mean, we should be, you know, we don't have to be a resource colony. You know, we don't have to be a country that

is still primarily exporting raw resources with very little value added. And many of us have been making this argument for a very long time. It's been going on longer than I've been alive in Canada, for sure. But somehow, the weighted blanket approach, the sort of Canadian flag as amnesia is sort of sweeping all of that away and diversifying the economy means just selling.

LNG to Asia or, you know, finding more customers for our raw resources. So that doesn't have to be the case. I mean, I think that we have some control over this narrative. We don't need to defer to the oil and gas lobby. Yes, they're able to, you know, purchase the airwaves to get their message across, but we have movement power. And I think that this is a moment, know, moments of shock.

It's the reason why I've been studying it, you my whole sort of adult life is is that they things change, right? And they can change for the better or the worse, right? You know, when I wrote the shock doctrine, I was really struck. You know, the shock doctrine came out in 2007 for people who are familiar with it. And it's a sort of alternative history of neoliberalism told through shocks. So it tells the story of how sort of extreme libertarian economists like Hayek and Milton Friedman came to understand that they could only get their radical agenda advanced on the backs of crises and shocks. And so they used Chile after the Pinochet coup as a laboratory, but then, you know, they used economic crises, wars, natural disasters. You know, I talk about everything from, yeah, like the coups in Latin America to Hurricane Katrina.

So one of the things that I realized while studying this move, while studying Friedman, is that the whole thing was actually a response to them learning from the ways progressives had responded to crisis to introduce the New Deal and the post-World War II social safety net.

There was this letter that I found from Milton Friedman to Augusto Pinochet where he said that everything went wrong in your country as well as mine. In this period when people got the idea that you could, this is a quote, do good with other people's money. And so their shock doctrine was really a counter revolution to the ways that progressives had harnessed the shock of the Great Depression.

the market crash of 1929 and the shocks of the second world war and fascism to invest in the public good. So we don't need to just take it for granted that this shock is going to slide us into a fossil fuel extraction frenzy and an austerity frenzy. It doesn't have to, but we have to organize if we don't want that to be the outcome.

And this is where Seth's work is so relevant and why I was excited to be in conversation with him because he's excavated that history in Canada.

Erin Blondeau (13:20)
Yeah, thank you so much for that context, Naomi. so knowing this, like how do we stand up to Trump and all of those things, rather than capitulate to the nationalist framing that we're given as this solution, when we know it just benefits billionaires and the fossil fuel industry. And Seth, you recently wrote something for the National Observer that talks about how Canada should hit Trump where it hurts the most with an oil and gas export tax, for example. So Seth, what are...

Can you list off some other ways that we can actually stand up to Trump and this fascist moment that we're in?

Seth Klein (13:57)
Yeah, well, we definitely need to push back hard. mean, that's what you have to do with bullies and it's going to be a little painful. But just to say a little bit more about what you just that that particular solution around hitting Donald Trump where it hurts, which is oil and gas. I mean, we keep getting these indications from him, these little tells the fact that he has been floating that the tariff on oil and gas will be substantially less.

than the other tariffs he imposes. The fact that he's still very keen about the Keystone XL pipeline. These are tells. And if this is indeed a high stakes poker game, it would be the height of foolishness not to make use of a tell like that. And to my mind, that means we should be imposing an export tax on our oil and gas exports.

to the United States. This is in fact where our economies are most linked. And if, as everyone says, we need to delink from the US, this is where you do it. And part of how you can do that is bring in, say, a 15 % export tax on oil and gas exports. That could raise $25 billion a year. And use that money to leap into the transition that we need to...

not only to delink from the United States, but to delink from fossil fuels. So that's one piece of it. think, you know, if this is indeed a shock moment, and it is, know, shocks are disorienting for the public, but they're also disorienting for our leaders. And I think part of what we're witnessing from our own leaders, federal, provincial, is this kind of panicky response. And when you're in a panicky response, there's this tendency to

grasp for these sort of well-worn default options. particularly at the provincial level, governments gravitate back to budget austerity, know, tighten up the spending given all the economic uncertainty, which is precisely the wrong response. Or in this federal election, we've got all of the parties, you know, falling over themselves all in on tax cuts. Again, a default response that's extremely costly to the public treasury.

but where the benefit is so widely dispersed, including to the wealthy who don't need it, that any economic benefit to households and the overall economy is largely inconsequential. And as Naomi started to say, even worse, you get politicians reflexively turning to expediting approvals for new fossil fuel projects. And so you get this rejoinder that ceases deepening one crisis

as we wrestle in response to another. And all of these responses just feel so plagued by a failure of imagination and vision. And I think a lot of the public also feels this weird mismatch between the scope of the threat we're facing and the response that we're getting so far. You know, we're getting leaders, our own leaders who are, you know, they're talking tough.

We're all like in that, everyone's across the political spectrum saying we'll never be the 51st state. That's all great. But then when you look at the specific policy responses to this Trump attack on our economy and sovereignty, it feels incongruous with the threat that we're facing. Taking alcohol out of the liquor store, US alcohol out of the liquor stores, some counter tariffs.

speeding up permits, easing up applications for unemployment insurance, removing inter-provincial trade barriers. This is all good. The impact though is minimal. In the case of inter-provincial trade barriers, the benefits get greatly overstated. So we just need a lot more imagination. And part of it is, ironically,

Well, Trump, think Naomi's right in saying what Trump is up to is not the neoliberal project in some important ways it's at odds with the neoliberal project, but our own leaders are still stuck in a neoliberal mode. And so they're still stuck trying to incentivize our way to victory, you trapped in this model that's far too incremental, almost entirely reliant on the private sector.

I think we start to see this in Mark Carney's response. His response is like, it feels like half right. He talks about how Canada needs to be less reliant on the US and achieve, he's talking about the language of achieving economic autonomy. And he's used this great language of, he says, it's high time we build things we've never imagined at a speed we've never seen. I love that.

But again, this incongruity where it's mostly reliant on the private sector to do the actual building. And somehow, it's hard for him, I think, to break free of the banker's curse to kind of suck the lifeblood out of what's actually needed.

Naomi Klein (19:32)
Well, I also like, mean, we should hardly expect a banker, a lifelong banker to really be able to speak to what it is that makes Canada different from the United States. And frankly, I don't think the left is particularly good at talking about this precisely because we are so uncomfortable with nationalism. But I think that we can talk about it in ways that are not nationalistic, but are reflecting of the fact that in Canada,

uh... social movements the fact that we can one of the things that makes us different canada as we do have a third party don't just have a two party system we do have third parties that have exerted pressure on the two dominant parties and we have one public policy victories that our friends to the south are extremely jealous of right uh... and it's not about the flag it's about organizing uh... and and those victories are you know if we really

get drilled down into what it is that feels really threatening about becoming the 51st state for a lot of people. It's like, well, we have public health care in this country. We have public broadcasting in this country. Because it's a weird thing. Let's be honest. What Trump is saying, he's like, well, why don't we just erase this border here? We're basically the same. And in lots of ways, the differences between Canada are not as sharp as the differences between like

France and Italy. we don't, you know, I mean, with the exception of Quebec, we speak the same language. We barely have a different cuisine, you know? Like it really is these social public policy victories that make us different. And, and, and, and as a leftist, I, I, want to admit that it is tricky to talk to. Like when I, was living in the States at the first part of COVID, when COVID, when COVID hit, was living in New Jersey because I was teaching at Rutgers.

And I'll never forget, you know, in June 2020, what it felt like to get to Canada. You know, we flew in from Dallas because there were so few flights. We had to fly from Philly to Dallas and then Dallas to Vancouver, because that was the most direct way we could get there. And it was, it felt like one of those scenes out of

out of one of the sci-fi movies when people finally make it to Canada or whatever. And it's such a cliche, but it was real. Nobody in the States took our temperature, asked us if we had a plan for quarantining. Our pilot, our American Airlines pilot, was like, wear a mask, don't wear a mask, I don't care. That's what he said over the loudspeaker. And then we get to Vancouver and it's like, our temperature, what's our plan for self-isolating?

getting checked in on and it was it wasn't it's not about the flag it's about investing in public infrastructure and it it said to us you're cared for because we need to be we need to be honest that these public policies are an expression of our values and they change the culture of a nation and they have been systematically under threat for decades so now we're fighting for shreds right yeah but

Seth Klein (22:49)
This

is personal for us, Because our parents were American and actually immigrated to Canada twice. Once under duress and once by choice. The first time as war resistors during the Vietnam War, a war that Canada did not directly engage in. And the second time by choice, drawn back in particular

by public health care and by the National Film Board. These public institutions, as Naomi's saying, that were...

Naomi Klein (23:23)
flawed right that were never covered the whole country yeah exactly yeah

Anjali Appadurai (23:29)
Okay, so let's bring it back to this moment then, this election period that we're in. If public policy and these public institutions, flawed as they are, are the thing that differentiates us, and they are, you you see a lot of Americans who are visiting here who are just like, you know, I'm sorry and you...

You're lucky you have public health care. Given that and given that we are in this shock moment, is sort of this empire showing its soft belly and it could either be the fascists who make the changes or it could be us organizing from the bottom. Given we're in that moment and given that we have the leadership that we have now, it's Mark Carney right now and he is about to be tested in this election.

Seth, you spoke a little bit to this. Is he the man for this? know, he is, as you said, he's a banker. He talks about curbing the power of the market, but all his solutions seem to be rooted in allowing the market to take the reins and to deliver the solutions that we need, something that we know has not worked and has marked sort of the failure of the neoliberal project. Is that trust in the markets to deliver? And given that we have

these actual proactive, imaginative policy solutions on the table, what do you see as Carney's potential to actually pick up those policies and run with them? And what does that mean for climate, since we are the climate emergency unit? What has he signaled on climate and what does he seem likely to do? Knowing that climate is not separate from the economy. And maybe...

Maybe Seth, you can talk through Carney's climate promises. And then Naomi would be great to hear about Carney's international record, because he has this interesting international experience that Trudeau doesn't have.

Seth Klein (25:43)
Yeah, well, I first off, I dearly hope I love the fact that the polls are tightening and that, you know, a few months ago, it looked like we were facing a hard right, you know, right wing populist government under Pierre Poilievre as foregone conclusion. And the fact that we're not comes to me as a great relief. I do think Carney is substantially different and better.

And yet there's all kinds of things about him that made me worry. On climate specifically, he's somebody who at some level has a record where he clearly gets climate. He served as UN Special Envoy on climate action. He gets it in a way that Pierre Poilievre clearly doesn't get it. But when you look at Carney's climate plan,

in the leadership race spectacularly boring is how I would describe it. It doubles down on this what I feel is a failed approach to meaningfully bend the curve on our carbon pollution. Heavy emphasis on incentives to encourage households and businesses to do the right thing.

It's rooted in this deep and abiding faith in market-based solutions, a belief that if only the private sector had to properly account for and disclose its climate risks, everything would fall nicely into place. I don't believe that. I think that there's just this focus on these esoteric and technocratic policy options that fail to excite most voters.

risk alienating working people, which is precisely what's got us, has fueled the rise of the populist right. And just sort of lacking in, you know, it's ironic that part of the appeal of Carney right now in the face of Trump is I think people gravitate to this calm demeanor. And yet in the face of the existential threat of our lives,

It's just sort of weird that his response lacks a kind of passion and emotion about the urgency to confront this generational challenge. You know, there's nothing in his language about how this crisis poses this severe threat to the people and places that we love.

Erin Blondeau (28:25)
All right.

Naomi Klein (28:26)
Which would indicate

that he doesn't get it on climate. I mean, he doesn't deny climate change, but it's soft denialism because it's all still the market-based quote unquote solutions that aren't solutions that he knows more than anyone, right? Because he spearheaded this big voluntary getting banks to sign on to net zero targets. And not only were they

largely meaningless because they the same banks were continuing to invest massively in fossil fuels, but they were making these sort of greenwashing proclamations and signing on to this initiative that he was spearheading. then as soon as Trump came in, they all just dropped out, right? Which just shows that these voluntary measures are like he should know better than anyone.

That what we need are tough regulations and we need sanctions and there need to be consequences That said I agree with Seth That that it's very good news that it's looking like he may be poly of and you know, I did say this ahead of Trump's election when people were saying that they're all terrible. It doesn't make a difference, you know, I you know, I I

I understood why people felt that they could not vote for Democrats in the middle of a genocide. But my message was, do not tell yourself that it can't get worse. It absolutely can get worse. And it's getting so much worse. And I think what we need to really understand is that this is a global phenomenon. The right globally is Trumpism, is variations on Trumpism. So this is not an aberration.

whether it is in Latin America, in Argentina under Mele, now Marcos in the Philippines, Vox in Spain, the national rally in France, the face of the right is fascist. And this is, I think, part of the of end times moment that we're in. But we really do

You know that it's gripped by a kind of apocalyptic fever that we need to reckon with. So we must understand that whatever Pollievre is saying about standing up to Trump, he would imitate Trump in Canada and erase the differences. Like whether or not he sold us to Trump is almost irrelevant because he would do the same thing as Trump in Canada. Right.

Anjali Appadurai (31:11)
I guess, you know, it's the polls are showing that Carney's likely to win, but we know that, you know, Trump was aided by Elon Musk and the sort of billionaire oligarchy to win the election. We know that the global right, as you said, it has a common face and it's building a common culture and they all borrow from each other's playbooks. We saw Trump borrow heavily from Viktor Orbán's playbook in Hungary and...

We know that there's a lot of intel sharing. We know that there's election interference, things like that. Should we be discounting Pierre Pollievre? We know that he's going to follow that playbook very closely. Should we be discounting him despite the fact that he's dropping in the polls?

Seth Klein (31:55)
No, I don't think we should be discounting him. It's still, I mean at the time that we're recording this, it's still four weeks out and anything can happen. If we've learned anything in recent months, it's that things can change quickly. And, you know, a lot of people were caught by surprise by Trump's win. There is something going on in, in...

Outside the mainstream media in terms of how the populist right is reaching people and reaching young people in particular that can catch us by surprise. And so we still need to be worried about Pierre Pelliev and what's possible. And I think as a movement need to be warning people of the dangers that what's at stake on a whole bunch of fronts. On climate in particular, I think we need to be super clear like

a win by this guy would be a disaster. know, lots of ink has been spilled about Poliak's campaign to axe the carbon tax, but let's be clear, he was never just gunning for carbon pricing. He is going after the whole package.

you know, the oil and gas emissions cap, zero emission vehicle regulations, clean electricity regulations, the Sustainable Jobs Act, every piece of climate policy won over the last 10 years that has finally started to, you know, incrementally bend the curve would be out the window and take us massively backwards. And that's just on the climate front. mean, Naomi's already spoken to the ways in which he would simply bring the Trump playbook.

to Canada. think the fact that he's not making much of this during the election campaign, but until the writ was dropped, one of the most popular slogans at a conservative Pollievre rally was defund the CBC. so like with Trump and Musk, this idea of going after the mainstream media, especially going after the public broadcaster, because that's not how they reach people.

they're they're animating their base through their own media and that's how they want it

Erin Blondeau (34:15)
Yeah, so it sounds like we have Polievre, a right wing, maybe even far right politician. And then now we have Carney, who is right of Trudeau as well. Where is the NDP in all of this? At a time like this, it seems like we should be seeing grassroots working class mobilization, but it kind of seems like the NDP has not been able to build this. And climate is just seems to be completely absent as well.

But we know climate policies should actually be baked into everything, all policies. But we're not really seeing that. So where is the NDP in this and what is going on?

Seth Klein (34:55)
You wanna go first, Noam? Or do want me to go first?

Naomi Klein (34:59)
You go first.

Seth Klein (35:02)
I mean, this is ironic that, you know, for the last few elections, you know, the progressive vote was being claimed by the Trudeau liberals and the NDP and to a lesser extent, the Greens. In many ways, Mark Carney is to the right economically of Trudeau. And you'd think that this would be a gift for the NDP, that the space has been opened up for the NDP to do quite well. And yet, as you say, Aaron,

That is not what's happening. I think part of the answer is that the NDP is trapped in the same neoliberal frame as everybody else. And consequently, they are not proposing exciting policy ideas that would animate their base.

and their response feels similarly, if not equally in Congress with the crises that we're facing. And in that context, people are like, well, let's, you know, but you know, you rally around, the most likely person to prevent Pierre, put your poly of winning in our case. And that ends up being Mark Carney. And, know, so this is true federally. It's true provincially too.

It's why provincially so many NDP campaigns have not done particularly well. I I would say because those platforms lack inspiration.

Naomi Klein (36:44)
like a real vision for the country, right? And I think people feel that what they're hearing is kind of add-ons or like a tinkering around the edges, not an actual speaking to the whole, especially in contrast to with the United States and taking ownership over the fact that it's because of the interplay between

the the NDP and the governing parties because the NDP has never governed federally but still it is largely responsible for why we have universal health care. And so yes, Carney is to the right of Trudeau on economic policies and that is why you know a best case scenario is a minority government much like we have now where they're still being pushed by the NDP.

And I think people need to vote smart, right? I if we're not looking at a conservative landslide, it means that, you know, you can be less worried about splitting the vote and you can support strong NDP candidates. Obviously, I am biased because my husband is running. But I think we need climate champions.

Erin Blondeau (37:57)
Yeah, and given that, a bit of a controversial question I guess for some people, but should people be voting strategically then? You know, is lesser evilism the way to go in this election? And if people do decide that they want to vote strategically, what does that actually look like? I see a lot of people talking about, just vote liberal in every riding, but what do you guys think? Is that what we need to do?

Seth Klein (38:20)
A very important question.

Naomi Klein (38:25)
This is the point, that if Polievre is surging, like looking towards a sweep, which he is not, then that kind of logic might make sense. But he's not going to be winning in writings that are not conservative, you know, have never been conservative. So you have to be smart and think about what kind of pressure you want a liberal government to be.

Seth Klein (38:49)
Yeah, I I always feel people should vote strategically, but you should do so wisely and attune to the local context. think part of what the challenge always with strategic voting is people look at the national polls and they let that guide a strategic vote in their specific riding. But the reality is of our parliamentary system is it's 343 separate elections.

You know, every writing is different. And just because the national polls are saying one thing doesn't mean people need to not let that guide what a strategic vote looks like in their writing. I think we all should still be giving priority to preventing a Pierre Polievre win. But to Naomi's point, I think we're also going to feel some deep regret if

Carney emerges with the commanding majority, like a minority outcome would be the best. where you have a strong NDP incumbent or, and this is certainly true of Naomi's husband, Avi, an inspiring local candidate, that needs to inform your thinking. I mean, I was saying before, you know, how, you know,

the NDP hasn't done particularly well in a number of provincial elections and federally, that individual candidates often defy those larger trends precisely because they are inspiring.

Anjali Appadurai (40:33)
So speaking of inspiration and you talking about the NDP lacking a strong political vision that can inspire people in this moment, why do you think that very progressive leaders, very few progressive leaders in this country don't talk about the things that actually differentiate Canada? This idea of defending the public sphere, is it that

just neoliberalism has rotted our brains to this point where it's just completely infiltrated the culture and that's a sort of third rail. I know that there's all this, there's so much fear mongering about public spending in the popular discourse, in the political discourse right now, it's this sort of, this boogeyman, government spending, which the conservatives have very successfully weaponized and capitalized upon.

Why do you think that even someone who, Trudeau, at the height of his progressive signaling, was still not able to speak to protecting the things that make us different from the states? And what are the risks of that? Basically, what do you think about that? And I guess I'll throw it to Naomi first and then over to Seth.

Naomi Klein (41:54)
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that this is all on the political parties. I think that there's a real role for social movements, for civil society to be the force, the motor for that vision and eventually forcing the political parties to respond to it. And so I don't think that it's a secret that our movements have been in retreat.

really since COVID, particularly the climate movement, it has not recovered to anything close to where it was in 2019. I don't think that we should be thinking about it as a reboot project though, like as a, how do we get back to that place? I think we are in a different place. often think about Arundhati Roy saying that the pandemic is a portal, meaning it's gonna take us somewhere else.

And we have choices to make about what that place is, but we can't dilute ourselves into thinking that it's going to be the same place. And so I think we are somewhere new and we haven't yet mapped it. We haven't yet sort of figured out who we are in this place and what kinds of politics it demands. I think it demands coalitional politics, including difficult coalitional politics. know Erin, you've been doing some of that organizing locally.

like what it means to organize against this.

I mean, it's almost like, it really is, feels like almost like a death drive. If we look at what's going on in the States and what could come to Canada, mean, this wild recklessness in destroying public health, know, vaccines, clean air protections, air traffic control, like, it just just wild, right? But it does mean that...

I think it was a dream read brown who i heard say that the front lines are everywhere now right but that means that there need to be many many on ramps to the left you know to to to this sort of mass movement whatever you wanna call it that are accessible welcoming right that aren't like throwing up a million litmus test telling people they're not radical enough right so.

So how that's what we need to build. don't think it's just about saying, okay, the NDP isn't doing it. Why haven't they organized that? Like I think it is on them, but it's also on us.

Seth Klein (44:24)
Yeah, to your earlier point, Anjali, think neoliberalism has rotted all of our brains, not just our leaders, but also all of us as social movements. One of my mentors is this fellow, Alex Himmelfarb, who was the one left-wing clerk of the Privy Council we've ever had in Canada. And Alex says that the line he uses is that the most insidious legacy of 40 years of neoliberalism

Imagine having a clerk even say that. The most insidious legacy of 40 years of neoliberalism isn't the tax cuts or the spending cuts or the privatization or the deregulation. It's the sapping of our imagination and of our faith and our capacity to do great things together. When I'm meeting with political leaders, federally and provincially in the work we do with the Climate Emergency Unit, from people from different parties.

The thing that I am most struck by isn't that these are bad people or captured or malicious. What I most encounter is that failure of imagination. And, know, which is why in the face of a crisis, whether it's the climate crisis or the crisis now prompted by these Trump attacks, just to build on Naomi's quote of Arundhati Roy,

Progressive leaders need to not default into that panicking mode. They need to see it as a portal, as an opening to leap us into the new, into the economy and society that we've always known we've needed for some time. And back to our earlier conversation about what would those alternatives actually look like. The private sector is gonna have

some role to play in this transition. But if we're really going to expedite the transition to a made in Canada economy at speed and scale, a true green industrial strategy, then we're going to have to do a lot of it ourselves through public institutions and so-called crown corporations with brash direct investments in public infrastructure and Indigenous economic sovereignty projects and renewable energy and

and east-west electric power grid and high-speed rail and public zero emission vehicle manufacturing and zero emission nonprofit housing. That's how we're going to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels once and for all. that's where personally I find

these invocations of the World War II frame helpful because in World War II we actually created 22 new crown corporations to do exactly that. And so that is an opportunity to open up our imagination and think about what would that new generation of public corporations look like that might hasten our transition off fossil fuels and relocalize or repatriate manufacturing and

I can think of a whole list of what those might be. And we've got all kinds of assets at our disposal through existing Crown corporations where we could do that. There was an interesting piece by Fred Wilson and Robert Ternomas and the Winnipeg Free Press a few weeks ago pointing out that the corporate sector in Canada is currently sitting

on an extraordinary $727 billion in cash. And it was actually Mark Carney back in 2012 when he was still governor of the Bank of Canada who referred to all of that cash as dead money. Look, the last thing these corporations need is to be rewarded with more tax cuts. It makes so much more sense that that dead money needs to be pressed into service.

legislated back to work. And if a corporation isn't voluntarily reinvesting that money in the urgent task of repatriating our economy, we should conscript it through taxation, through taxes on windfall profits and wealth, and get that money to work.

Naomi Klein (48:59)
I would really say, Seth's research into the second world war, and I've done some of this around, for this changes everything as well, looking at the rations program and Victory Gardens in the US, It was so important that these programs be seen to be fair and to be cracking down on the wealthy, right? And we're doing the exact opposite once again, right? Handouts for elites and

You know what the problem is? This rallying around the flag, I'm worried it's short-lived and shallow. there isn't, I think if we want to build stamina for this and we really do need to build stamina, it has to be fair because Canadians are under a huge amount of economic stress. And I think that it won't hold for very long if this is a sham in this way, right?

I think that's a big part of it. know you want to say something, Seth. I just want to bring in another piece of this, which is, I think the biggest problem we face is that the parts of Canada that progressives are proud of are under severe threat, right? And we don't have national leaders who can forcefully defend them because they have been busily compromising for so long. We've seen the way.

Everybody has bought into this anti-migrant discourse, for instance, Xenophobia and hatred of migrants, fear of migrants is the rocket fuel of the right globally, right? And we need people, leaders who are welcoming migrants. It's like, yes, elbows out, arms out. Elbows up, arms out to each other. We need a spirit of holding each other, not letting each other fall in this moment.

And then the other piece of this is that it's not just about nationalism, it's about internationalism, right? You know, Seth's examples from the second world war where Canada rising to our responsibility to fight fascism globally, but also in the post war period building the international humanitarian law, we is under, you know, is also in tatters in shreds, in part because countries like Canada or countries including Canada have

you know, participated in their destruction in fast forward in the face of Israel's genocide. And now we're like, wait a minute, you mean like a strong country can just like invade their next door neighbor? aren't there laws to prevent this? And it's like, yeah, there used to be, but, we, exactly. Right. So I think that this is a big piece of the vision is, is that it, yes, it's about

Anjali Appadurai (51:45)
We wrote them.

Naomi Klein (51:52)
our self-sufficiency and diversification, it's also about our internationalism and joining forces with other countries in the hemisphere who are also dealing with this massive bully. mean, why aren't we in alliance with Panama and Mexico and Greenland and Denmark? why, like I haven't seen that much of that.

Anjali Appadurai (52:11)
this one's so juicy, and I have so much to ask you about that, Naomi. I want to throw it over to Seth first, and we're going to come back.

Naomi Klein (52:19)
Yeah

Seth Klein (52:19)
There was a lot of juicy stuff there. In fact, Naomi, that line you just had about elbows up, arms out, I think that could be the slogan of our time. And I just want to double back to your point about the need for people to understand and feel that this is fair. This is a key lesson out of our pandemic experience. That first year of the pandemic, we experienced this wild whiplash.

where we went from low social solidarity to a high point of social solidarity and then pissed that all away all in the space of a year. Why did that happen? I think a big chunk of it is those early months of the pandemic when we were all being our best selves and where the mantra from our leaders was we're all in this together, except it turns out we weren't. Some people were making terrible sacrifices and other people were making a killing.

and we saw this rampant profiteering in particular. And this is a key thing where the pandemic experience didn't learn an important lesson from World War II. One of the very first things our governments did in World War II was they brought in an excess profits tax so that we wouldn't have the kind of profiteering that we had in the First World War, protest profiteering that erode social solidarity, that shared spirit that we are in fact in this together.

So now, as we ask, as we try to rally as a population in the face of this threat to the South, you know, there's a wonderful re-emergence of, think, a collective social solidarity that we're witnessing with, you know, people buying Canadians and canceling trips to the U.S. and so on. We will lose it again quickly if people don't feel that this is fair, which is precisely why we, the last thing we

we needed was this stupid reversal from Carney on the capital gains exemption. We need wealth and windfall taxes along with an export tax on oil and gas exports right now more than ever to maintain that social solidarity.

Erin Blondeau (54:34)
Yeah, thanks Seth for that. I want to go back to something you were just talking about a couple of minutes ago, which is, you know, that we need radical imagination. And I completely agree. And it feels like our radical imagination is being taken up by the far right's conspiracy culture, like imposing all of these radical imaginary things on us. And so I guess I kind of wanted to bring it back to Naomi for a second and just

We were on a panel together a few months ago, which was great, and we talked all about conspiracy culture. And in This Changes Everything, you write about how the right understands the fundamentals of climate action better than progressives in a lot of ways. Because to actually do something, it'll take changing capitalism. And then in Doppelganger, you write about the mirror world, which is kind of where reality is flipped and something that I resonate with a lot.

So my question is, you know, in this mirror world that it feels like we're all navigating right now, especially. Are climate conspiracy theories an attempt to create a reality where the real impacts of climate change are just explained away by something else so that capitalism and ultimately colonialism can continue? And what can we do about this huge existential issue?

Naomi Klein (55:58)
Yeah, it is huge. Thanks for that. And it's just one of those issues we can't forget about because, you know, I haven't, I'm not sure what stories are being told about Carney, but I know that there's all kinds of wild conspiracies about him. And because we're all in our different, like, filter bubbles, we might be quite surprised. It can take us by surprise where a sort of a viral story takes hold.

But yeah, that's the role that conspiracies play in our culture. Like fantasies, right? I there are real conspiracies out there in the world, but here we're talking about things that are just patently untrue, that people believe are true, is they distract us from actually focusing on systemic change. And I think that they are very appealing when reality feels unbearable.

right? You know, there are refuge in lots of ways from realities that just feel impossible. So I don't know if that resonates with you, but I think that this is part of the cost of these climate policies that actually in many ways have offloaded the costs of transition onto working people and have allowed wealthy corporations to continue to make a killing.

And why we need, you know, I've started calling it eco populism. Like we really need climate policies that people tangibly understand are going to address the cost of living crisis, are going to make their present better. Not just the future less bad, but their present better, more affordable, more enjoyable, less stressful. you know, I, you know, or else we're just going to lose people. And we have, we have lost people.

and there hasn't really been an accounting for that.

Anjali Appadurai (57:59)
Yeah, we are certainly losing people and our movements, as you said, have not recovered since prior to the pandemic. And that is providing opportunity for so much of what is getting erased right now in terms of our public imagination and in our public domain. I want to sort of zoom back out again.

And this elbows up frame, I do love the elbows up arms out, but the fact of the matter is the sentiment, the vibe is elbows up, Canada first. And it's largely a meaningless thing, as you said, the nationalism is this kind of like theater that we all participate in that a powerful fascist like Trump or the sort of the global right

can sort of encourage us to participate in because it's this thin veil for what they're actually doing. But we all participate in it. Elbows Up is a refrain that is used by immigrants. Like my family, my uncles and aunties are waving the flag as well. They're proud to be here. This is their country now. And it's also used by white nationalists. And those are two very different things, two very different.

visions of the country, of what Canada means. And so zooming back out, an issue that was huge in the discourse, unfortunately has been dampened by the current nationalist fervor and the election is Palestine, right? And where is Palestine in all of this? We know that the genocide, or

Palestine itself, what's been happening there is this paradigm, is this a frame that you've been using, Naomi. Palestine is a paradigm, sort of makes it crystal clear for us how this genocide happening so far away from us reveals something absolutely rotten in the core of the system that we live in.

that signals a huge red flag for us here in the belly of the beast, that there's something that we need to address within our system, within our body politic here. So where is Palestine in this election? Why isn't it showing up as strongly? how does that figure into this moment?

I know that's a very broad question. I don't think we've heard Mark Carney actually address it very much. And in fact, he's hired a chief of staff who's a known Zionist. so that doesn't bode very well for this election.

Naomi Klein (1:01:02)
Yeah, I mean, think that it's, I mean, to be honest with you, I think it's part of the demoralization on the left and fracturing on the left because there's been so many, like movements have divided over it, right? Because there's been, I think, many failures of solidarity out of fear and pressure. But in this moment where

we need broad coalition. We have to figure out how to how to mend those rifts and learn from them. There's been this sort of catchphrase in progressive circles for a long time, progressive except Palestine, to speak to the way that you can meet people who are really progressive on labor and racial justice.

and climate, but they just shut down on Palestine and suddenly they're defending an ethno-state and war crimes. And now if we look at what is happening in the States, that has become the wedge to destroy the entire progressive world, right? Not to mention universities and science education. I mean, it's the wedge. The accusation, the false accusation.

of antisemitism because of the equation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism is now being used to, you know, as the pretext to pull funding from everything progressive in the same way that anti-communism was used as the wedge in the 1950s. So we need to understand this and, you know, I...

I was speaking earlier, the phrase, the Palestine is a paradigm, comes from Sherine Sekaili, who is a Palestinian historian at UC Santa Barbara, and she's gonna be coming to Vancouver to give a talk, and writes about...

She rejects the idea of Palestine as a laboratory, but she talks about it as a paradigm for survival at the end of the world, is the way she puts it, for survival in a time of cataclysm. And then I think also of Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, who responded to Israel's statements of intent of genocide in October 2023 as saying that, and he said, the poor of the world see their future in Gaza. And he said, this is global 1933.

And he linked it specifically with climate. And he said that the wealthy of this world, and he was clear that he was talking about the wealthy global North nations, but also the wealthy in the global South, were going to defend their modes of consumption so fiercely that they would allow the poor of the world to suffer the fate of Palestinians in Gaza.

you know, this prophecy is rapidly being fulfilled under the far right. And those are the stakes of our moment. And that's why it matters that Canada rally in this moment, not just inside, but internationally, to stand up for what is left of international humanitarian law. let's not forget that if we allow international multilateralism to disappear,

then there is no climate. There's no possibility for climate agreements, right? This is the infrastructure in which the UN summits take place. And we're all terribly disappointed in them. And we can't just say that we want to go back to the way things were a few years ago. No, we need to go back to basics and actually live up to the promise that never was, right? There never was real multilateralism. There was always a veto for the rich countries, right? And that is what needs to be challenged.

I think that's the kind of visionary imaginings that we need in this moment.

Anjali Appadurai (1:05:24)
Yeah, and I want to throw to Seth as well. mean, on a personal note and a political note, you both come from a family of peace activists. And around the time that your family was protesting the Vietnam War, what was the cultural norm around internationalism like here in Canada? I think that'd be really interesting for me to know because I wasn't in the country at that time.

How has that changed? Because we know that in order... One of my projects focuses on building support for Canada's international contributions on climate, for climate finance and for Canada to use its role in the G7 to support international financial reform, to contribute its fair share to the global South. And bringing that work into the climate movement really...

I've learned that there's very little public buy-in for that kind of work. And the lack of public buy-in provides cover for the government to completely shirk its responsibilities when it comes to our international obligations. yeah, both culturally and politically, I guess I would throw to you,

Seth Klein (1:06:42)
Your campaign is tough sell, that's for sure. And in some ways this speaks to your previous question about Palestine and Gaza. mean, there is this irony that the federal NDP position on Gaza has been, I would say, very good, surprisingly good compared to where they were not that long ago, and more aligned with the Canadian public. So you would think that

the NDP would be benefiting politically from the fact that they were in the right on Gaza, but they aren't. And in the same way that your work is such a tough sell, your internationalist work, I think all of this drives home the fact that regardless of the humanitarian assaults and harms around the world,

whether it be in Gaza or climate emergency disasters happening around the world, there is this tendency for particularly us as Canadians to prioritize the threats that are closer in time and closer geographically. Which is why that I'm quite liking this slogan, it's proposed around elbows up and arms out.

I mean, that's the invitation of this moment to, and it's always the challenge. How do we both speak to people's immediate real crises in their lives and still ask of them that they act in solidarity with people far away?

Anjali Appadurai (1:08:29)
And what was it like growing up? What was the vibe like?

Naomi Klein (1:08:32)
you

Seth Klein (1:08:34)
Well, by the way, to our specific case, Naomi's earlier point about how immigration figures into this, I alluded earlier to the fact that our parents came first time as war resistors during the Vietnam War. And this was in the late 1960s. They got landed immigrant status at the Montreal airport in 20 minutes and a kiss on both cheeks from the Francophone customs guard. Like that was the context then.

Naomi Klein (1:09:03)
And our dad got a place at McGill to finish his medical school. Wow. So I mean, that's the kind of thing that we should be demanding of Canadian universities. You know, there's been all of this publicity. Okay, I'm going to be a bit salty. But like, you know, there's been all this coverage of, you know, these very famous

men who study fascism, have gotten fancy jobs at University of Toronto, and this is being cast as like Canada, you know, standing up for against fascism. I'm sorry, those are very safe hires. You know, that's basically McGill doing, I mean, so that's basically U of T doing disaster capitalism, you know, like they're like, oh, okay, we'll just take advantage of this and get these famous guys from Yale to come to come to U of T. What about the international students who

are being or are facing kidnapping from the streets, we should be opening up our universities right now to midstream international students and say, come here, finish your degrees, we'll keep you safe. We should be saying that to international faculty. I've been thinking about the fact that our father, who was a deserter, he deserted the US military. He wasn't even just a draft dodger. That was not a slight against him to finish his residency at McGill.

So it is possible for Canadian universities to show some courage and some backbone and we should be demanding that. Because I can tell you as a university professor, international students enrich our classrooms so much and nowhere more so than when we're teaching climate. To be able to hear from Tibetans, to be able to hear from people from Nepal, the Philippines, who have lived experience of the most intense climate disasters.

And we're already losing that because of the xenophobia and backlash on international students who unfairly get blamed for the housing crisis. So we've already been losing that richness and we should be, we should be, we should really be welcoming them.

Anjali Appadurai (1:11:11)
Yeah, not to mention the abhorrent...

living conditions and economic conditions of international students when they come here. The sort of, the xenophobia and the air combined with the material lack of support. And you have international students, you know, who can't afford winter jackets, who have no resources to access, who are sleeping, you know, in apartments where these predatory landlords are giving you a roach-infested corner of a living room, along with eight other people.

that kind of thing as well. Yeah, I think that's a huge opportunity for universities. Yeah, and it's, you know, it was the anti-war movement and then, you know, at the turn of the, in the 90s, we had the anti-WTO movement, the Battle of Seattle, this sort of anti-globalization movement where there were real coalitions, real movements here that...

were internationalist in nature that had partnerships with networks and movements around the world to be, and were able to articulate the dangers of globalization at the time. Fighting against the very trade agreements, ironically, that we are now elbows up defending now. It's just this strange mirror world poetry. Yeah, so.

Naomi Klein (1:12:39)
it's coming back some of it's coming back that internationalism yeah

Anjali Appadurai (1:12:43)
I hope so, and I think Palestine was a moment for that to come back. think, you know, even now we have a new collective in Vancouver that's focused on international, internationalist movements and internationalist demands and educating us about the movements that have shaped leftist politics around the world. Because I think Palestine made a lot of people realize that we knew nothing.

about the dynamics in the Middle East, about the political dynamics of Palestine itself. So I hope that that was a catalyst point. Now, bringing it back down, back to this election, this shock election, and speaking of climate, we've seen Mark Carney, he's had all these international posts. He's been with the Bank of England.

He was the UN special envoy on climate action. I've seen him and Seth has seen him in a room at the COP listening intently to Mia Motley, who's this sort of fiery prime minister of Barbados who talks about these massive, imaginative global economic measures that we could take to unlock massive amounts of climate finance for the global South. She talks about climate quantitative easing. She talks about financial architecture reform.

And we've seen Carney in those rooms listening and understanding. He's heard the speeches from the leaders of developing nations. He knows the barriers to rapid global climate action. We know that he gets it. So do you think, I mean, what's the opportunity that you see for him here? Assuming that he wins, let's just assume that he's gonna be the prime minister.

Erin Blondeau (1:14:27)
Do

Anjali Appadurai (1:14:39)
And I dare have a little hope, but I have a tiny bit of hope.

Naomi Klein (1:14:46)
I'd rather I'd rather push him. I'll tell you Try to push him than poly have I mean, there's no pushing poly at yeah, I think we'd see a very Accelerated criminalization of activism of all forms including Including climate activism. I mean we've seen some of this in the UK, right? This huge lawsuit in in the US against Greenpeace for where where they're being slapped with

you know hundreds of millions of dollars and and and the criminalization of solidarity with Palestine, right? That's the future that we would be looking at with poly of so we really are I mean, it's become a cliche but we are voting for the terrain on which we're gonna fight right and and and I think you know what you're saying Anjali about about the fact that he does bring this international

experience in the climate realm, it's something to work with.

Seth Klein (1:15:50)
There's

something to work with. It's interesting, at the risk of being Pollyanna, I mean, I had said previously that Carney is to the right of Trudeau, but on this file specifically, this international climate file and the work that you do, Anjali, around the need for a fair shares program for Canada, we could find more receptivity with Carney than we've had previously.

Anjali Appadurai (1:16:21)
That's good to know. you're right. will, on that front, that's, Connie is more of the opponent that we want to have, the person that we want to be pushing for the next couple of years. So we are at the top of the hour and it has been a wide ranging conversation. You know, we've gone from Canada to the world and back.

I just want to close, I think you've given us some really, really great pointers for us as the climate movement and the places that we need to dig into as a movement and the things that we need to organize around as a movement. So thank you for that. Let's end on a light note. We have the Klein siblings here with us today. What are family dinners like for you? You both do such important work. How do you?

work together. There's such an interesting symbiosis between the two of you. Yeah, what's the dinner table like?

Seth Klein (1:17:23)
I'm sure it's insufferable to people. No, I mean, well, we share a lot, as you can see, and we're both married to people who are of a similar vein, except they're both politicians or, in case of Avi, aspiring to be. And I'm married to somebody who is now a minister in the NDP government of BC. I think that tells you that our spouses have better people skills than we do.

if you ask me to control side about those two conversations he would say there's no boring all they talk about its politics

Anjali Appadurai (1:18:01)
Who teases who more?

Naomi Klein (1:18:06)
We all tease Seth. Aww.

Anjali Appadurai (1:18:10)
You know, as the eldest, I get it.

Naomi Klein (1:18:12)
We call him the plan man because he's always planning very, very far in advance and very meticulously. That's my son's nickname for him.

Seth Klein (1:18:22)
I'm a curse.

Anjali Appadurai (1:18:23)
I like that. When you were writing The Shock Doctrine, Naomi, you've spoken about how Seth was kind of your economic advisor.

Naomi Klein (1:18:33)
Yeah,

yeah.

Anjali Appadurai (1:18:36)
Is that still the case?

Naomi Klein (1:18:38)
I used to be really, really nervous when there was anything to do with numbers. Because I came more from writing about culture. And Nologo was like a combination of writing about culture, but also writing about economics. So I used to rely on Seth a lot more. And I've gradually gotten my confidence up. But I feel like we've been in an unending conversation on this topic. And it's been fun as our

our works have become more in conversation with each other and we feel very compatible for this moment, just in the sense that I do have this background in mapping these moments of shock. But the big lesson of this research is you've got to have your own plan. You have to know what you want. You can't just oppose what's being imposed upon you. You've got to fight back with your own plan.

and sets the plan man. I mean, we don't call him that for nothing. He's the man with the plan.

Anjali Appadurai (1:19:42)
Absolutely. And at the CEU, that's the plan that we're trying to forward in the world. So thank you for that, Seth. We're so grateful for your plan.

Naomi Klein (1:19:51)
You can call him the plan man too if you want.

Anjali Appadurai (1:19:53)
Okay,

thanks. I really will.

Erin Blondeau (1:19:54)
You

Naomi Klein (1:19:55)
You

Erin Blondeau (1:19:56)
have been damned.

Anjali Appadurai (1:20:01)
Thank you so much for joining us. We're so grateful for your leadership, for your vision, for your plans, and for you articulating this moment to us.

Naomi Klein (1:20:11)
You both are so brilliant. love to talk with you. Yeah. Thank you. Have a great day.

Erin Blondeau (1:20:17)
Thanks so much for coming on. Bye.

Naomi Klein (1:20:19)
Thank

you. Bye.

Erin Blondeau (1:20:21)
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Break in Case of Emergency. And a huge thank you to my colleague and friend, Anjali Appadurai, for co-hosting today's episode with me, Erin Blondeau. And so much gratitude for Naomi Klein and Seth Klein joining us today to lay down some important context as we head into the federal election. If you liked what you heard, please make sure to subscribe to Break in Case of Emergency, give us a rating, and send to a friend. Thanks everyone, until next time.