Environmental activists protest outside Vancouver City Hall

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Demonstrators gathered outside Vancouver City Hall on Feb. 10, demanding the city to act on climate change.

Organizers from Fridays for Future Vancouver created the protest in response to the Climate Emergency Action Plan’s annual report, which city officials will present to Mayor Ken Sim and council on Feb. 15. The organization is a local branch of the larger non-profit organization, Fridays for Future Canada, where people across the country protest for climate change on Fridays in hopes to seek change. 

“I’m hoping the City of Vancouver will recognize that we drastically need urgent climate action,” says Neelam Chadha, Fridays for Future Vancouver organizer and event host. “I can’t emphasize the urgency enough.”

Chadha says the report will reveal Vancouver is not on target to cut carbon pollution in half by 2030, as stated in the city’s action plan.

“A big thing is emissions reduction…. Emissions from housing [are] one of the really big sources, as well as emissions from vehicles,” Chadha says.

To lower emissions, she hopes council will make Vancouver more pedestrian, transit, and bike friendly.

Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki, Councillors Adriane Carr and Pete Fry with the Green Party, Christine Boyle of OneCity Vancouver, and Janet Fraser, a Green school board trustee, attended the rally.

Carr, founder of the Green Party of Vancouver, used the rally to bring awareness to Sue Big Oil, a campaign for the city to dedicate funding towards filing a class-action lawsuit against oil companies.

“I want the polluters to pay [and to] get the money back into the hands of the city to pay for the increasing [environmental] damage we are going to have to repair,” Carr says.

Fraser became connected to Fridays for Future Vancouver as a candidate during the election, along with many of her colleagues. She is hoping for broader leadership on climate reform.

“We need to see more action at the federal level because they really control a lot of what happens in Canada,” Fraser says. “That will support the action that’s been taken locally.”

During the protest, demonstrators repeated chants calling for climate action. Community music groups, like the Left Coast Labour Chorus, Solidarity Notes, and Acapellaboratory, performed songs with lyrics encouraging people to “face this crisis” and “save our planet.”

Organizers with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment also attended the protest.

“We hope that people walking by will continue to pressure [the] city to make sure they have policies that acknowledge the climate emergency we’re in,” says Dr. Margaret McGregor, member of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. 

Babies for Climate Action and For Our Kids Vancouver, two climate groups made up of concerned parents, were at the rally.

Demonstrators filled out a “wish tree” provided by For Our Kids Vancouver with their climate solutions and ideas, like “hang laundry to dry” and “no private jets.”

They also completed Valentines with their calls for action, which organizers collected with the goal of giving to city leadership.

Organizers from Stop TMX, a group against the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project, handed out flyers for a rally coming up on Feb. 21.

They plan to demonstrate outside the law courts at Robson Square, bringing attention to the sentencing hearing of eight climate demonstrators who protested the pipeline construction in Oct. 2020. They were found guilty of criminal contempt in Dec. 2022 after violating a court injunction, according to Castanet.

Stop TMX organizers will also be streaming the hearing set to take place in Kamloops.

“We hope that city councillors also will see this not as a kind of ideological issue, but something that affects the health of everybody, and particularly the health of the next generations to come,” McGregor says.