THE LEAP MANIFESTO

A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another.

Watch Video
Read More

THE LEAP MANIFESTO

A call for a Canada based on caring for the Earth and one another.

Read More
Watch Video

DEMANDS
15

AUTHORS
Dozens

SIGNATORIES
50,000

THE VIDEO

BACKGROUND

The Leap Manifesto is a fifteen-point roadmap for how Canada can transition beyond fossil fuels while upholding Indigenous rights and creating a more just and caring country.

The writing of the manifesto was initiated in the spring of 2015 at a two-day meeting in Toronto attended by representatives from Canada’s Indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labour movements.

The meeting was convened to move beyond saying “no” to the worst attacks on our rights and environment, and to dream together about the world we actually want and how to get there. The text and demands of the manifesto were shaped by the contributions of dozens of people.

Beyond demands around the transition off of fossil fuels, the manifesto made connections to other social justice struggles with calls to:

  • use the transition to fully implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
  • expand sectors that are already low-carbon like caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media; 
  • provide status and protection for all workers and “rebalance the scales of climate justice” by welcoming migrants and refugees;
  • massively invest in public infrastructure, transit and rail projects;
  • endorse “energy democracy,” community control of new clean energy systems;. 
  • reject austerity politics and force polluters and to pay for the energy transition.

The document made front-page news across Canada when it launched the leadup to the 2015 federal election, and set off a powerful backlash from right-wing politicians and commentators, including Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Rex Murphy, Conrad Black and more. Conservative papers published an average of an article a week attacking the manifesto over the following year.

Nonetheless, momentum continued to build around The Leap Manifesto, inspiring dozens of local groups and vigorous public debates about the speed and ambition of Canada’s energy transition. A grassroots movement within Canada’s New Democratic Party successfully pushed for the party to debate its key principles at the 2016 convention, leading Macleans Magazine to call the manifesto “the closest thing we’ve seen in Canada to the Bernie Sanders movement.”

A public event at the 2015 Paris Climate Convention attracted over 500 attendees and led to international projects inspired by the document; CNN International covered the event and called the manifesto “a blueprint that could be used around the world.”

In early 2016, members of the core organizing team behind The Leap Manifesto founded The Leap as an independent organization to advocate for ambitious and intersectional climate solutions and projects that brought them to life. Naomi Klein has also written extensively about The Leap Manifesto and the meeting that inspired it, in her books No is Not Enough and On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal.