If you have a culture based on hunting and fishing and all the animals are disappearing and the fish are sick, then you can't live traditionally. Then your treaty is being violated. Obviously there are degrees of choice in terms of that decision to fight.

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

I think people are losing that sense of security pretty fast, frankly.

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.

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.

Find an organization, shoot them an email, call them up, find them on Facebook and say "Hey, I want to volunteer." And that first step could lead to a whole life of engagement. It could be a pretty exciting ride.

The United States had eight years of Barack Obama. He made it incredibly clear that he was a right-wing Democrat. He cited Ronald Reagan lovingly in every stump speech for the last six months of the presidential 2008 campaign. And he made it clear that he was going to be a business-friendly Democratic president, and that he was not going to rock the neoliberal boat. And he didn't.