‘Government That Actually Confronts Power’

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‘Government That Actually Confronts Power’

[ https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/02/04/Avi- ... dium=email ]

Climate activist Avi Lewis on left-wing populism, his NDP candidacy, tariff wars and more. A Tyee Q&A.

Jen St. Denis - February 4, 2025 - The Tyee Jen St. Denis is a reporter with The Tyee.

EXCERPT: "The Tyee caught up with Lewis to talk about trade tariff threats, misinformation, grocery and housing costs, and whether voters even want to talk about climate policies this election.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The Tyee: What do you think the response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada should be?

Avi Lewis: We’ve been thrust into a historic turning point. When Trump first threatened the tariffs, I saw it as the bellow of the bully, and I think there’s a measure of that. But actually, the more this actual political crisis unfolds, the more I’m realizing the most revealing thing that’s happened in [the week leading up to tariffs being imposed] was DeepSeek.

China has been the primary target of American tariffs for a generation. The limit of those superchips to China and the extreme tariffs in the superchip war between the United States and China meant that China was deeply affected by tariffs, and what was China’s response? China’s response was to take that constraint, turn inward with ingenuity, and in a profound revelation, open-source co-operativism, rather than competition, develop a much more nimble, much cheaper version.

Canada has an absolutely golden opportunity to say, “Look at the world that free trade has brought us,” and actually chart a completely different pathway. We need local, clean manufacturing to make goods in Canada closer to where they’re consumed — for reasons of economic sovereignty, and also to cut down on the climate-bashing emissions of transportation.

I feel like with all this talk of the Canadian economy being threatened, politicians are really focused on oil and gas right now as one of our chief exports. And along with backing off from the carbon tax, it feels like there isn’t a lot of space right now in the national conversation to talk about climate change policies.

How do you navigate that when your whole history is about talking about climate policy?

Well, this is the moment we’ve been waiting for. I mean, this is another Shock Doctrine moment. [Editor’s note: The [i]Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book written by Lewis’s wife, Naomi Klein.][/i] It’s not a coincidence that Trump threatens tariffs and makes a big deal about his puerile understanding of trade deficits to propose more oil and gas. And it’s no coincidence that the oil and gas industry in Canada seizes on any economic crisis to pull the same plans off the same shelf that they always pull off after every invented crisis, and start re-proposing Northern Gateway pipeline. I mean, come on, we’ve seen this movie so many times. What we need to do is actually embrace the Shock Doctrine moment, a book, by the way, which is climbing the charts again, as people try to understand what the hell is going on here, and recognize it’s not the first time. . . . ."

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