Climate Action Parry Sound (CAPS) held a Fridays for Future strike this afternoon (March 31) on James Street to demand action on climate change.
Ken Christenson, one of the founders of CAPS, says the organization is calling on all levels of government for “real leadership” to tackle the climate crisis.
Christenson says CAPS started holding the weekly Fridays for Future strikes in Parry Sound in 2019, shortly after Greta Thunburg started. “[We have been] going out on Fridays to just keep this climate emergency in the public eye and to give messages to governments,” he says.
“It’s really unrealistic to expect 80 [or] even 90 per cent of the population to actually get out on the streets and demand action to do anything [about climate change], [or] to even understand the emergency as it is, without the government telling the truth. They want to hear it from the government before this action and we’re not getting that even in this last budget. We have all kinds of incentives, market incentives, incentives to corporations and that’s not real leadership,” he says.
Christenson says the organization has switched to rotating strikes. he says the idea actually came from the neighbouring region’s Climate Action Muskoka (CAM).
“So that is what we were doing today and it was a really good turnout,” Christenson says. He says he never did an official count but he estimates there could have been as many as twenty people on James street for today’s strike. Moving forward, he says strikes will be happening in;
- Burks Falls at the post office on the first Friday of the month.
- Huntsville at the town hall on the second Friday of the month.
- Sundridge at the post office on the third Thursday of the month.
- Huntsville at the town hall on the fourth Friday of the month.
- Parry Sound at the corner of Mary Street and James Street on the fifth Friday of the month.
- Bracebridge’s Memorial Park, every Friday from 11:30 to 12:30
He says the group is looking forward to bigger and bigger strikes, “because people do want to come out [especially] when they know that their town is hosting [strikes for] these other towns,” Christenson says.