VANCOUVER — “I’ve always kind of hated movies about climate change.”I’m listening.Naomi Klein drops that line right at the start of the 2015 documentary This Changes Everything, directed by her husband, Avi Lewis. I’ll admit it’s a clever hook, acknowledging that most climate films are guilt trips.Climate change documentaries had their cultural moment — think Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006 — but the genre has more than cooled off since then. Perhaps that's because nearly two decades later, many of the most dramatic near-term doomsday predictions haven’t panned out at the scale or speed warned about. CO₂ levels climbed, yet we’re still here: no widespread societal collapse, no mass famines pinned directly on warming, Mount Kilimanjaro remains snow-capped, and Florida is not underwater. The “slit-your-wrists despair” offered by such films, once popular with younger audiences, has given way to something else.That “slit-your-wrists” description comes courtesy of Lewis himself. In interviews promoting the film, he insisted This Changes Everything was “not a slit-your-wrists climate film.” It wasn’t another sad story of inevitable doom. Instead, it was meant to be a story about people “fighting back” — and about the deeper forces that, in his view, make real solutions “impossible under the current system.”Fast-forward to this past weekend, when Lewis cruised to a first-ballot victory as the new federal NDP leader in Winnipeg, taking 56% of the vote. The filmmaker is now the face of Canada’s Left, ready to drive his long-held political philosophy into the heart of national politics. Lewis describes that political philosophy as “eco-socialism.”.But what is that exactly? What is an “eco-socialist?”Put rather simply: in the minds of Lewis and Klein, the only way to fix the “climate crisis” is to become a socialist. Think Lenin meets Gore.In a memorable 2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation exchange, journalist and commentator Tom Switzer pressed Klein on the connection. Switzer, a longtime skeptic of aggressive climate policy and big-government solutions, called eco-socialism a “watermelon.” It is green on the outside, red on the inside..He suggested that activists like Klein and Lewis use environmental issues to advance a deeper socialist agenda. Klein, he added, deserved credit for her “intellectual honesty” because “she doesn’t even pretend.”“I’m not concealing,” Klein replied, smiling in agreement.Lewis is equally unapologetic about his socialist leanings. He and Klein both proudly call themselves “eco-socialists.” And like all good socialists, they're multi-millionaires who also have a manifesto..That manifesto is the Leap Manifesto, released in 2015 by Klein, Lewis, and a coalition of labour, indigenous, environmental, and “social-justice groups.”It recommends respecting indigenous land rights and title as the mere starting point, followed by a complete break and moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure and expansion, a rapid shift to “100% clean energy,” and then a bunch of “fair transition” and “social justice” gobbledygook.This past weekend, numerous observers of the “international clown show circus” leadership convention noticed and asked questions about the visuals during Lewis’s victory speech. Supporters waved a large Palestinian flag prominently on stage behind the new leader. No Canadian flag was visible in the key shots..The answer to those questions regarding the Palestinian flag might be contained in the first lines of Lewis and Klein’s Leap manifesto.The document opens with a blunt declaration: “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking details about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty and inequality are a scar on the country’s present. And Canada’s record on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future.”.You could almost picture Iranian mullahs using kinder language in a stern letter to President Donald Trump. It’s an openly hostile anti-Canada approach right out of the gate — framing the country not as a flawed but remarkably successful liberal democracy with enviable living standards, resource wealth, and innovation, but as a perpetrator of historical violence, present-day scars, and the purveyor of both ongoing and future crimes against humanity.Aside from casting Canada as the new Nazi Germany, the other core belief underpinning the manifesto is straightforward and sweeping. Capitalism’s endless drive for profit and growth — “extract, expand, profit” — is the real villain. And whether you pick capitalism or socialism, Lewis says, it doesn't matter. You're cooked either way.“The future is radical. One way or another,” Lewis says in another interview hyping This Changes Everything. “We have an opportunity to get off this path and actually move to a low-carbon, post-carbon society in a way that serves the needs of justice — where people who got the worst deal in the old economy are first in line for the next economy.”Avi Lewis is the kind of socialist who thinks previous socialists didn’t go far enough. Where others might have settled for mixed economies or welfare states, he and Klein demand full democratic planning, public ownership of key sectors, wealth taxes, and an ecological straitjacket on growth itself.The “old economy,” in this telling, is the familiar fossil-fuel-driven, profit-chasing system that built much of Canada’s wealth but now stands accused of cooking the planet. The “next economy” is the publicly steered alternative — no more “infinite growth on a finite planet,” as Lewis likes to put it with a shrug: “Just say to anyone, can we have infinite growth on a finite planet? Duh, no.”
