Up to 10,000 people attended the March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate in Toronto on July 5, climate action group 350.org said.
The mass march came ahead of the Climate Summit of Americas, held in the city over July 7-9.
Various groups took part in the march, including No One is Illegal Toronto, Greenpeace Canada, First Nations, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario. Marchers called for “a justice-based transition to a clean-energy economy in Canada”.
Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, who took part in the action, told The Toronto Star that day: “We’ve had a government that has pitted jobs and social services against climate for years now.
“Our economy is not in great shape, people are losing jobs in the extractive industry and in the tar sands, and we have a terrible record on climate. We’re losing on all fronts.
“If we took climate change seriously and acted with tremendous urgency — because this is an incredibly urgent threat — we would create inevitably many, many times more jobs than in the current model.
“If we want those jobs to pay a living wage, to be unionised jobs, then we have to fight for that.”
350.org founder Bill McKibben said: “It’s becoming clear that climate change and inequality are the twin overriding issues of our age, and their roots come from the same places — they’re interrelated.”
[Abridged from TeleSUR English.]
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