The Leap Manifesto... (and a minor quibble)

Last week a number of prominent Canadian individuals and civil society organizations released "The Leap Manifesto" - an important document challenging Canadians and in particular the government to acknowledge, confront and tackle the severe problems of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation (in particular climate change).

Like many Canadians I agreed with the premises and objectives of the Manifesto, not to mention the urgency with which these problems need to be addressed, as implied in the name of the concept. Some 21,555 people had signed the Manifesto within a week of it's publication - I being one of them.

However, like any Manifesto, where it succeeds in conceptual ideas it falls short on detail. And one detail in particular merits a little bit further elaboration in my view. At one point the manifesto claims the following:

"High-speed rail powered by just renewables and affordable public transit can unite every community in this country – in place of more cars, pipelines and exploding trains that endanger and divide us."

Really... there are just far too many sentiments crammed into this sentence and the effect is that it comes off as unrealistic and unclear. The vision painted is of some super futuristic society where carbon-neutral high-speed trains link all the metropolises and towns of Canada. But clearly that can't be what is actually intended, as that would be an environmental catastrophe in a country as vast as Canada. I've written about this elsewhere, but the energy required to build and power new high-speed train lines is vast, and even wasteful when we consider existing resources such as the publicly-owned rail services operated by VIA Rail, bus/coach transport, and yes - even congested highway infrastructure. In a neoliberal country like Canada high-speed trains are a business mechanism for creating growth - the idea is to get more people travelling, not to reduce the overall volume of travel. So we need to be careful when we paint a picture of new energy-intensive infrastructures being built all over this vast country.

What I think the Manifesto intends in that statement is the following, and it would do well to take the time to spell out the details: 1) we need to provide more environmentally-sound methods of transport between and within cities; 2) we need to promote and support public forms of transportation and make transport more accessible to all Canadians; 3) we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, particularly in the transport sector; and 4) we need to reduce our dependence on rail freight and pipelines for shipping crude oil, because this has led to increasing frequency and lethality of accidents (with dire consequences for public safety and environmental health).

I'll readily admit this is just a quibble, and it arises specifically because I've spent half a decade studying Canada's high-speed rail prospects during my doctoral studies. Nevertheless, words matter, and if the Leap Manifesto is to be taken seriously it needs to be sure that its idealistic optimism is backed by practical concepts and facts.