It was a frantic week with Montreal’s climate strike arriving the day after our Premiere with Cirque Eloize’s Seul Ensemble. The good news was that worldwide there had already been a week of climate marches, so the word was out and people were aware that Friday would be happening in a big way. After a few beers at the premiere party the night before the march I tottered home and started painting. From 2am to 4am I painted a banner on a sheet on my floor, and also, unintentionally, literally on my floor. Twenty minutes of mopping took care of the evidence and I was left with a banner as big as a bookshelf made out of an up-cycled sheet I’d bought at Value Village depicting a giant blue and green globe and the words “Policy Change, Not Climate Change” on it. I hung it over the shower curtain to dry and stumbled into bed tired but proud.
As I arrived at the 7 Fingers’ building the day of the march the street in front of their building already showed a trickle of protest-goers, a hint of what was to come. It’s a beautiful thing, seeing a procession of unrelated people all walking the same direction, as if to a baseball game, or a concert, or in this case- and how much better than a ball game!- in this case, a protest for the planet.
At the Fingers, more signs were rolled out: “The chaud must not go on!”, “There is no Planet B”, etc. We stood in the lobby, milling about like excited sheep unsure of the shepherd’s plan, an army not sure where the enemy is. Welcome to the climate dilemma. Everyone wants to help and no one knows what to do. Eventually it was deemed time to go and we took to the streets with banners and fish masks, a school of righteous circus strikers.
-MLK jr.
“There is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of a determined people.”
As we headed towards the starting point at Mont Royal Park the trickle of people flowing in from side streets turned into a stream. Rivulets hit main arteries and by the time we reached Pine it was undeniably a march, a roaring torrent of signs and drums and facepaint, a wave of people hungry for change. Some signs were nothing more than sharpie-scrawled slogans on cardboard, others were works of art. Mine had effectively become a giant sail at this point, so we took a knife and cut stripes in it to let the wind through.
A small portion of the 500k+ people at the 2019 Climate Strike.
Pine hit Parc and at last we saw the true scale of the event. I don’t know what I expected, but when we turned the corner and were struck with the sight of hundreds of thousands of people filling the street all the way up and over the hill under a bluebird, crisp fall day, well it filled me right up. Nearly one in every three residents of Montreal had turned out that day for a total of more than 500,000 participants, the biggest protest of any sort Montreal had every seen.
One of the strange things about the march was that there was very little audience in the traditional sense. We were performing for ourselves: those that supported the march tended to be… marching. There was music and dancing and drums and chanting, art and performance, but for who? Maybe the real audience was the politicians of the world that would see the final pictures, hundreds of thousands of bodies calling for change. My hope is that this army of voices might convince them to overcome their timidity and form policies with real teeth, but I’m not holding my breath. More action will be needed to overcome the inertia and the resistance from those profiting from our status quo, including ourselves.
I was happy to see not a single plastic water bottle or disposable cup throughout the march. This had to be one of the most responsible and civil large gatherings of people the city has seen. There were no toilets provided, and hardly any police officers, but despite the hundreds of thousands of people the streets were left clean. I was later rankled to see that the press had reported on one man trying to throw an egg at Trudeau. What about the other 499,999+ people, I thought? What about the message of the march? There was a bigger story here, and the media sacrificed a great opportunity to spread information and start critical conversations for the sake of an easy headline.
The march finished at the corner Robert-Bourassa and Wellington, with the crowd stretching as far as the eye could see and further back up the hill. We had marched as a solid block for nearly two hours and there were reports from the stage that there were still people arriving back at Mont Royal. We listened to Greta’s speech, which was charming, and everybody cheered.
What was the point of the march? It could be argued that this sort of thing is merely cathartic for the people doing it, and I hear that point of view. I think what is really needed for substantial change is policy action, drastic steps from the government to curb emissions and switch to renewables on a grand scale. In this way the march showed a clear sign of support from the people of Quebec that they are ready for bold action from their politicians. When the majority of emissions are coming from a small number of companies and industries it will take more than people switching away from plastic straws to make the sort of difference that is needed to prevent catastrophic change. It will take those at the top tier of government who guide the policies and decisions that effect the rest of the country to implement sweeping, coordinated changes. For both companies and consumers alike it is always an effort to do anything less than the cheapest, easiest option. Policy change can help make the affordable, convenient choices into the ones that are also best for the planet.
On a smaller scale (and even “small-scale changes” can lead to big change when applied to 500k+ people), a march like this legitimizes the movement, it makes it seem less crazy to suggest to a colleague that they keep a mug and a set of utensils in their bag rather than grabbing a sack of plasticware at the cafe. It motivates people to talk and share information with each other that might lead to further widespread, individual changes. It sends the message to companies nervous about trying vegetarian options that it won’t be such a risk as they fear. It raises awareness in people to inspire their own switches- from cars to bicycles, from polluting banks to cleaner ones, from economy-first candidates to pro-planet candidates, from imported food to local options. At least that’s what I tell myself it does, or might do. Like in making these changes, there’s not much to lose by trying them.
Who wants change? All of us.
Who wants to change? I’ll leave that up to you.
Weel put. And I see my bro there!??