Good wars then and now: a Remembrance Day call for climate emergency mobilization

Remembrance Day is an occasion to reflect on the lessons and sacrifices of past struggles. Today, as we prepare to tackle our generation’s greatest threat – the climate emergency – Canada’s mobilization to confront fascism 80 years ago has valuable lessons to offer.

For all of us who wrestle with the enormity of the climate crisis, our Second World War experience offers a helpful — and indeed hopeful — reminder that we have done this before. We have mobilized in common cause to confront an existential threat. And in doing so, we have retooled our entire economy – twice! Once to ramp up military production and once to reconvert to peacetime, all in the space of six short years.

It’s true that the task is urgent, and that our politics has dithered on climate for far too long. But consider this: despite Canada’s war declaration in September of 1939, even as the winds of war gathered in the late 1930s, our leaders were reluctant to recognize what would ultimately be necessary. A lot like today. Canada was on the cusp of being completely transformed by its Second World War experience, yet right up to the 11th hour our government – and much of the public – still hoped to avoid being dragged into that fight.

We find ourselves in a similar awkward period in the present. In the summer of 2019, the federal government passed a “Climate Emergency” motion in the House of Commons, and then proceeded to re-approve the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion the very next day. But as with the Second World War, this Phony War period will not last.

Both WWII and the climate crisis represent profound threats to our security, well-being and the future of our children. If we fail to rise to today’s climate challenge, the human, ecological and economic costs will be devastating. The science is clear that if we do not act quickly, then over the coming decades, things start to get horrific — a world that is unlivable and catastrophic for many, deeply disruptive for all others, and quite possibly ungovernable.

Yet as we’ve all witnessed during this pandemic, something powerful happens when we approach a crisis by naming the emergency and are upfront about the scale of the response required. It creates a new sense of shared purpose, a renewed unity across confederation, and liberates a level of political and economic action that seemed previously impossible. We become collectively willing to see our governments adopt mandatory policies, replacing voluntary measures that merely incentivize and encourage change with clear timelines and regulatory fiat in order to drive change.

During the Second World War, starting from a base of virtually nothing, the Canadian economy and its labour force pumped out a volume of military equipment that is simply mind-blowing. In those six years, with a population less than one third what it is today, Canada produced 800,000 military vehicles (more than German, Italy and Japan combined), over 700 ships, and more than 16,000 military aircraft (building the 4th largest air force in the world at the time). So too, once we shift to emergency mode, we have the knowledge and the capacity to rapidly electrify and decarbonize our economy.

Many worry about the job impacts of climate action, given that about 300,000 Canadians are directly employed in the fossil fuel industry. Yet appreciate that in WWII, over one million Canadians enlisted, and even more were directly employed in military production. All those people had to be trained up, and later reintegrated into a peacetime economy. And that’s what we did, with robust income-support, housing and education programs that changed the face of post-secondary education in Canada and transformed the lives in thousands of people.

Often when talking with each other about climate one hears the refrain: But Canada is just a small country. What would it matter if Canada were to act on climate, especially if the U.S. is going in the opposite direction (as it was under Trump).

But recall that in WWII we did not wait on the Americans. We threw ourselves into that fight two years earlier, and indeed, for much of that time we were the only country in the western hemisphere engaged in the war. We were an even smaller country then – a population of a little over 11 million people. And when it was all over, no one questioned the value and importance of our contributions.

Those who served overseas during the Second World War came back forever changed, and some drew lessons from their war experience that motivated them to fight for peace and human survival for the rest of their lives. They never stopped doing what they could to secure our collective future.

When I was a teenage peace activist in the 1980s, I had the great fortune of getting to meet some of those people, including a lovely man named C.G. “Giff” Gifford, co-founder and long-time chair of Veterans Against Nuclear Arms (VANA).

Gifford was raised in a pacifist household, but as he watched the rise of fascism as a young man in the 1930s, he became convinced that Hitler had to be stopped. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941, became a navigator, flew 49 bombing raids, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Gifford and a handful of other vets founded VANA in Halifax in 1982, when the Cold War and nuclear arms race were still in full swing. Alarmed by then U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s talk about fighting and winning a “limited nuclear war,” VANA chapters sprung up in cities across Canada and grew to 800 members, most of them Second World War vets. They would attend peace marches and Remembrance Day ceremonies wearing white berets, to symbolize both their past in the military and their desire for peace.

Those VANA vets are no longer with us, as we face down the climate emergency. But if they were, I’ve no doubt they would be marching with the student climate strikers. They laid a path – taking lessons from the Second World War to confront global crises in the present.      

This is a moment for our political leaders to reflect on the leaders who saw us through the Second World War and to consider who they want to be, and how they wish to be remembered, as we undertake the new defining task of our lives. And much like the trials that tested the character of past generations, the present emergency demands of all of us that we reflect on who we want to be as we together confront this crisis.        

All of us who take seriously the scientific realities of the climate emergency wrestle with despair. The truth is that we don’t know if we will win this fight — if we will rise to this challenge in time. Yet it is worth appreciating that those who rallied in the face of fascism 80 years ago likewise didn’t know if they would win. We often forget that there was a good chunk of the war’s early years during which the outcome was far from certain. We know how that story ended – they did not. Yet that generation rallied regardless, and in the process surprised themselves by what they were capable of achieving. That’s the spirit we need today.

Few of you reading this were alive in WWII. But all of us who choose to mark Remembrance Day have an appreciation for this history. Many of us look back on such pivotal times and we ask ourselves, “What would I have done if I had lived then and there.” But today, as the future of our children is thrown into doubt and another civilizational threat arrives at our doorstep, the answer to that question is really no great mystery. The answer to that question is: whatever you are ready to do now.

[A video of Seth’s Remembrance Day sermon to Canadian Memorial United Church, based on this article, is available here.]