It's early Friday afternoon and David Suzuki is hunched over a cellphone in the family's crowded Prius as they head south from Vancouver to catch a 3:50pm ferry to Vancouver Island. The 38 mile crossing lasts two hours.
Suzuki is heading to Victoria to take part in the B. C. Supreme court's historic recognition of the aboriginal title of the xeni gwe'tin people to their traditional lands. Afterwards he will catch the 'Powell River Queen' in Campbell River to the Suzuki cabin on Quadra Island, home to the We Wai Kai band of the Laichwiltach nation. It's has been an exhausting week for the 71 year old yet he rallies to talk about the task at hand. Time is short.
Greenliving: I'm deeply concerned about the position Canada has now taken on Kyoto...
Suzuki: Well yes! That's everyone's concern... You know the [Conservative minority] government has taken the unprecedented position of not even taking the opposition parties as official members of the delegation to Bali... It's the first time they've done that. So basically the government is really shutting them out... To me it's a shocking thing. It's a minority government, after all, and one would have thought that in a minority government what you do is you work together because you haven't been given a mandate.
Greenliving: It's very deft and very frightening.
Suzuki: Yes, it's political in the worst sense of the word.
Greenliving: So what can ordinary citizens do?...74 percent of Canadians favoured signing on to Kyoto in the first place. I don't think there's been much attrition since 1996...
Suzuki: Right. Well, there's an election coming, of course,...the government is... going to...put...stiffer sentences for crime, and those kinds of issues...on the front burner and make them the [election] issues...That's what we have to fight against...It's up to every one of us to go to the all-candidates meetings and to say 'look what about the environment?' 'what are we going to do?' After all, the only reason...the current government is making any noise about climate at all is because the public is so bloody concerned about it that they have to respond...But their response so far has been tepid... They're not serious about it, so it's really up to us...And you see...where the current government is...most vulnerable is on the environment, so to keep that suppressed...they use tax breaks or crime...
Greenliving: To distract Canadians?
Suzuki: Exactly.
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