Break In Case of Emergency

Emergency Marker 5: Leave No One Behind (w/ Jim Stanford, Anjali Appadurai & Seth Klein)

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Episode 5 of this 6-part special series takes on the equity marker: leaving no one behind. Erin Blondeau speaks with economist Jim Stanford, campaigner Anjali Appadurai, and strategist Seth Klein about what just transitions must look like in practice. They explore the realities for fossil fuel workers, the importance of linking climate action to economic fairness, and Canada’s responsibilities globally. Their conversation highlights that climate action succeeds only when it’s grounded in solidarity: supporting workers, expanding public services, addressing inequality, and ensuring that communities most impacted by the crisis are centred in solutions. It’s a reminder that justice isn’t an add-on: it’s the strategy.

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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 breaking 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 where we're breaking down the climate emergency unit's guiding framework, our six markers of climate emergency, we've been exploring what it means when our governments shift into genuine emergency mode, and what it looks like when our leaders truly understand crises to be the emergencies that they are and act accordingly. In today's episode, we are digging into marker number five. Leave no one behind, and we've got some very special guests joining us today to discuss this pretty complicated but very relevant topic. So we have Jim Stanford and the climate emergency unit's very own Anjali Appadurai and Seth Klein. 


Jim Stanford is an economist and Director of the Center for future work. He has a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York. He is one of Canada's best known economic commentators, serving for over 20 years as economist and Director of Policy with Unifor Canada's largest private sector trade union. Jim is the Harold Innes industry professor at economics at McMaster University, and the author of economics for everyone, published in six languages. He has written extensively on labor markets, economic transitions and just transition policies. Welcome Jim. 

So good to be here. Erin, thank you for having me.

Anjali is the director of campaigns here at the climate emergency unit. She spent her early career building a strong civil society voice at the United Nations climate convention, working with social movements from around the world to demand climate justice at a multilateral level. Today, Anjali is passionate about making the links between climate change and globalization, colonization and economic inequality. She's worked as the climate justice lead at Sierra Club BC, and is also a very talented singer songwriter and music producer. Fun fact, it's anjalis music that actually opens this podcast. So Hi, Anjali. 

Hello. So happy to be here. 

And we also are joined by Seth Klein. Seth is the team lead and Director of Strategy here at the climate emergency unit. He is the author of a good war mobilizing Canada for the climate emergency. He is a regular columnist with Canada's national observer, and he also spent many years as the director of a progressive Think Tank and currently serves on the board of the BC society for policy solutions. Hello, Seth, good to be back with you. Erin, climate action is often framed as this sacrifice, something that will cost us jobs and security. We've been told that we have to choose between protecting workers or protecting the planet. Meanwhile, inequality has soared, the riches continue to produce the most emissions, while the poorest face the worst impacts of climate breakdown. Workers are pitted against activists, immigrants and marginalized communities, and the global south is told to wait their turn while wealthy nations that built their wealth on fossil fuels refuse to pay their fair share. This framing undermines the social solidarity that we desperately need to take climate action at the scale required. That's why in this episode, we are diving into marker number five. Leave no one behind. This is the marker that speaks to the need for climate emergency action to be linked to broader societal struggles for equity and justice and to come with a robust, just transition plan for workers and communities that currently feel reliant on the fossil fuel industry. It also speaks to the need for a grand transition that is globally equitable, recognizing the great injustice that the places that have historically contributed the least to the crisis are now experiencing the brunt of its devastation. There is a moral and legal obligation on wealthy countries to support the poorer ones through this transition. So this is a marker that covers a lot of territory, so let's dig in Seth, I'll turn the mic to you first so the climate emergency units, marker number five, again, is called leave no one behind, and it's built on this idea that climate action will only succeed if we make a compelling promise that the society we're building will be more just than the one that we are leaving behind. And you've studied the Second World War mobilization extensively. What can history tell us about the importance of social solidarity?

Yeah, thanks, Erin. Well, so not surprising. I think history, and in particular that second world war story, can can offer us a lot.

Yeah, thanks, Erin, you know, the local just transition agencies could provide an assurance that the projects undertaken are sensitive to the realities of each location, right? Each province has its own GHG profile, its own labor market and training needs, and the model would recognize that. But the main point is that the transfer would represent real dollars for actual transition in new jobs, and not these vague assurances and the historic false promises of just transition in the past, right? So let's get a little bit more specific on numbers, if we can. And Jim, I want to bring you into the conversation, into the conversation for this, because you have a recent report called jobs for today, and I found that it's really useful in helping people understand this issue. So can you paint a picture of the employment side of the just transition, and how many jobs need to be created to actually do the work that we need to do there? Like you said earlier, there is a lot of work that needs to be done, like there is so much that Canada needs to improve to actually build the sustainable world that we're looking for. So how many jobs are we talking about for this? Well, Erin, first of all, your emphasis on the opportunities of these investments in energy transition is so so important, because I think it counters this false idea out there that protecting the environment means making do with less, you know, with less jobs, with less income, with less consumption. And I mean, you know, if we're honest, there's actually a streak of that thinking even within the environmental movement, the kind of de growth side of the environmental movement. But most environmentalists, and certainly.

The climate Council has done great work on already the existing size of the clean energy economy and how much that's going to grow. The report you mentioned Erin jobs for today is something I worked on with the Center for Civic governance, which is a progressive think tank in BC, and the building trades unions, so all of the unions that represent construction workers, and what we did there was we first of all did an inventory of the different investment projects that are going to be required in developing renewable energy,

First of all, to your point about those links, I think that's just so important. Important because, you know, there's so many climate policy you know, experts and wonks out there who tell us, don't, you know, don't link the fight on climate to inequality or all these other thorny social justice considerations, like, don't make it more complicated than it already is. It's hard enough and and they're wrong. They're wrong the because these things are linked for the reasons that you've already started to articulate. But in particular, they're wrong and they need to be linked, because it's by linking tackling climate with confronting inequality that we win, and this is the key historic lesson, which is that successful mobilizations require that people make common cause across class and race and gender, and that the public have confidence that sacrifices are being made by the Rich as well as middle and modest income people that that mobilization, successful mobilizations require social solidarity, and inequality is is toxic to building that social solidarity. So this is something that the the leaders in the in the Second World War, I think, really appreciated, they were learning lessons from the First World War. Incidentally, during the First World War, inequality and really rampant and grotesque levels of profiteering, of corporate profiteering, undermined social solidarity, and consequently undermined recruitment efforts. It's one of the reasons we had the conscription crisis in the First World War. And so consequently, at the outset of the Second World War, the Mackenzie King government took these, really, when you look back at it, really remarkable, bold steps to lessen inequality. They put a cap on profits, so they introduced progressive, more progressive taxes for corporations and for individuals, but in particular, the kind of profiteering that we've seen in recent years was illegal in the Second World War, because they understood that in the first world war you couldn't Ask people to voluntarily offer up their lives and make these incredible sacrifices while other people were making a killing, and you had to do something about that. That was on the taxing side, on the spending side, you know, even as they're like spending incredible amounts of money on the military effort itself, they introduced Canada's first major income transfer programs during the Second World War. Unemployment insurance comes in in the Second World War, the family allowance comes in during the Second World War, they commissioned this, this famous report the marsh Commission, which, which really Marsh's report laid the whole architecture for the post war social welfare system, and they offered it up to Canadians as this pledge and this promise that the society they were going to come back to would would look different and be more just and more equitable than the one they Were leaving behind. That's when the magic starts to happen. That's when the mobilization happens. That's when the recruitment numbers really kick in.

They also, interestingly, built up this really robust system for returning soldiers. You know, again, they were haunted a bit by the First World War and the fact they hadn't done that in the First World War, and they had a lot of labor strife as a result in the Winnipeg general strike. They didn't want that to happen again, and so they set up systems with income support and housing support and post secondary support for returning soldiers that literally over in the years right after the war, doubled the size of the post secondary system in Canada and transformed the lives of 1000s of people. So appreciate Jim's going to be talking in a moment about how many jobs are we talking about in terms of fossil fuel workers today, but just to make a comparison in the war from a population about a quarter the size of what it is today, over a million Canadians enlisted. Over a million Canadians were directly employed in military production. They all had to be recruited and trained up, and at the end of the year, they all had to be returned to a peacetime economy. And we did that with these robust programs. So you know, the task today is great, but it actually isn't as great as what we did then. And finally, just to kind of foreshadow what Anjali is going to talk about at the end of the war, at the very moment when our debt to GDP ratio as a country was higher than it's ever been before or since. Months, we also saw this incredible spending on other countries for their rebuilding efforts, again at a level that we've never seen since. So I do think that there's all kinds of lessons here, and really the point in recalling all of this as we face today's threat, and the need to mobilize is twofold, like one, to appreciate that how inequality is a barrier to Cross Society mobilization, but second, to understand that effective mobilization isn't just about building more planes or tanks or today wind turbines or solar panels. It requires policies that fulfill that promise, that we're going to look we're going to better look after one another and guarantee good jobs and income supports for all, and that people will be treated with dignity and fairness. Because when you're asking people to share in a great undertaking, as we absolutely have to do today, that's how you keep everyone on the bus.

Thank you, Seth, I as a millennial, like everything you just said makes me both inspired, but also kind of mad, because I just can't even imagine a world that has those those programs set up. And so Jim, you're an economist who spent decades studying labor markets and economic transitions, taking action on climate is sometimes framed as this catastrophic threat to workers, like we talked about in the introduction, but you've actually crunched the numbers on this and looked at what a what a just transition would really look like. Can you like take a minute to set the stage for us what is actually at stake here when we talk about workers and a just transition?

Well, we have, on the one hand, a certain amount of Canada's economy that is tied up in the fossil fuel industry, in the production and processing and transportation and use of fossil fuels, and that, of course, is the dominant problem in climate change. It's not the only source of climate change, but by far the dominant source of climate change. So part of the transition, the energy transition, and everything that goes with it, has to involve phasing out the use of fossil fuels, and that means that the work that is currently going into those activities is gradually going to disappear. On the other hand, we're it's not like we're going to stop using fossil fuels and then sit around and do nothing. We're going to replace fossil fuels and replace them with other forms of energy. And there's going to be work required in producing that other energy, work involved in investing in the capital and the infrastructure to generate energy in sustainable ways, work required to produce the machinery and the tools and the products that use renewable energy, like an electric vehicle, for example. So the impact on the final economy is going to depend on, first of all, how large those two buckets are, the bucket that's going to disappear, people working in fossil fuels now, and the bucket that's going to grow, people working in renewable energy. And how large are those two buckets compared to the overall economy? And how are we going to manage the process of reducing fossil fuel activity at the same time as we're increasing renewable energy. Now the interesting thing, and in a way the helpful thing, is both of those buckets are actually very small compared to the overall economy. And this is, I think, part of the educational effort we need to do in our movement to counter the propaganda that comes from the fossil fuel sector, that Canada's economy, or Canada's labor market is fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels for for its viability, and that's just false when you add up the number of people in direct fossil fuel roles, producing, refining, transporting fossil fuels, is less than 1% of total employment in Canada, something like 175,000 jobs today, so 1% and it's not like we're going to pull a plug and eliminate all that work overnight. No one has suggested that. You know, if we're going to do it on a timetable and that's consistent with the Paris agreements, then we're going to phase out that work for the most part over the next 25 years. So frankly, changing where 1% of the workforce works over a 25 year period is invisible in macro economic terms, much, much less substantial than the historical transition that Seth mentioned at the end of World War Two, and much smaller than other transitions that we've had for good and for bad in Canada's economic history. When you look at, you know, just things that happen, like demographic change or the entry of women into the labor force or urbanization, those are all immensely more important than phasing out 1% of jobs over a 25 year period, or even. On negative crises that occurred in other industries, whether it was the manufacturing decline in the 2000s or the collapse of the cod fishery in Newfoundland in the 90s, or the ongoing crises in the in the forestry sector in BC, every one of those challenges had a much bigger proportionate impact on the respective labor markets than phasing out fossil fuels would now. What about the other bucket? The bucket that involves new work associated with renewable energy? Well, that's also small. Frankly, it's going to be a net positive. There are going to be more jobs in renewable energy than there are in fossil fuels. For the reason that fossil fuel production is uniquely capital intensive. Think of some of these activities like bitumen mining and petroleum refining and so on, where there's 10s of billions of dollars of capital invested for a relatively small number of jobs. And you know, renewable energy is also capital intensive, but not that capital intensive. So on a net basis, there's going to be more work involved in producing the renewable energy that we're going to have to do so on a net basis, it's going to be a winner. And you know, that's a fundamentally positive thing that we should emphasize, but we shouldn't get too caught up in the idea that the solution to this all is to just take, you know, someone from a bitumen mine and put them to work manufacturing windmills. That isn't actually how the transition is going to occur. How it's going to occur is, you know, the 175,000 people working in fossil fuels are going to do different things over the next 25 years. Most of them, by the way, are going to retire. So that's the easiest kind of transition, particularly if you're given a decent pension and bridging benefits and opportunities to retire early in some cases. And then those that do go to other jobs aren't necessarily going to even be interested in manufacturing windmills. They'll be interested in all kinds of other things. We've done research with fossil fuel workers, and they're interested in construction, they're interested in professional and Scientific Services. They're interested in non fossil fuel minerals industries and so on and so on and so on. And then there's other issues, like, where are the jobs in renewable energy? What are the skills required, etc, that complicate the idea that you're going to move a person from Job A, like they're a poker chip into job B. That isn't how it's going to occur. It's actually going to occur in a more complex but easier way, because of all of the different opportunities that are out there. So the key, key challenge in all of this is to make sure that the overall labor market is functioning well and at its capacity. Because, in my experience, people are much less worried about what their next job is going to be when they see a labor market that's humming along, you know, working at full capacity, generating lots of new opportunities and alternatives, and suddenly people actually start thinking, Gosh, I could actually do a job that I'm actually more interested in, rather than desperately trying to hang on to the job they have because they don't know what else they can do. And it's that dimension of economic inequality. This comes back to your you know, your fundamental point that you're making here about leaving no one behind and linking the struggle against inequality to the struggle for sustainability. It's that inequality in a labor market that's a dog eat dog, insecure, competitive place where people are constantly worried about their future and the future of their family, and as soon as we take that away by saying part of our package is going to be a full employment economy where we make sure that creating jobs and keeping everyone occupied is the top priority, and we're going to support them to be good jobs and secure jobs, then the transition problem just becomes a non problem, because actually, then people start seeing it as an opportunity, rather than as a big threat. So I think that it is absolutely manageable to imagine how this transition away from fossil fuel work is going to occur, but it is going to require a kind of holistic analysis of, how do we build a fairer labor market, not just how do we facilitate those specific job transitions for those specific individuals.

Thank you so much, Jim, I will fully admit I did not realize that the fossil fuel industry was only 1% of the labor market. Like, yeah, shout out to the climate movement. Let's talk more about that, because I had no idea. Anjali, so I want to turn the mic to you for a second. When we talk about leaving no one behind, it can't just be about workers in Canada or the global north, right? So from your work on the fair shares project, what does this principle mean from a global justice perspective, yeah, leaving no one behind. I mean, everything that Jim and Seth just talked about, if you just expand that out to include the world, that logic of making sure that wellness is at the core of our economy, that the labor market is not this high. Competitive, dog eat dog world, and where we're not pitting people against each other, but rather replacing human well being at the center of it all, that is a principle that can and should be expanded to a global perspective, and that is about recognizing that climate change is a threat multiplier, and it's the ultimate threat that we all face. It's the ultimate test of the commons. It seeks to teach us that no one is safe unless all of us are safe, and as I keep repeating ad nauseum in my fair shares work, climate change knows no borders. We can only tackle it together, and that means that we are all implicated in each other's fates. And there are some core injustices there that that climate change sort of behooves us to to tackle. And that is, you know, this undeniable fact that the global north it has, you know, we call it the triple injustice of climate change. The Global North kick started this crisis during their industrial era, while at the same time extracting wealth from the colonies, which is the most of the Global South, and restructuring those colonies to continue draining their wealth. And on top of that, the global north, in spite, on top of having the wealth to be able to deal with the crisis, is less affected. We know that the climate crisis disproportionately impacts the global south and the most vulnerable populations there. And so that triple injustice is not just. It's not something that we can accept. Because it's not just like, Okay, well, if we leave the global south out to dry, we'll be fine. It's not that all of us will be affected. In the end, we're all implicated. And so this narrow nationalism that we're seeing like, you know, starting with the US, and sort of an attitude of like each country to their own is simply a race to the bottom. And we're being challenged in this moment to think internationally and to, you know, break down old, archaic divides. And as we know, Canada, is 2025 we are currently the chair of the g7 and I think that that's a really powerful position from which to show leadership in this international sphere as well, and just to sort of recognize that leading that just transition Here at home inherently includes showing leadership on international climate justice.

Yeah, thank you. Anjali, that reminds me of something that I wanted to ask Jim, which is that you know, coming back to this point that the world's richest produce the most emissions globally, while the poorest face the worst impacts. And it comes back to something that Seth said earlier, which is that we know that inequality is toxic to social solidarity. So Jim from an economic and labor perspective, how, how can we tackle these two things, climate and inequality together?

Well within Canada, part of the inequality is, is that point I mentioned earlier about a labor market that's chronically insecure and where people are very worried about protecting their current vocation, and with understandable reasons. Another dimension of the inequality is inequality and how much people earn in the jobs that they have. And this one, in a way, is a bit more challenging where fossil fuel jobs are concerned, because one of the factors that makes people very concerned about losing a fossil fuel job is the fact they tend to be better paid than most jobs in the rest of the labor market. In fact, in the oil extraction sector, the upstream oil oil and gas industry, average salaries are twice as high as they are in the labor market as a whole, which is a big difference. And so part of the reason that those folks you know are concerned about their job security is they don't know what kind of job they're going to go into if they had to take a different job, and almost certainly they think it would pay less than the job that they are currently in. Now, some of the ways to manage that challenge and that, of course, that population has been fertile ground for the, you know, the oil and gas interests. Who are, you know, doing the propaganda campaigns around how the labor market will be destroyed if we stop producing these things. And the greatest irony of all, of course, is that fossil fuel jobs are already disappearing, not because of climate policy, but because of actions by the oil and gas companies to automate production and downsize employment roles and so on. We've lost about 35 to 40,000 fossil fuel jobs in the last decade, but. Even though we're producing more fossil fuels than ever. So the the hypocrisy of the oil and gas companies to claim that they care about fossil fuel workers is is galling, but the fear of fossil fuel workers that they won't find another job, or they certainly won't find a job that pays as well, gives fertile ground for those efforts, part of the way to do that is to take advantage of that retirement stream that I mentioned. Fossil fuel workers, on average, are older than the typical Canadian. About 60% of them are going to reach normal retirement age before 2050 which is the deadline for our net zero commitment, when most fossil fuel use needs to be phased out. And so, you know, saying to people, yeah, you can keep working. You're lucky. You got a good paying job. Keep working until you retire, and then we'll manage the economy and the industry such that your position isn't backfilled by a new person who comes in to fill the job, not perhaps not knowing, or perhaps just not accepting that that job is going to disappear. So the retirement transition option is one good way, another good way would be some kind of an income insurance program for fossil fuel workers who aren't going to retire before 2050 then they are going to get another job. What if that job pays less? That's where some kind of income insurance or wage top up arrangement to in a way, make those workers whole in the in the eventuality that they end up doing a new job for less pay would help to ease some of those concerns. And various transition programs, not just for fossil fuels, but for other types of restructuring and so on in Canada's history and around the world have used income top ups as a way of trying to, you know, bridge that gap between what workers make in their new job and what they made in the old job, and that way, take that issue Off, off the table. But even that runs square into another of the ways that inequality, as Seth said at the outset, inequality is toxic to our efforts to build social solidarity, because the reality is, in Canada, workers lose their jobs all the time, and there's all kinds of companies that close, or industries that shrink, or occupations that disappear for technology or profit or whatever reasons, and so other workers don't necessarily have that sort of protection. So here's again, where us, you know, developing and targeting special transition reports supports at a group of workers the fossil fuel sector who have, in a way, the luxury of higher paying jobs. They're hard jobs. I don't want to say that they're privileged per se. In fact, they're exploited, and the working conditions and other demands on them are very, very intense, but the pay is, on average, good. So we're going to design special supports for those people. And meanwhile, let the rest of the labor market fend for themselves in a dog eat dog world that's that's not really morally sustainable either. And so this, again, is where it's it's possible to imagine ways to facilitate that transition that don't leave fossil fuel workers behind, but it really needs to be done in the context of a strategy for the overall labor market and the overall macro economic strategy for the country that also pledges to leave no one behind, no matter what industry you work in. And again, this just reinforces Seth's point from the beginning that inequality and and this fight for a fair, planned, gradual transition have to go hand in hand.

Yeah, and so you talk about workers retiring. Do you think that, like apprenticeship programs also would play a role in this?

Well, apprenticeship is where you're training someone to do to do a new job. So if there's a group of fossil fuel workers who aren't going to retire in time, then they are going to move to a new job. And training and skills and apprenticeships can be part of facilitating their transition. And you know, it's usually a go to idea in any of the transition policy making that we've had in Canada, and, you know, we've had, we've had some successes, but most of the transition planning, like the federal sustainable jobs act process and so on, has been sort of long on, on jargon and ambition and short on specifics. And the thing they go to all the time is we'll give you training to go and do a new job. You know, a couple of problems with that. Number one, the lack of skills is not the biggest barrier. People working in fossil fuel industries actually have got quite strong and quite flexible skill sets that can be used in all kinds of other industries. It isn't by and large that they need. New skills. In some cases, you'll need some specific job training to move into another role, but many of the skills are very comparable, including, for this reason, surprisingly, when we dug into the numbers, we found that over half of fossil fuel workers, direct fossil fuel workers actually live in cities. So this idea of someone in a rough, rough neck job out in the stick somewhere, isn't quite the whole story when you count people working in office roles or scientific roles or professional roles, or also how the production process for fossil fuels has been automated. So a lot of the wells oil wells can be managed remotely, and things like that. So the fact that you work and live in a city gives you all kinds of opportunities for other types of work. So by and large, retraining is not the big problem. And just saying to a worker, don't worry, we'll give you retraining doesn't really convince them. Because, number one, how much retraining do they actually need? Number two, the big one, is there going to be a decent job for me after I've done the retraining, and that is the key. That's where we need, I think, to emphasize very strong connections and guarantees for fossil fuel workers to imagine how they're going to get into a new job and how it's going to be a decent job that I think ultimately will be more important than the training, per se.

Yeah, and this topic actually hits pretty close to home for me, because growing up, my dad worked in the oil stands as well, and he made, like a lot. He made good money. But then I was this the camp kid, right? Because my dad worked away in camp. So it, you know, it kind of changes familial relationships and that kind of thing as well when the person has to go away and work in camp. But like you said, it's hard when, when that is a well paying job. You know, workers are wondering what is, what is available for them if they're not going to take this job. So, Anjali, I want to bring you into the conversation, because when we talk about leaving no one behind, globally, specifically, we're also talking about historical responsibility and the fact that wealthy nations built their wealth on imperialism and the mass polluting of other nations. Can you explain what fair shares means in practice and what it would look like for Canada to actually pay our fair share?

You know, this is a great question, because it's very concrete, historical responsibility is a legal principle. It's one of the legal pillars of the UN climate convention that Canada is signatory, true. And the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is actually the largest international treaty. It has the most signatories, so it's the most widely adopted treaty. And so it seeks to wrestle with this, these tough questions of justice and fairness around who should, who should bear more of the climate action burden, and when it comes to the historical responsibility that's a core part of it, and so that. So I just want to say that that's part of Canada's legal obligation, is recognizing that historical responsibility that we bear. And you know, there's just several things that we can do as a country, as a government, and things that we can do as movements to push our country fair shares in practice, means Well number one, responding to the call from global south governments and accepting responsibility for historic actions. There's a lot of pushback from Canada and other global North nations at these un talks, consistently pushing back on these, these legal principles, historical responsibility, common but differentiated responsibility, and sort of pushing back on, you know, which baseline we use for our the, you know, the the year that we bear responsibility for our climate pollution. And then after that, it's to uphold our commitments under the Paris commitment under the Paris Agreement, it's to it's mostly cold, hard cash. It's mostly climate finance. You know, we we owe a huge climate debt, and we have a great obligation under the Paris agreement. And so a lot of that is in the form of climate finance, which is money that is sent through intermediary bodies to the global south to support with mitigation, which is reducing climate emissions, adaptation, which is adapting to ongoing climate impacts and loss and damage, which is payments for irreversible losses that have come at because of of climate change. And you know, the movement to to secure a commitment for loss and damage, just as one, one small stream of finance, has been a multi decade movement that has just been a huge, huge effort, mostly led by global south. So. Social movements, and it has, it culminated in 2013 in this, you know, creation of the law, this loss and damage fund, and then the fund proceeded to lie essentially empty for over a decade since then. So it's this constant, constant struggle led by social movements from the global south just to get Global North governments to uphold their obligations, let alone go above and beyond. So that's one big piece of it, of doing our fair share, is accepting our responsibility and acting on it, and that's a tough sell. You know, like billions of dollars in public money to go towards climate it's very low on the public's priority list right now. It's it's not something that's going to be an easy sell, especially in these times when we're fighting off Trump and the tariffs. So I'm not saying this isn't this is an easy thing to do, but that is simply our responsibility. There are other ways that that Canada can show up with strong leadership as part of doing our fair share. And there's other ways to unlock the tremendous amount of finance that's actually needed to tackle the climate crisis globally. And I think Canada has a huge role in that. There is an ongoing campaign for debt cancelation in the Global South, these are unfair debts that have compounded over decades, that often started during colonial times, and Canada has a role in supporting those calls for debt cancelation. Canada actually did back in the year 2000 cancel some sovereign debt, and it's time for us to time for us to do that again. There has been some really great research in in recent years. I, you know, I keep quoting Jason Hickel, but there's, there's really great research that shows, if you add up all of the financial flows from the global north to the global south and south to north. And sorry, I keep using these very, you know, clear categories, but unfortunately, they still hold true for the most part. There's actually the global south provides a net transfer of the equivalent of 2.2 trillion US dollars a year to the global north, just through labor. And, you know, companies being able to outsource and all kinds of financial flows, and a lot of this, this stems from colonial times. So there's a huge inequality there that Canada can at least begin to address and acknowledge. We have a role in the global trade system. You know, we have a lot of bilateral trade agreements. We have over 70 bilateral trade agreements with other countries, and a lot of these trade agreements include some very harmful provisions that are massive blockers to climate action. And we have, you know, Canada can take the lead on finding new forms of finance, like putting levies on under taxed sectors. You know, we could support a financial transactions tax. The economy is increasingly, increasingly financialized, and if you put a tiny, very, very microscopic tax on finance each financial transaction that happens in the economy, you could generate billions for climate action every year. There are international levies we can support on all sorts of industries, shipping, plastics production. So there are, there's a lot. There's a financial architecture that we're working with globally that is outdated. It was created after the war, and it's no longer fit for purpose. And so there's a lot that you know, Carney has been talking recently about decoupling ourselves from the US and becoming independent in the next decade. And I think a lot of this, a lot of these actions, are a part of that is separating ourselves from the legacy of the US, is kind of bullish approach in the global community and showing leadership that is rooted in collective care, right?

And earlier you mentioned that that, you know, it's kind of a hard sell for the Canadian public, so I'm just wondering, do you think that these are competing priorities, like supporting Canada's fair share and doing climate justice at home? Like, what do you say to people who say that? You know, we can't, we can't do both.

You know, it's a tough conversation to have right now, and we're still figuring out how to have that conversation. But under the Paris Agreement, Canada's climate obligations are actually they take the form of two pillars, that pillar one is domestic action, and pillar two is international action. And those those pillars actually were. Together, they are a package deal and they don't they shouldn't be pitted against each other. A key part of our fair shares, what would be our fair share, is to be accomplishing a just transition here at home, while supporting emissions reductions beyond our borders. You know, in just a scenario, if Canada were to achieve the just transition tomorrow, if we waved a magic wand and our emissions went down to zero and all our workers were employed in new sectors, tomorrow, we'd still be facing the full brunt of the climate crisis if, even if we did our transition at home, it is completely upon us to support the trends the transition globally, because climate change doesn't have borders and so. So, yeah, the two really shouldn't be pitted against each other. Unfortunately, they are. And we do have this prevalent attitude within the public, which is not, you know, very understandable, of like, let's clean up our backyard first. We have problems here first. And it's just, it just doesn't really work that way. You know, we saw, you know, during covid, when supply chains started getting impacted globally, we saw the impact that that had on Canadians. We are so intertwined with the rest of the world, and I think a little bit more awareness of that in the Canadian public is something that we need to build.

Yeah, and Seth, let's talk about a specific Canadian policy for a second, because at the climate emergency unit, you've argued a lot about a core failure of government climate policy is being the refusal to offer workers, specifically oil and gas laborers. But like Jim said earlier, not necessarily compelling. Offering them a compelling counter offer, something that can offer assurances of Employment Security. And so I think out of that critique has come the climate emergency unit's campaign for a Youth Climate corps, but also a proposal for something called a just transition transfer. So we have talked about the Youth Climate corps before in other episodes, but can you explain a little bit about what the just transition transfer is and why we need it in a time like this,

yeah? Sure. Happy to Yeah.

I mean, frustratingly, the campaign for a just transition transfer never got the traction of the Youth Climate corps, but I think it's desperately needed in previous episodes. You know, we've talked about how we're not spending what it takes to win domestically or internationally, we're not creating new, transformative institutions to get this job done, but it's also just been, you know, in our time together with the unit, it's befuddling to me that we have not made a compelling counter offer to the 1000s of people who understandably feel anxious about what this transition means for their jobs and their livelihoods. You know, Jim offered the reality check that fossil fuels, fossil fuel productions, aren't nearly as big of a player in the overall Canadian economy as we're often led to believe, but it is a big player in certain parts of the economy or certain regions. You know, it's a big player in Alberta, it's a big player in Saskatchewan, it's a big player in Newfoundland. And so I just feel like in the in the face of the climate emergency, we need to be making an audacious and hopeful offer to those workers and communities whose employment and economic security is currently tied to the fossil fuel industry, and to certain extent, to auto and steel and concrete and agriculture. I mean, they all face transition issues and to the indigenous communities on the front lines of fossil fuel extraction. And, you know, Jim was making the point that we, you know, we've had all this discussion in recent years about the sustainable jobs act and all of this language, but what's mostly been missing is actual substantial investment in those jobs of the future, so that the promise of just transition isn't a hollow one. And so that's where this idea of a climate emergency, just transition transfer comes out something that's that's specifically linked to funding climate infrastructure projects that would create 1000s of jobs, along with the accompanying training and apprenticeships, and Because of how climate plays out differently in different regions. A transfer like this could also really be a mechanism for dealing with the Confederation conundrum in Canada and renewing Confederation as we rise to this challenge, and a way to say to 1000s of those workers currently. In the sector, none of you are going to be out of work. We're going to need your help to meet this moment. Your skills and your strength are going to be deployed differently, building renewable energy projects, retrofitting buildings, building High Speed Rail and Public Transit, renewing existing infrastructure to make it more resilient, managing our forest to reduce wildfire risk. So how would the just transition transfer be structured? First of all, it needs to be big. You know why? I've suggested it should be at least 25 billion a year, or roughly like 1% of Canada's GDP, to fund those ambitious climate infrastructure projects in the coming in the coming years. But also the transfer would speak to this, again, this conundrum in Confederation, which is that most of the climate infrastructure we need logically comes under provincial or municipal or indigenous jurisdiction, energy, transit, housing, but it's the federal government that has the greatest capacity to pay so we get those federal dollars for those things. But then two, two important things would differentiate this transfer from other federal transfers like health health transfers and education transfers. The first is that unlike those other transfers, which basically allocate the money based on population, we propose that the just transition, transfer, distribute the money based on a formula linked to greenhouse gas emissions in each province, but sort of fixed going forward, because you don't want to perversely incentivize higher greenhouse gas emissions. But what that would do is it would recognize that certain jurisdictions like Alberta and Saskatchewan and Newfoundland face a greater challenge in the transition. They have more heavy lifting to do. So we would say, for example, okay, Alberta currently produces 38% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. That's like four times more than their share of the population. We'd freeze that in time, and we'd say, okay, Alberta, you're going to get 38% of this transfer money. But the second catch is that, unlike other transfers, where we just hand the money over to the provincial governments, we wouldn't do that because too many of these provincial governments aren't to be trusted on this file. Instead the just like the government in Alberta, just for Alberta, exactly. So we would say the just transition transfer funds would go to newly established just transition agencies in each province and territory jointly governed by the federal government, the provincial governments, if they empty in local governments, vitally, indigenous nations in each province, put representatives of labor and and and business and civil society groups and academic experts on the board, but that would ensure that the transfer money isn't just absorbed into provincial budgets or used to displace other infrastructure money, it would ensure the money is used for its intended purpose, and really the benefit of structuring it this way is, is that, investing in energy conservation, particularly in building energy use and investing in sustainable transportation infrastructure, everything from urban transit to EV chargers for electric vehicles to high speed rail. And just the scope of those undertakings is enormous, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars spent over the next quarter century. And you know, the just transition transfer arrangement that Seth is proposing would sure help in paying for those investments. And then we estimated what would be the job creation from those things so, and this is just on the construction side. It isn't involving the manufacture of the steel or the manufacturer of the electric vehicles or the spin off benefits in supply chains and so on. Just a direct construction jobs. We estimated between six and 9 million job years of construction work over the next 25 years, leading up to 2050 that timeline for our net zero commitment, and that's equivalent to something like 250 or 300,000 permanent new construction jobs, or about a 20% increase in the size of the construction workforce. So again, that's not the whole story. That's just the construction piece, but that alone, remember those 250 to 300,000 new construction jobs, that alone, more than offsets the 175,000 people who currently work in direct fossil fuel roles. So it's a no brainer that this is going to be a net positive. And I think emphasizing the benefits of expansion and investment and growth and jobs is the way to sell this to people and to say, you know, combined with overall measures to build a fairer, more prosperous labor market and macro economy, this is going to bring untold prosperity. So think about construction workers, you know, again, who are another target for all this fossil fuel industry propaganda, you know, we must build another fossil fuel pipeline, or you construction worker, you'll be out of work. And we can hold this thing up and say, hey, there are enormous numbers of new jobs involved in these alternative energy investments, as long as we're pitching and moving forward with those alternative energy investments, rather than saying we're going to stop doing fossil fuels and sit around and do nothing. I mean, obviously nobody's saying that, but that is the implication that often comes through some of the some of the dialog. So I do think there's an enormous upside for labor markets and the economy from doing this energy transition and doing it quickly.

Yeah, yeah. And I think this is you're making a good point in like, in this conversation, pivoting to looking forward into the future and what this could actually look like. So just as a follow up for you, I wanted to ask you, you know, if we fast forward 10 years, and we've actually done this, we've managed to do a just transition and leave no one behind. We've created hundreds and 1000s of good climate jobs, and we've built a more equal society. What do you think will have been the turning point that made this possible?

Well, I think it's going to be convincing Canadians that prosperity and security and fairness in the long run, needs us to do this, rather than, you know, delaying and denying and deferring, which is how the climate issue has been handled so far. That is not going to do anyone a favor, because even you know, Donald Trump or No, Donald Trump the world is going to transition to renewable energy. It first of all has to, obviously, for climate reasons, but it's going to for economic reasons, because renewable energy sources are now cheaper, as well as being cleaner, and we're seeing that big time in other parts of the world, in China and elsewhere. So this is going to happen and convince. Missing people, including those who work in existing polluting industries like fossil fuel production, convincing them that it's better to get ready for this change and manage it as an opportunity, rather than pretending it's not going to happen and then get tossed out on your ear at the end of it, which is exactly what happened to COD Fisher workers in Newfoundland, and many forestry workers in BC and and many others who've been affected by unplanned private led so called transitions. They weren't transitions. They were downsizing. But that's what's going to happen to fossil fuel workers, unless we have a plan of action to say there's enormous opportunities. We won't leave anyone behind, and let's get with it. I think that argument, to me anyway, is a compelling one to build the sorts of alliances and coalitions and common cause that Seth mentioned at the outset are so important if this movement is going to be successful, right?

And Anjali, you've been organizing with young people and Frontline communities for years. What have you seen or experienced that makes you believe that we can actually build the political power to win this thing?

You know, my answer to this every time is just it's just social movements. I just see people who are committed to the transition in a way that is their lives work. And I see these, these movements spreading up all over the world that are just relentless. You know, I see worker solidarity, international worker solidarity, and that's, I think, going to be one of the major keys that unlocks this all is if we can build, you know, transnational solidarities amongst workers of the world, recognizing that we have common cause as as workers under this system. I think that's that's the that's what we can work for, and that's what so many people are devoting their lives to working for. So that's that's what makes me believe that we can build a political power to win this. I mean seeing a lot of labor movements worldwide become more militant and and seeing that sort of refusal to to to back down to corporate power, I think is, is very inspiring as well. Watching, you know, watching people in the US stand up to ice and protect their neighbors gives me a lot of hope and makes me believe that there is the grit and determination amongst people to make this happen. And I just think that this kind of collective thinking that we that I've been talking about here, is anathema to the current brand of capitalism that we live under, and it's anathema to the nationalism that is being foisted upon us. And I think that a lot of these movements that we're witnessing are practicing that, that collective, that sense of collectivism, which is inspiring.

Yeah, I think, you know, as we see fascism rising all across the planet, and as we really feel the effects of, you know, what I would consider late stage capitalism. We do see those rise of social movements. We do see people standing up more so that is really inspirational and Seth, turning back to you, because you're the history guy. You're the history uncle. When you think about the moments in history when society radically transformed, do you see any signs today that we could be close to that kind of broad movement toward climate justice. It feels a little bleak to me, but let's turn to you. Let's see if maybe you have something a little more hopeful.

I mean, I do, I do see elements of it. I mean, recently, you know, at the time of recording this, we had these draw the line protests, which, you know, where we saw this incredible coalition building between the climate movement and the migrant rights movement and indigenous movements and and labor. You know, I hadn't seen anything like that in a long time. Just a few years ago. I think when, when, when at the time that the RCMP were having these confrontations with the with teleton Land defenders. You know, it wasn't that long ago, but the response across the country, you know, in Far, far away places with these solidarity actions, I don't think I'd ever in my lifetime, I'd never seen anything quite like that, in terms of people taking solidarity action like that. To me, partly, I think we're going to win on these things because they're popular. You know, wealth and windfall taxes are really popular. When I commissioned polling from abacus data, when I when I was working on my. Book, you know, I tested the public on these, you know, quite radical climate policies, where, which, where there was lots of support, and then, and then asked, you know, what happens to people's levels of support when it's tied to these green New Deal type ideas around tackling inequality? And taxing the rich and corporations and increasing income transfers to lower income people and Supports for Workers. When you link it that way, the support for the bold climate action doesn't go down. It goes through the goddamn roof, like like people, it becomes very popular and very appealing across a broad swath of the population. So, you know, you're asking me about the historic comparison here. So I mean, this is the thing we're living at a time where there's a lot of despair and desperation out there in the economy, and people are really anxious. And you know, when you look at the period of the Great Depression in the 1930s when it was even more so the case the Great Depression gave rise to both Nazism in Germany and the hope and promise of the New Deal in the United States. There's nothing inherently different about those populations. Leadership mattered. The kinds of appeals that were being made mattered, and I see an echo of that in the work we've done the last few years on the on the Youth Climate court. You know right now, the far right in Canada is finding its strongest base of support among young men. But interestingly, again, with abacus, when we polled a couple of years ago on the Youth Climate corps, it was, it was the only climate poll I've ever seen where the enthusiasm among young men outstrips young women. There was something about that appeal, that invitation to service, to rally in collective defense when we make the right kind of appeal that that, you know, the very same people who can get pulled in a, you know, just look after yourself, place can actually be pulled in a different direction. And so we need our governments, we need labor leaders. We need as a society to be making that kind of grand invitation again, to people to meet that moment. And there's lots of evidence that when we do that, people respond, yeah.

I think it's very inspiring to me too, seeing the polling results that, you know, young men were really interested in a Youth Climate corps, are really interested in a Youth Climate Corps. And I think that speaks to the fact that, like we've talked about before, the military is really the only low barrier option for this kind of work in the country. And you know, it's really nice. Well, I'm a little biased, obviously, working on the Youth Climate core campaign. But I think it's really powerful that we are proposing something different, that that people can can put their energy into. So we are coming to the end of the conversation, but I wanted to just open the floor and see if there's anything else that anyone wanted to add before we wrap up today.

Yeah. No, I just wanted to say that Seth, that was, that was really powerful. I mean, just reiterating how much support there is for policies that are universal and collective in nature. And, you know, just to add to that, you know, from the from the fair shares work that we're doing last, just last year, we found that a majority of Canadians, over 60% support a windfall profits tax on oil and gas, and that that same tax could generate $4 billion Over five years. And that's that's crucial for the transition, for funding the transition. So it's a win, win situation. It's, it's in the public favor, and so thanks for, I think that's, that's a really core message that, I think is the the ray of hope in this, in this discussion.

It's even a it's even a demand. I think Anjali that fossil fuel workers could get behind, because guess what, they've been screwed by those same oil and gas companies, just like anyone else has. We've seen the loss of jobs in fossil fuel industries, as I mentioned, from automation, from downsizing, from cost cutting. We've seen the shift of head office functions to America by companies like Imperial oil, and we've seen a real cut in the real wages that those workers earn, et cetera, et cetera. So they know full well, I think, at an implicit level, that when the oil and gas industry stands up and says, We must double down on fossil fuel exports, et cetera, et cetera, they're not doing it out of solidarity with the workforce in that industry and showing how much. Oil and gas companies have profited, and what they're using those profits for, they aren't using it to create new jobs in Canada. Would I think both raise support for the energy transition period, but also things like the excess profits tax.

You know, if I can offer this last point, partly what makes this hard is we're up against some powerful forces who don't want this. You know, Jim was talking earlier about how, you know, just the trends about renewables being so cheap that this transition is just going to happen, but the industry is going to be made kicking and screaming on this because in some ways, capitalism doesn't care about the cost of things. It cares about profits. And it's true that renewables are remarkably inexpensive. Their curse is that once you make the capital investment in solar or wind, Mother Nature, and her generosity just provides it for free. The in fossil fuels, in contrast, when we're hooked up and dependent on them, we have to keep paying every goddamn day and every goddamn month to these companies. That's why they've been among the most profitable corporations in human history, and now they're spending a lot of that money on advertising and lobbying and everything that they're doing to try to block this transition. So part of this as well, and this is important for our leaders, is they, they have to be ready to invite the fight too. Yeah, to bring on the fight, to make this happen, and to let Pier polyev explain why he wants to, you know, run interference for the most profitable corporations in human history, seriously and that, I think that's another group. I know we have to end here. But we, we one aspect of this is the cultural aspect, right? And how pure economic logic alone isn't enough to create good climate policy. We have companies. The fossil fuel industry has created a culture of Petro nationalism across the country. They've funded grassroots groups. They're using the power of social media and of community organizing even to create a loyalty to oil and gas where Jim, as you talked about, if the workers were to, you know, really see the that they are completely replaceable, that they are just a tool for the massive profits of these companies, there would be much less loyalty to the industry, and the economic logic of needing to continue with resource extraction wouldn't be as strong. So there's a strong cultural front of this as well. I mean, we saw, I mean, speaking of the disingenuous nature of it, the CGL pipeline up north that has been fought Seth, you mentioned the with So, the clashes with the RCMP and with so attend with incredible violence, incredible colonial violence. And there's such fierce resistance to that pipeline. At the end of the day, CGL has projected around 200 jobs, around 200 permanent jobs for that entire pipeline. And so what keeps that in place is so much of this, so much of the choke hold that the industry has on our politics and these sort of like cultural wars that we have around holding on to fossil fuels. So I just wanted to leave that there as well. That's part of our that's part of our battle here.

Well put

Well, we have covered so much today. So I I just wanted to say thank you so much to Jim Anjali and Seth for this important conversation on marker number five, which is leave no one behind. Taking action on climate doesn't mean that people will be out of work, that indigenous nations can be exploited, or that the economy will collapse, like something that we hear often. We have the historical precedent from the Second World War to know that massive change is possible. We know that a just transition means good job guarantees and upholding workers' rights. And today we talked about some of those important solutions, like the just transition transfer and Canada paying its fair share. What we need now is the political will to make it happen and social solidarity to demand it. I'm your host. Erin Blondeau, if you liked what you heard today, please like subscribe and share with a friend. Be sure to join us for our next and final episode in this series, which is marker number six. Indigenous rights and title are essential to winning. Thank you so much for listening. Everyone. Bye. You.