The Fab Fifteen take climate failures to court |
The Fab Fifteen walked through a raucous guard of honour on their way into Federal Court in Vancouver this week. It was the kind of reception usually reserved for championship-winning sports teams but, in this case, assembled for the group of young Canadians heading in to challenge the government’s lack of action on climate change.
It’s actually difficult to know how to describe the 15 “youth” who come from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities around the country. When the case launched in 2019, the youngest was just 10 and the oldest 19. The gears of justice grind slowly enough that all are now old enough to join the military and most testified this week as adults.
Their claim is straightforward: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees that we all have a right to “life, liberty and security of the person.” The lawyers will wrangle in the murk of legalese, but the basic argument in La Rose v. His Majesty the King is clear as day: the government should be held accountable for making climate impacts escalate and violating those fundamental rights.
"I want the court to know that we are doing this for our future," said 20-year-old Sadie Vipond from Calgary when she took the stand. “We are all, at the end of the day, kids wanting to hold our governments accountable to be able to make our future safer and better for everyone to come after us.”
Sophia Sidarous, a 25-year-old member of Metepenagiag First Nation in New Brunswick, described the impact on nature, wildlife and even Indigenous ceremonies. “Someone actually died from the heat during a powwow," Sidarous testified.
Kira Young, now 20, testified about repeated escapes from wildfires, including when all of Yellowknife had to be evacuated in 2023. “It was very hard. I felt so powerless,” she said. As her family made it past the scarred hulk of a warehouse in Enterprise, a community in the Northwest Territories destroyed by the fire, she remembers wondering if “this was the fate of our home that we had just left.”
Saddling swaths of the country with despair
Listening to the testimony,........