Last Friday, the world watched young people protesting and marching to protest against climate change. In Canada, 16 year old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg led the protest in Montreal. As usual, our Prime Minister and other politicians photo-bombed the whole event, as though they were right with them all along. I had previously written my own thoughts about this on the post More Carbon Confusion https://everydaylillie.com/2019/09/14/more-carbon-confusion/

I will definitely be adding some more ideas on this in the near future. This topic is so important to all of us, and in particular to our young people, so I just think that all of our politicians are missing the point. I thought that it would be a good idea to give you my observations about the activiites on Friday of 4 real Canadian youth. It’s meant to be funny – so hope you don’t mind.

My four young adult children each attend a different Canadian University. Some of them keep in touch really well, but when they don’t – they are always trackable on social media.

Do any of you hear about your kids activities that way?

So it began with the youngest, forwarding a post requesting his University support the climate strike by cancelling classes and midterms for that day. I was wondering if he just wanted the day off – but he actually had a midterm that day, and so did not attend his local march.

Our oldest, works and attends school part time. He had to work, and drove to work, commenting that there is no public transit to easily get between the two cities. Fair enough, we have good in-city bus systems, but poor between town transportation. Our Go Transit train system has mostly east-west lines – but limited services or none between certain areas. It still revolves mainly around a Toronto Hub and so doesn’t serve a lot of our province.

The second older lives several hours north, where it’s much colder generally. She was making protest signs, marching as I would expect. She could later be seen playing beach volleyball.

The second youngest heard that his climate march was rescheduled to 9am and ended shortly – because there was a Prairie Blizzard. He sent us a picture of snow!

I’m proud of my children and their choices. Sometimes I’m just happy they are so busy, but I find the weather contrast on the day of the climate strike to be ironic.