To secure a just, people-centred green recovery, Canada needs both reactive policies to support workers and communities in affected regions, and proactive interventions to ensure an equitable zero-carbon economy. The scope of the policies must add up to the challenge. Instead of asking if we should focus on green transitions amidst the current socioeconomic disarray, the question should be if we can afford not to.

Canadians own the biggest retail network in Canada: Canada Post. Imagine if those locations could drive a post-carbon, post-COVID transition. Imagine if each of those locations were retrofitted for energy efficiency including solar panels. Every delivery vehicle was electric and there was a network of charging stations from coast to coast to coast, supporting them and the needs of our communities by providing public charging stations.

Global problems of this scale require global cooperation. Nuclear annihilation and extinction by climate catastrophe are twin threats to the planet. Meanwhile, for victims of the neoliberal assault that has plagued the past generation, the short-term problems of sustaining their mere existence displace fundamental questions about the fate of our children and grandchildren.

Why would the Canadian government choose and promote nuclear energy over other cheaper and readily available renewable technologies? It is true that there are still major flaws with renewables, but given that most small modular reactors are a decade away (at least), and the cost of solar has already dropped 89 percent in the last decade, it seems unlikely that SMRs—whenever they are ready—will be competitive.

In Canada, the lack of a coherent national green economy strategy and insufficient federal-provincial collaboration explains why we are rapidly falling behind other industrialized nations. Canada desperately needs stimulus measures to reduce our GHG emissions, foster clean technology development, and secure a just transition to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

As gold prices soar to record levels, the Los Filos gold mine in Mexico has sat idle since early September after its owner, Vancouver-based Equinox Gold, failed to uphold its agreement with the nearby community of Carrizalillo, a small town of about 3,000 people. Equinox blames the community for the shutdown, but in reality, the company and its executives have no one to blame but themselves.

As Biden seems poised to move into a dominant position in the race for president, the progressives and socialists who vote for him can’t become complacent like they did after Obama’s victory in 2008. The only way to push the administration to take the kind of climate action necessary to avoid the worst warming scenarios will require an organizational effort not seen in the United States in many decades.

The actions taken by Europe and China will plummet global demand for petrochemical production. The technological and economic paradigms in these countries will no doubt spread to the rest of the globe while encouraging Canada to do a lot better than its recent plastics proposal, one that falls short of expectations and does little to address one of the most pressing ecological dilemmas of our time.

This marks the seventh installment in an ongoing curated series that asks contributors to imagine the perils and possibilities that will ground our collective response to or emergence from the COVID-19 crisis. Our seventh edition, about water, features contributions from Heather Dorries, Alice Cohen, Brittany Luby and the Niisaachewan Anishinaabe Nation, Kathryn Furlong, and Deborah McGregor.

Climate change solutions will require a government-led, coordinated effort of building multiple national systems simultaneously that are designed to work together: they must be planned by the government. Fascism again stalks the world, exemplified by the current president, and the left must offer an alternative.