From Campbell River to Yellowknife to Charlottetown, thousands of senior Canadians will be marking National Seniors Day today by gathering in their communities to demand aggressive climate action now from all levels of government.
Organized by lifelong climate activist Rolly Montpellier, Seniors for Cl!mate Day was launched at the end of May and already has a subscriber list of nearly 3,000. More than 75 events or actions will be taking place across Canada throughout the day today.
The Energy Mix reached out to dozens of climate-activated seniors across the country, asking what motivated them to participate today.
Here’s what some of them had to say.
“Denying reality won’t make it go away,” said Bonnie Brownstein of Quadra Island, British Columbia, who is helping to organize a speaker-focused event in Campbell River.
An avid kayaker, Brownstein was out paddling with her husband in the Broughton Archipelago during the 2021 heat dome, an event that killed more than 600 people, most of them vulnerable individuals in the Lower Mainland, and left a billion intertidal sea creatures dead all along the Pacific Northwest Coast. Brownstein spoke of seeing “thousands of tiny animals floating dead in the water.”
The extreme summer of 2021 also strongly motivates Dave Gregory of Nelson, B.C. “The months-long combination of smoke and a heat dome that we experienced here two years ago, it made normal life impossible while being an obvious harbinger of the future if global warming is not halted,” Gregory said. And then there was this summer’s wildfire evacuation of his daughter’s family from the Slocan. “That hit home,” he said.
The Nelson event will feature a “rocking chair” rally outside the local branch of the Royal Bank of Canada—the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuels, and in particular fracked gas, in 2023.
Erlene Woollard, a Suzuki Elder involved in organizing Vancouver’s Climate Crawl through Art, Culture and Action, said her granddaughter’s frustrated query—“How many wake-up calls do grownups need?”—was a galvanizing call to action.
“I hope for the power and political voice of elders to be realized and put to good use. I hope we can make discordant noise, that our votes will count, and that we can demand that more effective politics be taken seriously with the support of youth (and all citizen) alliances,” Woollard said.
“People think seniors can’t do much to change the climate heating situation. But if you just turned 65, you could theoretically have 10 to 20 years left of polluting the atmosphere or 10 to 20 years of making change for the better,” Lisa Allan, organizer of an event in Athabasca, in northern Alberta, told The Mix. “That counts,”
Describing Alberta’s summer of ongoing drought, Jasper aflame, and devastating hailstorms as “yet another reminder that climate change is not some problem down the road,” Heather Addy, co-organizer of an event in Calgary, said she was motivated to climate activism in part by her long professional life as a biology professor at a local university. Many of her students testified to extreme fears about the future, to the point of not wanting to have children.
“It is particularly important for seniors in Calgary to come together, given the prominence of the oil and gas industry here,” Addy said. “Our elected leaders need to hear that seniors in Alberta want decisive action and will vote for people who lead on climate change.”
Organized by the Saskatchewan Environmental Society’s volunteer elders, the Seniors for Climate project in Saskatoon will see a full-page ad appearing in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and the Regina Leader Post this morning. Signed by more than 160 seniors from across the province, the ad contains a statement of concern and a call to action, event contact Ann Coxworth, a long-serving volunteer with the Saskatchewan Environmental Society in Saskatoon, told The Mix.
“We are seniors who care about the future we are leaving for our children and grandchildren and for young people everywhere. The climate crisis threatens their very existence,” the ad reads. “We are seniors. Seniors care. Seniors vote.”
For Pat Wally, who is coordinating a Climate Action Expo in Winnipeg, this spring’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in support of a climate suit advanced by senior Swiss women was the prompt to join Seniors for Climate Manitoba.
“We will have over 25 exhibitors who will be providing solutions so that folks can get answers to the question, ‘What more can I do’ by myself, and when I join together with others,” Wally said.
Pat Smith of Barrie, Ontario, who is organizing her community’s three-hour event, described a late but increasingly urgent personal drumbeat of alarm leading towards climate action. “In my adulthood I lived in the Near North and managed to ignore the whispers of climate change for the most part. I was caught up in ‘progress’ and ‘consumption’,” Smith said. “I thought Canada was lucky to have so much oil and gas.”
But now, “all of us in our 70s know in our hearts that the world is catching fire.”
Five hundred kilometres to the east, in the small town of Casselman, Ontario, Lynn Ovenden is marking Seniors for Climate Day by hosting a coffee party in her home.
“I live on a busy highway where it’s very difficult to know your neighbours. I want to know these people,” Ovenden told The Mix. “I want to know how they care for the future and who they think of as their community. I’d like us to sense the security of community and, maybe, ultimately, find some collective agency for the common good.”
“At the local level, the silence around environmental breakdown saps your spirit,” Ovenden added. “I am hoping we will enjoy our conversation over coffee and feel encouraged.”
Margaret Ann McHugh, organizer of the event in Halifax, cited a litany of escalating harms now becoming facts of life for Nova Scotia—including intensifying hurricanes, lethal flooding, ocean rise, and last year’s “horrendous fires”—as her motivation to step up.
“We want to join seniors across Canada, who vote in large numbers and who control a lot of the nation’s wealth, to demand an end to fossil fuel use, a just transition, and mitigation and adaptation in the meantime,” McHugh said.
“We urge New Brunswickers to use their democratic power to vote in favor of a future without fossil fuels and to put pressure on our politicians to prioritize climate change in a tangible and visible way,” Muriel Jarvis, said organizer of the rally in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, where one of three provincial elections this fall is under way. (The other two are in B.C. and Saskatchewan.)
“During last week’s political debate not one mention was made of the climate emergency—either by the interviewers or by the candidates. That is shameful!” she said.
Quispamsis, New Brunswick’s “learn and act” event will include an opportunity to sign a letter addressed to provincial party leaders and candidates demanding that they tell New Brunswickers before Election Day October 21, “how they plan to stop the burning of fossil fuels while protecting those standing in the headlights of oncoming climate-caused dangers,” said Ann McAllister, who is organizing the event for the Greater Saint John region.
“My vote depends on it,” she added.
