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Students staging climate rally

FRANCIS CAMPBELL THE CHRONICLE HERALD fcampbell@herald.ca @frankscribbler

Lilian Hougan-veenma is in her senior year at Citadel High School in Halifax but she's long since resigned herself to learning all she can about climate change and how to slow its assault on her city, province and the globe.

“I had always been very interested in the environment,” Hougan-veenma said. “I grew up being outside and I had been involved in environmental clubs, and in 2019, I got involved in School Strike after the really big 10,000-people march.”

The 17-year-old is part of Climate Strike Halifax, a students group that has organized a climate justice rally for Friday to coincide with global strikes around the world.

The global rally is #Uprootthesystem, recognizing that the current climate crisis is caused and its effects amplified by different intersecting systems of political, social and economic oppression.

Hougan-veenma said the goal of the strike is to send a message to the provincial and federal governments that clear climate goals and targets are needed and to impose accountability on governments for reaching those goals.

“Nova Scotia has a Sustainable Goals and Development Act but it's quite lacklustre and it doesn't have very many strong targets to reach and there is no actual accountability for the government to reach those targets,” she said.

The Liberal government under Stephen Mcneil introduced the Sustainable Development Goals Act on Oct. 23, 2019, and it received royal assent a week later.

As of May 27, the government was asking Nova Scotians for their ideas on fighting climate change to help inform the regulations for the act with the promise to proclaim the act into law at the completion of the consultation period, which ended on July 27.

Before that happened, thenliberal Leader and Premier Iain Rankin called an election on July 17 and the Aug. 17 vote swept the Liberals aside in favour of the majority Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Tim Houston.

In Houston's mandate letters to newly appointed department ministers, he directs Environment and Climate Change Minister Tim Halman to introduce new environmental legislation during the first House session, set for next month.

The new legislation, to be called the Enviro-goals and Climate Change Reduction Act (EGCCRA) “will guide Nova Scotia toward a cleaner and healthier environment in the coming decade (and beyond) and will further encourage growth of the sustainable and green economy and the sustainability of traditional industries,” Houston's mandate letter reads.

Halman was also directed to set environmental goals for the province to achieve long-term objectives that included:

• implementing the Independent Review of Forestry Practices (Lahey Report); • protect at least 20 per cent of the total land and water mass of Nova Scotia for nature conservation by 2030;

• updating the environmental impact assessment process to consider the cumulative impacts of any development that would potentially affect wetlands, rivers, lakes, or other aquatic environments;

• supporting and encouraging local food consumption;

• committing to 80 per cent of electricity needs being supplied by renewable energy by 2030;

• working with the auto and gas service industries to sell 30 per cent zero-emission vehicles by 2030; and

• ensuring that new provincial buildings are net-zero and that all major provincial building retrofits will be low-carbon, reducing embodied carbon and ensuring 75 per cent of domestic office floor space (new leases and lease renewals) will be in net-zero carbon climate resilient buildings starting in 2030.

The rally will start at noon at Victoria Park in Halifax, move along to Nova Scotia Power headquarters and then the legislature before ending up at an undetermined location. Hougan-veenma said the hope is to get a large number of Halifax-area high school students out, along with university students and members of the general public.

She said the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report showed that Canadian and Nova Scotia targets “are not strong enough.”

The world is running out of time and young people are running low on hope, Houganveenma said.

“There is a lot of resignation, that there is no way to change what's happening,” she said of many of her school peers. “I think a lot of people have lost hope that anything is going to happen and hope in government assistance to make things happen, which is also very unfortunate. But I do think there are a lot of reasons for hope, we know the science and we do know what needs to be done.”

Hougan-veenma said the group has modest expectations for the rally turnout.

“The last strike we had was very limited because of COVID, but 200 to 300 would be amazing,” she said. “Obviously people are not supercomfortable in groups after COVID. Masks are mandatory of course but it's just to get back out there and get the message out.”

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2021-09-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

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