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

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

The thing that our system is designed to do is keep us alone and isolated in our little consumer bubble. And the most revolutionary act of all might be finding a community of like-minded people where you can talk about these issues and figure out what to do together.

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.

If we could get proportional representation and open up roles for smaller parties in coalition governments, we could start intentionally breaking down the cult of personality that is one of the most distorting things about our electoral system in Canada. We had a constellation of social actors behind the Leap Manifesto. And we created something bigger than ourselves.

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.

So many people are on the front lines of this fossil fuel frenzy. It is infused with a sense of urgency.