The climate crisis in Canada is worsening every year. In 2023, wildfires burned six times their historical average, polluting Montreal’s air quality to the lowest level in the world for two days. In 2024, 32,000 hectares of Jasper National Park burned down, rapidly eliminating critical local biodiversity and natural ecosystems. Across all of northern Canada, the permafrost is melting, destroying the ecosystems which sustain local Indigenous communities. In August, Montreal received more rainfall than it had in 100 years due to Hurricane Debby, causing flooding and the most costly damage in the city’s history. Meanwhile, as 2023 was revealed as the hottest year on global record, studies revealed Canada as the fastest-warming country in the world. 

While Canada as a whole is on track to reduce emissions by about 35 per cent by 2030, Quebec is falling behind, projected to reduce emissions by just 26 per cent. Quebecers took to the streets on Sept. 27 to demand more transparency and concrete climate action in the province. Like many places around the world, Quebec is prioritizing economic growth at the expense of sustainability. And while its goals for economic development include investment in Indigenous communities, they ignore the reality of Canada’s systematic eco-racism, and the fact that no investment in marginalized communities will promote systematic equity if climate justice is not first and foremost addressed.

While the climate crisis affects everyone, certain communities feel its effects much more severely. In Canada, Indigenous and low-income communities without the resources to escape or protect themselves against the disastrous effects of climate change bear the greatest burden of the crisis. The ability to evade wildfires or floods by car, or to survive deadly heat waves with air conditioning, is a potentially lifesaving privilege available only to those who can afford it. These same heat waves are destroying crops both in Canada and abroad, hiking up food prices and exacerbating Canada’s already high food insecurity and cost of living. Meanwhile, the damage to biodiversity, especially in Northern Canada, puts Indigenous communities at unique risk, as they rely directly on the land and its ecosystems for much of their food security. 

McGill—as an institution and as a student body—has the potential to hugely influence Quebec’s policies and initiatives towards climate action and climate justice. McGill has made important steps towards addressing its own complicity in the global carbon footprint by divesting from fossil fuels in December of 2023. While decisions like these deserve due credit, they are not enough; McGill’s vast room for improvement cannot be hidden under micro-scale band-aid initiatives, such as upgrading to an electric heating system or expanding campus green spaces. McGill continues to propagate environmental racism through expansions such as the New Vic Project, which is located on unceded Kanien’keha:ka territory and is potentially home to unmarked Indigenous graves. 

A recognition of global citizenship and a responsibility towards a healthy planet for future generations is the defining task of this generation. On the provincial level, Quebec must enact tangible policies which rethink climate issues from the bottom up, and construct infrastructure with the changing climate in mind first, and economic growth second. McGill must move away from performative greenwashing towards more divestment from companies invested in fossil fuels such as Royal Bank Canada. It must use its state-of-the-art STEM facilities and faculty to make progress towards new sustainable technologies, and it must work in any and all ways possible towards substantive reparations for the Indigenous communities whose land and history McGill has violently disrupted. Finally, the McGill student body must recognize and utilize its own power—the power that successfully pushed McGill once before to divest from fossil fuels—and find space in its activism every day for climate action and climate justice.