Break In Case of Emergency

Emergency Marker 3: Make It Mandatory (w/ Dr. Melissa Lem & Seth Klein)

• Climate Emergency Unit

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In Episode 3, the series confronts a critical shift: moving from voluntary climate action to mandatory rules that match the scale of the crisis. Erin Blondeau and Seth Klein speak with Dr. Melissa Lem, whose experience as a family physician brings urgency and clarity to the conversation. Reflecting on the deadly 2021 heat dome, they discuss mandatory measures like banning fossil fuel advertising and phasing out gas in new buildings. They also highlight the power of community-led responses and the growing leadership of health professionals calling for decisive action. This episode underscores that voluntary approaches are no match for an emergency.

This episode was recorded on August 26, 2025, when entering forests in Nova Scotia was banned while severe forest fires burned through the province.

Links & references:

More on the 6 Markers of the Climate Emergency:

Credits:
Produced by Erin Blondeau and Doug Hamilton-Evans. Written and hosted by Erin Blondeau. Music by Anjali Appadurai. Audio editing by Blue Light Studios. Artwork by Geoff Smith.

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 your host. Erin Blondeau, and this episode is part of a special series of break in case of emergency. Over the course of six episodes, we are breaking down the climate emergency unit's guiding framework, our six markers of climate emergency. We will be exploring what it means when our governments shift into genuine emergency mode, and what it looks like when our leaders truly understand the crises to be the emergencies that they are and act accordingly. In today's episode, we are digging into marker number three, which is shifting from voluntary and incentive based policies to mandatory measures. And for our conversation today, we are very excited to be joined by Dr Melissa Lem. Melissa is a Vancouver family physician and the president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the environment, also known as cape, and a clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of nature and public health, and she's won many awards for her leadership and advocacy, and she's also a great friend and ally of the climate emergency unit. We are so grateful and excited to have her here to share her expertise with us. Hi, Melissa, so glad to have you. 


Thanks so much, Erin. And likewise,

and we're also joined by Seth Klein. Seth is the team lead and the Director of Strategy here at the climate emergency unit. He is the author of a good war mobilizing Canada for the climate emergency, and he has spent many years as the director of a progressive Think Tank and currently serves on the board of the BC society for policy solutions. Hi, Seth, how are you?

Hi, Erin.

So to get more context for our listeners about the six markers of climate emergency. We do suggest going back to marker number one of this series to get a background, or we have also recorded an overview episode on March 15, 2025 but as a quick synopsis, we believe that it's not too late to change the course on the climate emergency, but only if we embrace the type of transformative change that we haven't seen since the Second World War and to a lesser extent, the pandemic. We needed extraordinary measures to confront fascism, and we need audacious change now to confront the climate crisis. Our six markers of emergency framework is a way to understand if an institution or a government is acting in genuine emergency mode, and today we are discussing marker number three, which might be the most controversial one, as it does wrestle with the thorny issues of mandates. I know a lot of people have feelings about mandates. Melissa really is the perfect guest for this, given the historic parallels between emergency mandates and health mandates. And I do love a good controversy, so let's just get into it. And again, marker number three is shift from voluntary and incentive based policies to mandatory measures as needed. So for decades, we have accomplished very little when it comes to actually reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Canada continues to pursue new extractivists and pipeline projects, mining for minerals in other countries, on indigenous land, and most recently, upping our military spending, despite military and war contributing greatly to the climate crisis. And one perspective that we don't often hear about is the impact of climate change on our health. So Melissa, I want to turn to you first. And first of all, congratulations, you won the 2024 Canadian eco Hero Award. So that is really awesome. Congrats on that. And I wanted to ask you, as a physician, seeing these impacts of the climate crisis on people's health daily, just how bad are things getting, and why did you decide to focus on the interconnection between planetary health and public health?

Well, first of all, thanks, Erin. I want to give a quick shout out to planet in focus Film Festival. For that award, it is one of Canada's best International Environmental film festivals, and that kind of storytelling that hits the head and the heart at the same time is such an important way of motivating us to do that work that needs doing. And the 2025 festival is happening October 21 26 so be there. But in terms of your question about just how bad it's getting, we we're seeing everything scientists predicted and more. We all live on the west coast of Canada, and all three of us in this conversation, and we, we all have lived experience with the health effects of the climate crisis, and I think 2021 will stand out. Will stand out to everyone in this province as the year when BC kind of lost its innocence on the climate emergency, when the health impacts of the climate crisis became impossible to ignore. It started with the 2021 heat dome that was. The worst mass casualty event in Canadian history. It killed over 600 people in five days. I saw more heat illness cases than I ever had in my entire career, and I heard from my colleagues who were working in the ER those days that they were the worst shifts they had ever experienced in their lives. They were literally running from room to room, intubating patients who were unconscious and having seizures from heat stroke. And in addition to this toll on human life, there were also major psychological impacts on frontline workers. We go into this job wanting to save lives, and that feeling of profound helplessness and seeing so much death and heat injury created not only moral distress, because how could our political leaders be letting this happen, but also lots of anxiety and depression and PTSD on a personal level? And then year after year, we've had these record breaking wildfires that fill the air with deadly smoke that's been linked to higher rates of lung cancer, brain tumors, heart disease, lung disease and birth defects and also extreme flooding events that cut communities off from essential health care. The Canadian climate Institute estimates that if we don't rapidly draw down our emissions, that by mid century, this is only a couple of decades away, and I'm still going to be working as a doctor, then we are going to be seeing an additional $110 billion per year cost in health care because of climate change. Our health care system is already sitting on the razor's edge in terms of funding and being able to deliver quality and timely patient care, and I don't even want to think about what our health care system is going to look like if we don't treat climate change like an emergency. So that's why I've decided to focus on the interconnection between public health and planetary health, and it's something I think about every day, and this is why I do something every day off the side of my desk. By the way, my work with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the environment is 100% volunteer to try to catalyze the action that we need to take. Only 20% of our health status in Canada comes from what I and my colleagues do in the healthcare system, and the other 80% relies on the social determinants of health like housing and food security, and without stable ecological determinants of health like clean air, clean water and intact forest and ecosystems that 80% starts to collapse. So that's why I've been focusing on these interconnections for about 15 years of my career. Now it's because I can have a way bigger impact on my patient's health by changing policy and public and government opinion outside of my clinic than focusing my work only on clinical medicine. Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss are they are my lane, because they affect the health of my patients.

Thank you so much for sharing that. And you know, the heat the heat dome is just such a huge example. I remember the heat dome and how scary it really was. We didn't have an air conditioner, so we, like our family, we just huddled down in the living room with fans pointed at us just to try to survive those few days, and I can only imagine how horrifying that would have been. And Seth, you in a good war, you talk about emergencies as well, and you argue that we need to treat the climate crisis the same way that we treated another emergency, which was the Second World War. And in this case, we're talking about mandating regulations rather than incentivizing them to meet this emergency. How do you know that something like this could work? Is there a historic precedent for this?

Yeah, there's actually a few precedents. Let me just start by saying how great it is to be doing this with Melissa, who is a climate hero to a lot of us that I'm proud to counter among among my friends? Yeah, when you look first of all, just to take a step back, when you look at our efforts over the last few decades to actually tackle the climate emergency, part of what is so frustrating is that really the best we've managed to do is flat line, our emissions, little bit of bending of the curve, just in the last couple of years. But that's really the best we have to show for all of our efforts. Why is that? And I think that a big reason why we have made as little progress as a country as we have is because, when you survey our climate policies to date, federal and provincial, one of the things that they almost all have in common is they're voluntary. We are we are stuck in an approach where we are trying to incentivize our way to victory. You know, we send price signals and give tax credit and we encourage and we cajole, but what we haven't done is actually require, and when you are in an emergency, a genuine emergency, governments sometimes have to actually require certain behaviors. So that was certainly true. In the Second World War. It was also more recently true in the first year of the pandemic, where we had mandates for masking we had mandates for for vaccinations, because sometimes we put certain restrictions on absolute freedoms in order to protect to the common good. That's just part of the compromise of living in a society where we take care of one another. My argument, though, is that if our approach is simply about voluntary incentivization, that this is no way to prosecute the fight of our lives, and that it will ultimately be unsuccessful, and that there are lessons to be learned from both the covid experience and the World War Two experience about how to go about adopting mandatory measures as needed in a way to actually get the job done. And that's why, in our work with the climate emergency unit, we consider it one of our six markers of emergency.

Yeah, and Seth, I guess, just to kind of flip that question around, and this also goes to you as well, Melissa, but in your decades of experience, Seth, with public policy and World War Two history and climate justice and Melissa and your experience as a physician and a public health expert, Have there ever been incremental measures or incentivization that has worked when it's come to things as dire as health of the humanity and health of humanity and the planet? Why are you advocating for brash emergency response rather than incremental responses, like I'm thinking about policies that might, you know, make change over a longer period of time. Why does it require an emergency response?

The fact is, when you're faced with a public health crisis, which the climate emergency is, the World Health Organization says that climate change is the greatest threat to public health of the 21st Century. It it's completely indefensible for decision makers who are tasked with protecting our health and well being to sit back, back and punt climate goals to years later and keep approving fossil fuel projects like LNG Canada and the prgt pipeline and going back to the covid 19 pandemic, just look what happened in 2020 within one to two weeks of the very first case being identified in Canada, the federal government mobilized $1 billion to keep people safe at home, to supply frontline workers with PPE, to ramp up monitoring by hundreds of millions of dollars, and multiple provinces declared a state of emergency, and no one batted an eye. This is what a responsible government does in the face of an immediate threat. They act immediately to legislate broad measures across society that will protect everyone. And I think we can take massive lessons and insight from how the federal government responded to the pandemic, which teach us that it is possible to take climate action now and on a broad scale, because our health and our healthcare system will pay the price of impacts from extreme heat and air pollution and mental health fallout if we don't.

And I think Erin, it's not that incremental measures or voluntary measures have no effect. They do have some effect. It's simply that that effect is insufficient, that we don't hit speed and scale the way we need to in an emergency when everything is just left to voluntary adoption. It's certainly not what we did in World War Two, and we would have had a different outcome if that had been our approach, and it would have you know, I think when you look at Canada's record during the pandemic, it ranks among the better ones in the world in terms of the death rate, and a chunk of that is because we did have mandatory measures. Now, it's not that they weren't without controversy, and it's not that these things are always unanimous. In fact, they're never unanimous, including in the war, including, you know, there's always an anti social rump of opinion that that is strongly opposed to this stuff. But in the main, that's not what happens. In fact, when you if we all remember back to the early months of the pandemic, it was actually the public ahead of our politicians saying, make it mandatory. Make it mandatory. Now, why did we get that response? I think it's because, in the main most of us actually want to do the right thing. We care about our neighbors, our fellow citizens. We want to do the right thing, but, but it's also the case that nobody wants to be a chump right nobody wants to do the right thing, but then feel that their efforts and best efforts are undermined because their neighbors aren't and are undoing all of their good work. That's that's the great thing about man. Detroit measures is you're able to do the right thing, and know that your neighbor is also going to have to do the right thing, and that by so doing, you get a collective response that actually gets the job done. But as I said before, it's never unanimous, and there's always some hesitation, particularly among political leaders. Just to give you an example from from the Second World War. At the beginning of the Second World War, the governments of Canada, the US, the UK, were all very nervous that they might have to bring in rationing, which is, of course, a form of mandatory measures. They were afraid that if they had to do that, they would experience a kind of popular revolt. But as the war progressed, they found that they had no choice. They felt compelled to institute household rationing. But then, in defiance of those expectations, those policies ended up being extremely popular when polling was done at the end of the war in Canada and in those other countries, they found rationing to be one of the most popular things that the government did. Again, it wasn't unanimous. There were always black market. There were people trying to get around the rules, but most of us, at the time actually embraced it. And they embraced it because, as I say, there was that feeling like I'm going to do right? I'm going to know that everybody else is going to do right. So I'm going to know that it's fair, that it's equitable, that the rich are going to have to do it just like the poor in the middle, in the middle class. And so it's sort of equalizing in that way. And it becomes a way in which, when in an emergency, we're invoking that spirit that everyone has to do their bit, that everybody gets to do their bit.

Yeah, and I want to go back to something that Melissa was just touching on a little bit, and maybe we can go, like, a little bit deeper into other examples of times when government regulations maybe were like taboo or, you know, had some controversy to them, but then they became the norm after a while. So I'm thinking about public health mandates, like when seat belts were required. And it's really funny now to kind of like, look back on these, like, historic videos of people who were like, protesting seat belt laws. Or, you know, when smoking was allowed, like in restaurants or whatever. And there'd be like a non smoking section, a smoking section, which is really funny, because you're indoors, and that smoke doesn't work that way. And then there's also things like food safety around foods like raw milk, which also kind of a contemporary example, because I see this resurgence of people wanting to drink raw milk, for example. So I'm wondering if maybe we can go a little deeper there and see, are there any lessons that we can take from regulating things like smoking and food safety in terms of creating climate mandates when something has the potential to create harm to human health on a huge scale, like you mentioned, motor vehicle accidents, smoking and contaminated food, governments should be regulating them, and the same goes for carbon pollution from fossil fuels. Regulations make sustainable actions the easiest choice. They change social norms. They shift our behavior and investments by making those harmful activities inconvenient and expensive and stigmatized. So instead of having to educate every individual person to make these health friendly choices on their own, public health mandates make them part of our everyday lives. And like you mentioned, smoking bans make it make it a lot more difficult to smoke in public these days, climate policies should make it a lot more difficult to pollute in public food safety regulations, let's take that example. They integrate standards along every step of the supply chain. Climate regulations should also integrate sustainability practices into every single sector along every step of the chain, from where resource or resources are extracted or harvested all the way to where the end products arrive in our homes and in our businesses. So in the end, policies drive investment and behavior education about the climate emergency, like what we're doing right now is really important, but it's not enough. We need policy changes that make healthy choices easier, that remove social license for oil and gas polluters to keep harming our health and and also to make sure that these regulations last in the long run.

I think too, there's like, there's a natural evolution to these things. And Erin, I love your examples, because, I mean, look, I'm a little older than you too. I'm a child of the 70s, so I remember when seat belts were made mandatory. And then sometime later, I remember when smoking was banned in bars and restaurants and when these rules first came into being. So first of all, you get the early period where it really is about education and voluntary advocacy and that kind of thing. And then you get enough of the public that's calling for these things. That a government finds the courage to just make it the law, and when it's first introduced again, because I remember it, people were up in arms. They thought mandatory seat belt rules were this incredible infringement on their civil liberties. You know, I remember when the bars and restaurants thought that those smoking bans were going to devastate the industry and wipe them all out, and the airways were filled with this stuff, but the government stuck to their guns. They did it, and it's remarkable how quickly you know, in the space of months, if not weeks, that it just becomes normalized, and nobody would consider going back on those things. And that happened pretty fast, yeah.

And Seth, sorry for referring to your childhood as like a historic time, but yeah, maybe we can switch gears for a second and talk a little bit about our joint campaigns that cape and the climate emergency unit have worked on, because obviously it's very relevant. So there are two specific policies that relate to marker three, which is banning natural gas in new buildings, and then the other one is banning fossil fuel advertising. So Melissa as Cape president, you've been leading the charge on the fossil fuel advertising bans, and from a health perspective, why? Why are you doing this? Why do you think that it needs to be mandatory?

The first thing I want to say is a big thank you to Seth and the climate emergency unit for putting the fossil fuel ad band campaign on Cape's radar. Seth, I still remember that first virtual meeting we had after an email you sent me with Cape's Executive Director, Anjali Helferty, where she agreed that cape would take it on, and I was really excited for a number of reasons. One is there are so many analogies when it comes to action. Physicians have led on achieving bans on tobacco advertising. And also, what, what a great and compelling way and analogy to to raise awareness about the connections between the fossil fuel industry and our health. So in 2022 Cape managed to get health organizations across the country representing over 700,000 health care professionals, including mainstream organizations like the Canadian college of Family Physicians, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, which cover essentially every doctor in the country, to sign on to our letter calling for a ban on fossil fuel advertising and Dr Leah temper, who's Cape staff, she's actually the one leading the charge. I can't take all the credit here. She's done an amazing job on leading this work. And there are three major reasons why fossil fuel bans need to be mandatory. One is that fossil fuel green washing obstructs action on climate change. The fossil fuel industry has they've been wily. For decades. They've moved from climate denial straight to misinformation and green washing, which trick the public and lead them to make poorly informed choices. Fossil fuel ads also don't tell the truth about the health and environmental hazards we know their products create, which put lives at risk right now. So for example, natural gas companies call natural gas clean, but they don't tell us that kids living in homes with gas stoves has have a 42% higher risk of developing asthma, which is similar to the risk of living with a smoker. The public has a right to know about these risks. And last but not least, fossil fuel ads undermine our climate commitments. The federal government has already committed to phasing out gas powered vehicles, but up to 80% of cars in Canada, car ads in Canada promote the most polluting kinds of vehicles, like SUVs. So on one hand, we're committed to reducing demand for gas powered cars. But on the other hand, fossil fuel ads are doing the opposite thing, so they will actually help the government achieve their goals. And then if, if we talk about the known immediate health hazards of fossil fuels beyond climate change, we've seen all those again in real time. I could go on forever. So a recent Harvard study showed that one in seven premature deaths in Canada can be linked to air pollution from fossil fuels. One in seven people never guess that number is that high. Wow. Also, over 80% of Canadians live in areas where air pollution exceeds guidelines set by the World Health Organization, again, primarily because of fossil fuels. And then we're not even, you know that's not even mentioning the local health harms of fossil fuel extraction, like, for example, with fracking, which is linked to higher rates of lung disease, heart disease, birth defects and childhood cancers. So fossil fuel companies should not be allowed to green wash and advertise their products as something that's a good and healthy choice, because it's harming our health right now and promoting industry that we need to move away from,

yeah, just to jump in there. Like, I first of all, a huge gratitude that cape took on this campaign. I do remember those, those early years of the climate emergency unit, and going going to Melissa and her board to say, like, I think this is a natural fit for Cape, because. Of these incredible parallels with the efforts to ban cigarette advertising, which was also led by health professionals, because in both cases, I remember when I was when I was writing my book and and sitting in a movie theater, you know, and before the movie started getting bombarded with all of these fossil car ads and just thinking something is weird here, like we have, our governments telling us that it's a climate emergency, they seem to accept that, but it's sort of polluting to the public space and terribly confusing when you know, if our governments say, as they did with tobacco, if they said this, you know, can kill you, but they still allow the advertising, it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Similarly, if they say it's a climate emergency, but they still allow fossil fuel advertising, they're actually undermining the emergency message and and signaling to the public, well, maybe it isn't an emergency or undermining the public's ability to understand the connections between the burning of fossil fuels and the heating of our planet. So you know, this is a perfect case for this marker number three, that when something is clearly anathema to what it means to be in emergency mode, you mandate that it shouldn't be allowed.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point Seth, because I think that that actually is why a lot of people have a hard time fully accepting or understanding the consequences of climate change, because we're getting conflicting messages all the time from the government, like they declared a climate emergency, how many years ago, and they still aren't acting like it. They don't have any emergency policies, really. And then, like you said, if we're having advertising about these things that we're also told are bad, like it's just sending mixed messages. And maybe we can just get a little bit more specific on the gas bans as well. I you know, I have talked about this before. I have really wanted a heat pump in my house, but they're very expensive and, you know, kind of like inequitable to get one. And I'm just wondering, Melissa, maybe you can answer this one, how, how would having like a heat pump in every home? How would that impact everyday, working class people who are just trying to survive the daily grind of life. Would that really improve conditions for them?

Yes, on multiple levels. So mandatory electrification of everything? Well, not everything. There are some industries that are hard to decarbonize right now, but of homes which we have the technology for, it takes the work and thinking out of making those healthy choices at home, it means that everyday people won't be moving into new buildings with gas stoves that increase our risk of lung disease and leak benzene, which increases your risk of cancer. We know that in Vancouver, almost 60% of our carbon pollution comes from the gas that we use to heat our buildings. But beyond that, it's not just at home. It also generates about 20% of the total nitrogen dioxides in outdoor air pollution. So burning fewer fossil fuels means cleaner air, indoors and outdoors, which is going to improve our health immediately. On a broad scale, it'll mean fewer visits to the doctor's office. It'll mean fewer refills for inhalers. It'll mean all kinds of things immediately by reducing air pollution, because it improves our health right away.

You know, one of the challenges when it comes to mandates is so there are a couple of areas where I said off the bat, the government has made everything voluntary, but there are a couple of areas where they have brought in mandates. We have vehicle mandates that say all new vehicles have to be non fossil fuel vehicles. But by 2035 we have mandates that new buildings need to be carbon zero. But by the end of the decade, so we have mandates, but where the dates are so far out into the future that they're like politically imaginary. First of all, because the governments that are bringing them in aren't going to be the same governments around when those dates kick in. But again, they also communicate a contradictory message. They come in, they end up when the dates are so far out, they end up communicating the opposite of emergency. So part of why these building mandates are so important is, first of all, as Melissa is saying, about about 20, about 10% of Canada's emissions are coming from buildings. So it's a key thing, of what we have to what we have to tackle when it comes to new buildings. What does it actually mean if we if that, if it was actually an emergency? So let me give you an example. Vancouver, in their approach to to climate emergency, actually has treated this topic like an emergency. I. Vancouver passed its climate emergency plan in 2020 and as of January 2022, so like a year and a bit later, new buildings in Vancouver can't use fossil fuels for space and water heating. That's emergency setting dates for the end of the decade, not emergency. And here's the thing, too. There's also a cost issue for households, because we all know that the day is coming when we're going to have to get fossil fuels out of all buildings. Right? It's just a matter of time. So to the extent that we keep approving new buildings that continue to tie into gas lines and continue to use fossil fuels effectively, we've, we've we've put a lien on those houses. We've given new homeowners a bill right at the right out of the gate for the retrofit job that they're going to have to do sometime in the future to get off of gas, and those retrofit jobs are much more expensive. To your point, Erin, that it's very expensive to convert from electric to heat pump. But what isn't expensive is getting it right at the beginning. That actually doesn't increase the cost at all. So why on earth when we know how to create new buildings that are fully electric now at no extra cost, and that take no longer to build, we should be making that mandatory now.

Yeah, I think you just said getting it right the first time, and that made me think of how many fires are happening all across Canada right now, and this year especially, it kind of feels like there's so much happening in the media that not a lot of people are talking about the fires that are happening everywhere. And specifically I'm thinking about Nova Scotia. And in Nova Scotia, there was recently a ban, like people were banned from entering the forest, kind of as this sort of emergency measure. You know, they were trying to keep people safe, I guess. But there's been backlash to this, which, you know, in some ways, I can empathize with, especially in an era of rising fascism or authoritarianism, people are feeling sensitive to this, so they're told they can't go into the forest. And there's also been, you know, conspiracy theories about all of this. I know I'm always talking about conspiracy theories, but I wanted to use this as an example to kind of explore, like, how can we implement necessary mandatory measures despite all of this opposition? Is there a better way to do this than banning people from forests? For example?

Yeah. Seth, I'll turn to you.

Well, I mean, sometimes, you know, we the world has gotten so hot and dry that there are times that we are, in fact, going to need to do this, and there's always going to be a bit of a backlash, as you just described. And as I was saying earlier, it's never unanimous, even though, you know, as with the early part of the pandemic, in the main, the majority of the public actually gets it and agrees that measures like this are going to be necessary when it comes to climate mandates. I mean, one thing we have in our favor, though, is that most of the mandates that we need are actually not directed to individual liberties, if you will. They're actually directed towards businesses, right? We need, we need building mandates that say to builders and developers, you can't tie into gas lines anymore. We need vehicle mandates that say to car manufacturers and and retailers, you're not going to be allowed to sell fossil fuel vehicles anymore. So that's where the where the the target ends up being applied. But to your point, Erin, we do need to develop mandates in a thoughtful and collaborative way. The public does need a say. They need to understand the logic and necessity behind these mandates and have them designed and implemented, particularly in a manner that's done in partnership with indigenous communities where that applies, and there is a way to do this that's less of a heavy hand. So for example, and you were talking about the risk of forest fires, and some of those mandates that flow from that, one of the examples I give in my book is how in the summer of 2017 we had devastating wildfires here in the interior, British Columbia and the province declared a state of emergency, and they ordered people to leave their homes. But in the chilcotine nation in the interior actually defied those evacuation orders. They hadn't been properly consulted. And you know when they were told you're going to have. Have to, you know, evacuate from your own land, your unceded territory. Basically they said, nuts to you, we're not leaving. That was not a great situation, and people were at risk. So the following spring, in anticipation of more summers like that, something interesting happened that chilcotine ended up signing a first of a kind, agreement with the provincial and federal governments recognizing the Chilcote and as full partners in wildfire response. The nation has trained their own wild firefighters. They have extensive experience with wildfires, and from that point on, they decide if and when to declare an emergency on their territory and how to respond. So interestingly, there was the following year 2018 was also devastating in the interior in terms of wildfires, but that time, the local response went much more smoothly. And I think there's a template. There a model for how to do this and design this in a way that won't eliminate the backlash, but can certainly allow necessary measures to unfold a lot more smoothly.

I'll just add there that it's really important for these measures to be and to feel like they are community led, and I saw, we saw these examples during the covid 19 pandemic, when there was some pushback from different communities, whether they were racialized communities or indigenous peoples, against, say, vaccines or different mandatory health protection measures, you had spokespeople from within the Healthcare System who were indigenous doctors, or you had trusted members of racialized communities being tapped as spokespeople and people to socialize these ideas within the communities. And so I think the example that you spoke of Seth with the choco teen, is one example of how we can actually meaningfully engage and mobilize people within communities, not this top down approach we need. We need bottom up as well to make sure that these messages are socialized and that they're accepted. And of course, you're always going to have naysayers. It doesn't matter what policy you put forward, someone will not like it, but when the majority see that it's better for us, when the majority see these are healthy policies and procedures to put in place, then it'll be more generally accepted, and there'll be less pushback.

Yeah, I think there's two threads here that are super important. And it sounded, you know, it's like taking a justice perspective, making sure that nobody is left behind, and also not looking at this individualistic, and instead looking intersectionally, or looking at it in a wholesome way. And so during covid, like you were just talking about Melissa, some of the mandates did kind of focus on individuals in a lot of ways. And some people felt like they were very inequitable. Lots of people lost their jobs, and disabled people and elderly people were forced into really deep isolation, of course, and, you know, kids had to do schooling online, and this created a lot of pressure for the parents, and people were really encouraged to stay at home and do their part. But while all this was happening, the world kind of seemed like a bit of a playground for the rich and powerful, who were still, you know, out there flying around on their jets or, you know, they have large properties and homes. It didn't mean the same thing for them to be stuck at home that it did for, you know, maybe like a single mom in an apartment or something like that. So all of this added to the political tensions that we saw, you know, with the freedom convoy and other anti establishment activism that's happened since, and a lot of times in the climate justice movement, we're talking about making climate mandates that are not about putting the onus on individuals, but putting it on big business and the wealthy. How can we design policies that do put the burden on those who are most responsible, which is corporations or, you know, the 1% or whatever?

Yeah, well, when it comes down to it, Erin, we need to make these big polluters pay. So policies like carbon pricing, where greenhouse gas pollution is priced, places those costs directly on those big emitters and incentivizes them to emit less. And then, if we take that big pot of revenue and use it to support low income and vulnerabilize communities and fund green infrastructure projects that will make their communities healthier and more prosperous. That's that's a win. Win. Redirecting fossil fuels subsidies into investments in clean energy and sustainable development that reduces the burden of pollution on local communities at the same time is also important, and we've talked about this already, we also need to prioritize the perspectives of communities that are the most affected, especially indigenous, black and racialized communities, to make sure it's not just those wealthy white people with big properties and private jets that are that are making all the decisions. And it's also really important to support workers. When I was up in northern BC recently in the Peace region. And I was speaking with some oil and gas workers, and one of them said to me, if he was given the opportunity to work in clean energy with the same or even 20% less pay, if he could spend every evening home with his family, that he would change in a heartbeat. So we can't leave anyone behind in our transition away from fossil fuels. And then, last but not least, obviously, investing in local climate action is really important. Let's take that money from the big polluters, from carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidies and support locally led initiatives to make sure that what we do has real, tangible benefits on the ground that people can see in their own communities, not just these big stories about kind of high level emissions reductions and a better economy, but real impacts where they live and work and play.

You know, Erin, I think the point that you're raising is super important, because when we're actually asking the public to undertake a major mobilization or transition like we need to with respect to the climate emergency, social solidarity is such a vital ingredient. And when you have inequalities in the way that you described, where some people are making a tremendous sacrifice and other people seem to be making no sacrifice at all. It's poisonous. It totally undermines that social solidarity. You know, the examples you're giving speak to one really big difference between the response during, you know, that first year of the pandemic versus the stuff I write about from the Second World War. In both cases, you get this mantra from government that that is, we're all in this together. And in the second world war, you really actually could make a strong case that we were, you know, we had an excess profits tax that said to all businesses, you know, your your profits are limited until the war is over. You know, once your profits were a certain level, your tax rate became 100% there was rationing that that, you know, applied to everybody. We saw increases in taxes. We saw the introduction of unemployment insurance and the family allowance and all of this stuff. Whereas in covid, you know, there, there were some supports in the in the form of this, you know, the wage subsidies and the Cerb, as people will remember. But at the upper end, we saw increases in the accumulated wealth of the wealthiest people in Canada that were astronomical, and we saw really grotesque levels of corporate profiteering. So very quickly it became clear that the mantra of we're all in it together actually wasn't true. And it's my feeling is that because we saw that escalation and inequality and profiteering that that was a big piece of why support for mandates started to erode as quickly as it did. You know, you can't ask people to make sacrifices while other people are making out like bandits.

Yeah, thanks, Seth, and I think we're starting to come a little bit to an end here of our conversation. But I did want to turn to you, Melissa, and you talked a little bit about this already, but I really wanted to ask you if you could implement one mandatory measure, maybe, maybe more than one. I don't know that's kind of a hard decision, but one mandatory measure, climate health measure tomorrow, treating this like a true emergency. What would it be?

Erin? There are so many good measures to choose from, but I'm going to say we need a ban on fossil fuel advertising. We have had some successes in Canada with Cape's campaign on banning green washing, and the international community has noticed and is starting to harness that energy to create kind of total fossil fuel Advents globally, endorsed by the World Health Organization. So that is what I would like to see. And I think that would create a lot of impact right away

well, and I mean, I'd certainly love to see that, but I'll add to it and say the prohibition on on the use of of fossil fuels and gas in new buildings just and there's every reason to just make it effective within a year. It's low hanging fruit. It costs nothing. It saves people tons. It means that they'll have cooling in the summer as well as as heat in the winter, it just seems an obvious one, and it would communicate emergency and with respect to vehicle mandates, I think we, as a move in really need to stick to our guns on this. You can see part of what happens with these late mandates is they also give time to the. Industry to regroup and keep forcing us to reprosecute these fights. And so you see the car industry pushing back on vehicle mandates with some of their political buddies. And you know, people say, Oh, it's, you know, it's too hard. We can't switch our vehicles as quickly as this. Let me just again, offer a world war two example, and this one's an American example. Pearl Harbor happened in December of 1941 and that's when the US joined the war. In February of 1942 which is to say two months later, the production and sale of the private automobile was illegal in the United States for the rest of the war. Now, the Big Three automakers in Detroit, they were still busy. They were still fully employing people, hiring lots of people, pumping out all kinds of stuff, but they were mandated about what they would produce, because in in an emergency, we give instructions about how we use scarce resources and our labor in order to collectively meet the moment. And I do also want to offer one other reflection, Erin on you know your your comparison with covid and how we maintain people's participation in this. You know, we've been talking throughout this, this podcast, discussion about all of these similarities between covid and the covid response and climate. And there lots of similarities, right? They both require listening to scientists and health experts, and both confront an assault of misinformation, and both of them require that we make changes, including some sacrifices and some limits on our absolute freedoms for the sake of collective and societal well being like to protect the safety and security of others in the case of covid or vulnerable people, or in the case of climate, to protect our children and future generations or more vulnerable communities from the climate emergency. But there is also a really important difference, and maybe I think this is actually a really important difference between the pandemic response and the climate emergency mandates that we need in the pandemic response, people really did start to feel what was dubbed covid fatigue that was real, and I think that's because the things that we were called upon to do in response to the pandemic are anathema to all of our social instincts, you know, isolate, stay home, be distant, mask up. That's hard, and kind of goes against all of our instincts. And it's no wonder that people just wanted to be done with it. The good news about the climate mobilization is that it calls on us to do precisely the opposite, to get out there and do something grand and fantastic together. And I, I am convinced that the vast majority of us are ready to get on board and can do that for a good long time until we get the job done.

Yeah, and I did want to turn it back to you Seth, just for one last thing, and I guess it is another American example, but it reminded me that when Charlie Angus introduced the bill to ban fossil fuel advertising, you wrote an article at that time, and you were noting that the backlash to that was, quote, swift and hysterical, and you ended that piece by invoking Franklin D Roosevelt's response to corporate opposition, which was, quote, I welcome their hatred. Do you think that this is a mindset that maybe we could use more of, or maybe politicians could use more of as we accept that these mandatory measures are necessary?

I do, and I do really feel a lot of appreciation for Charlie's willingness to take that on, you know, Cape. And we went to him and to see if he was willing to bring forward a private member's bill on banning fossil fuel advertising, and he said yes. And then he became the target of death threats and all kinds of stuff. And I remember saying to him one day, like, I'm so sorry. I didn't expect that you were going to experience this. And he was like, It's good. It's fine. It tells you that it matters. And you know, we're doing this whole series in this podcast, this special series on the six markers. But sometimes when I'm giving talks about the six markers, I joke with an audience, and I'll say, Look, I know that. You know, in a few weeks, you're not going to remember all six markers. So I'm going to give you a little trick. If you really want to know whether a government's policy plan is a genuine emergency climate plan, look at the reaction of the fossil fuel companies if they're standing on the stage. Engage with the government, saying they can get behind this. You do not have a climate emergency plan. If, on the other hand, you can see some panic in their eyes, then maybe you're on to something. So that's the shorthand way of knowing, if you've really got a plan, that's an emergency plan. Thanks Seth, and by that measure, by the way, banning fossil fuel advertising and banning gas from new buildings passes the test with flying colors. They because you got exactly a reaction that told you that these are true climate emergency policies.

Yeah, that's so true, and I love to end on that note. But is there anything that we've missed on this topic? Any final points that you want to add?

I want to speak to the power of health professionals at catalyzing and sustaining action on the climate emergency. We are the most trusted professionals in the world. The health care system within Canada allocates 12% of our GDP, there's so many different measures that we can take within the healthcare system and to shift public opinion beyond that can make this happen. So if you are a healthcare worker who happens to be listening, join forces with colleagues who are doing good work on this, like the Canadian Association of Physicians for the environment, because when we work together, we win this work is not easy, but it is worth it, and we need to be supportive of each other for the long haul.

Thank you so much, Melissa, and I'll just add as well that the shift from voluntary to mandatory measures is not about relinquishing control and human rights to powerful entities, like some people might feel like it is. It's about demanding the protection of our human rights and the rights of our planet. It's about accepting the reality that we are in a climate emergency. So we do have to act like it. So for our listeners, if this conversation sparked something in you, do something like Melissa just said, get organized. Get active. Contact your representatives, join local climate groups or organizations like Cape who are pushing for these mandatory measures that we really, really need. Thank you so much to Dr Melissa Lem and to Seth for this crucial conversation, as we discussed marker number three, which, again, is shift from voluntary and incentive based policies to mandatory measures. This is the third part of our six markers of climate emergency series. I'm your host, Erin Blondeau, and be sure to check out our next episode in the series, which will be marker four, tell the truth about the severity of the crisis and communicate urgency. If you liked what you heard today, please like, subscribe and share with a friend. Thank you for listening. Everyone. Bye. You