I think that kind of urgency is what makes this stage of the climate movement really different from what it was even a few years ago when it was much more of the professionalized NGOs lobbying behind closed doors and maybe having a march now and then.

If you spend a lot of time with activists, as I have, they're just ordinary people who instead of Netflix are getting together in church basements and making posters or making phone calls doing organizing work. It really is about finding a community of other people.

Catastrophic damage from climate-driven extreme weather is now an annual reality. The cost of not dealing with it will be much greater than if we try to pre-empt some of those disaster cleanups by actually investing in the shift now.

Film 'This Changes Everything' is not a sad story. It's not a slit-your-wrists climate film. It's a story about people who are making change happen.

What we face in Canada are multiple overlapping crises. We have the climate crisis, which is screaming down on us - all of the predictions are coming true even faster than the scientists thought. We have the inequality crisis, where the Panama Papers are a great reminder that the one per cent have actually created their own economy. We still have the crisis of child poverty, which has never been dealt with despite decades of concerned words from politicians.

The book and the film [This Changes Everything] fed into each other in ways that were compounding and very exciting. The pain was shared.

I've always kind of hated films about climate change.