The Battle Plan: Key Lessons from the Second World War for the Climate Mobilization, from A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
To execute a successful battle, we need a plan — a roadmap to guide us through the stages of climate mobilization. From my study of Canada’s Second World War experience, and in particular how we successfully mobilized on the home front, the following key strategic lessons emerge:
Adopt an emergency wartime mindset, prepared to do what it takes to win. Something powerful happens when we approach a crisis by naming the emergency and the need for wartime-scale action. It creates a new sense of shared purpose, a renewed unity across Canada’s confederation, and liberates a level of political action that seemed previously impossible. Economic ideas deemed off-limits become newly considered, and we open ourselves up to fresh ways of thinking. We see the attacks on our soil for what they are. And 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 and meet ambitious targets.
Rally the public at every turn. Many assume that at the outbreak of the Second World War everyone understood the threat and was ready to rally to Mackenzie King’s call. But that was not so. It took leadership to mobilize the public. In frequency and tone, in words and in action, the climate mobilization needs to look and sound and feel like an emergency. If our governments are not behaving as if the situation is an emergency, then they are effectively communicating to the public that it is not. As occurred in the war, our governments need to develop and execute multifaceted advertising programs that boost the level of public “climate literacy” and outline and explain their policy responses. The news media and educational institutions need to reimagine their approach to this crisis, and we must demand that they do so. We need to marshal the cultural and entertainment sectors, which requires major public funding for arts and culture initiatives that seek to rally the public. And we need to better include the public in decision-making as we refine our climate policies, through the use of citizen assemblies and other means of democratic engagement.
Inequality is toxic to social solidarity and mass mobilization. A successful mobilization requires that people make common cause across class, 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. During the First World War, inequality undermined such efforts. Consequently, at the outset of the Second World War, the government took bold steps to lessen inequality and limit excess profits. Such measures are needed again today.
Embrace economic planning and create the economic institutions needed to get the job done. During the Second World War, starting from a base of virtually nothing, the Canadian economy and its labour force pumped out planes, military vehicles, ships and armaments at a speed and scale that is simply mind-blowing. Remarkably, the Canadian government (under the leadership of C.D. Howe) established 28 crown corporations to meet the supply and munitions requirements of the war effort. That is just one example of what the government was prepared to do to transform the Canadian economy to meet wartime production needs. The private sector had a key role to play in that economic transition, but vitally, it was not allowed to determine the allocation of scarce resources. In a time of emergency, we don’t leave such decisions to the market. Throughout most of the war years, the production and sale of the private automobile, in both Canada and the U.S., was effectively banned; instead those auto factories were operating full tilt to churn out wartime vehicles. Howe’s department undertook detailed economic planning to ensure wartime production was prioritized, conducting a national inventory of wartime supply needs and production capacity and coordinating the supply chains of all core war production inputs (machine tools, rubber, metals, timber, coal, oil and more). The climate emergency demands a similar approach to economic planning. We must again conduct an inventory of conversion needs, determining how many heat pumps, solar arrays, wind farms, electric buses, etc., we will need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels. We will need a new generation of crown corporations to then ensure those items are manufactured and deployed at the requisite scale. We will require huge public investments in green and social infrastructure to expedite the transformation of our economy and communities. And as we did in the war, we will need to mobilize labour to get this job done, banishing unemployment in the years to come.
Spend what it takes to win. A benefit of an emergency or wartime mentality is that it forces governments out of an austerity mindset and liberates the public purse. The Second World War saw an explosion in government spending. In order to finance the war effort, the government issued new public Victory Bonds and new forms of progressive taxation were instituted. Yet these new taxes and what remains to this day historic levels of public debt did not produce economic disaster, as is so often claimed. On the contrary, they heralded an era of record economic performance. As we confront the climate emergency, financing the transformation before us requires that we employ similar tools.
Leave no one behind. The Second World War saw over one million Canadians enlist in military service and a similar number employed in munitions production (far more than are employed in the fossil fuel industry today). After the war, all those people had to be reintegrated into a peacetime economy. That too required careful economic planning, and the development of new programs for returning soldiers, from income support to housing to post-secondary training. Those post-war programs weren’t simply the result of government largesse and goodwill; they stemmed from the demands of labour and social movements, who after the ravages of the Depression and war insisted on a new deal. The ambition of these initiatives provides a model for what a just transition can look like today; they should inspire us to develop robust programs for all workers whose economic and employment security is currently tied to the fossil fuel economy, with a special focus on those provinces and regions most reliant on oil and gas production.
Reject the straitjacket of neoliberal economic thinking. The previous lessons all share a common thread — the casting off of free-market economic ideas and assumptions that have kept us from doing what we need to do in the face of the climate emergency. During the war, given the urgency and scale of the task, both the general public and private-sector leaders understood that the economic transformation had to be state-led. Canada’s Second World War government was by and large a free-market oriented administration (indeed, that orientation had severely constrained government action during the Depression of the 1930s, at the price of great hardship). But in the face of the urgent need to confront fascism, its leaders were no longer ideologically rigid. They were prepared to embrace a level of economic planning, public investment and public enterprise that seemed previously unimaginable.
Transform government. Once an extended emergency is truly recognized, all the institutions and machinery of government are focused on the task of confronting it. During the Second World War, King appointed a powerful war subcommittee of cabinet to oversee the government’s efforts. We need a Climate Emergency War Cabinet Committee today, and a Climate Emergency Secretariat in the Prime Minister’s Office and each premier’s office, coordinating our emergency response as a whole-of-government approach. Just as we have created a governance architecture for fiscal planning, budgeting, budget consultations and accountability in the present, so too we need to build similar systems for carbon budgeting. We need new federal-provincial-municipal cost-shared programs focused on the climate crisis, including a new federal Climate Emergency Just Transition Transfer to collaboratively fund new green infrastructure and job training initiatives, with funding going disproportionately to the provinces with the most heavy-lifting to do in this transition. We need to breathe a new, ambitious spirit into the civil service. During the war, C.D. Howe created end runs around the existing civil service to expedite wartime production. That was effective but also produced its own problems. The challenge now is to transform the public service — to recruit and promote the people willing and able to make bold things happen quickly. We need visionary and creative people in key leadership positions in the civil service and to bring in outside experts, civil society leaders and entrepreneurs as needed to drive change and oversee the necessary scale-up. And we need all political parties to advance policy agendas that are truly consistent with what the science demands of us.
Indigenous leadership, culture, and title and rights are central to winning. Indigenous people played an important role in the Second World War. Today, their role in successfully confronting the climate crisis is pivotal. As our mainstream politics dithers and dodges meaningful and coherent climate action, the assertion of Indigenous title and rights is buying us time, slowing and blocking new fossil fuel projects until our larger politics come into compliance with the climate science. Some of Canada’s most inspiring renewable energy projects are also happening under First Nations’ leadership. It is imperative to both honour and support such efforts, first by embedding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into law at all levels of government, and second by ensuring that Indigenous communities and nations are full partners in the development of our climate emergency plans.
Everyone has to do their bit. The Second World War was a total war effort. It was not merely prosecuted by government, the military and war manufacturing firms. All households played their part. Every company in the country made adjustments. All institutions were engaged. The same is true today. Households will need to shift their consumption, their transportation and how they heat their homes. All companies and institutions, public and private, need transition plans. Thousands of young people want a role to play, and many could find meaning in a new national Youth Climate Corps. And social movements will need to keep governments’ feet to the fire at every stage.
This time, human rights must not be sacrificed. The government’s invocation of the War Measures Act in 1939 came at too high a price. People were imprisoned and interned without due process. Communities were forcibly relocated. Civil liberties were forsaken. Canada’s wartime experience offers cautionary tales of what not to do. The current crisis gives us an historic opportunity to avoid the sins of the past, and to engage in a form of emergency mobilization that is collaborative rather than coercive.
Canada is not an island. We don’t win wars by ourselves, and neither can we opt out when justice demands our engagement. Canada’s population is relatively small, yet we have punched above our weight before — we certainly did in the Second World War — and we can again. This lesson applies at multiple levels. First, while Canada’s domestic GHG emissions may be small at a global level, we are also a major international exporter of fossil fuels. Second, in addition to taking climate action at home, Canada must embrace our responsibilities to the rest of the world. During the Second World War, Canada was extremely generous with our financial transfers to various Allies, despite unprecedented demands at home. Our historic per capita GHG emissions have been disproportionately high, carbon pollution does not stop at our borders, and we are one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Given all this, it is incumbent on Canada to substantially boost our financial transfers to poorer countries, particularly in those regions hardest hit by the climate crisis and extreme weather. This is not a matter of charity, but of necessity and justice. Third, we must make right one of the most shameful chapters of Canada’s Second World War legacy — the response to refugees. Before, during and after the war, Canada refused to open its doors to people fleeing persecution, particularly Jews seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. In the coming decades, the crises of people displaced by climate impacts will surely be a defining issue. This time, we need to act with honour.
When necessary, real leaders throw out the rule book, and they are the heroes. Stay alert throughout this book to people who, in the face of a humanitarian crisis, defy orders and the norms of their time and circumstance — they are the ones who change the course of events. These are some of the people we remember from the Second World War, and they will be the people history again recalls as climate emergency champions.
Know thine enemy. Before engaging in battle, we need to know what we are up against. The enemy was clear in the Second World War — today, less so. We face numerous barriers to change, particularly a fossil fuel industry that has done much to block climate action. One of the most insidious barriers is a dynamic I call the “new climate denialism,” along with its various manifestations, peddlers and enablers. The new climate denialism currently dominates our politics, and it is the new modus operandi of the fossil fuel industry. We will start our mobilization roadmap here.
A Good War puts “meat on the bones” of each of these lessons. The book is an historical excavation — an unearthing of what we are capable of when we collectively approach an emergency with a new mindset, not only with respect to economic change, but with a new spirit of collaboration and purpose.