Still hopeful after all these years

“Still Hopeful: Lessons From A Lifetime of Activism”
By Maude Barlow (ECW Press)

When I was teaching political science at Langara College in Vancouver, some of the most memorable events were the half dozen teleconferences Noam Chomsky did with my students.

During one such discussion of international trade treaties in 2012, Chomsky singled out the work of Maude Barlow, then chair of the Council of Canadians, as being instrumental in defeating the proposed “corporate bill of rights” known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

That was just one of a lifetime of Barlow’s achievements, starting with her work for women’s rights, such as advising the CBC on affirmative action programs and later, in the early 1980s, she was prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s adviser on women’s issues.

In 1985, Barlow helped found the Council of Canadians alongside such progressive thinkers as Mel Hurtig, Margaret Atwood and Pierre Berton. The council, then and now, focuses on issues such as promoting democracy and equality in Canada, as well as Canada’s role in international affairs.

Barlow won the Right Livelihood Award in 2005, but she was just getting started.

From 2008 to 2009, she served as senior adviser on water to Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, then president of the United Nations General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the UN. It will not come as a surprise that this campaign was resisted by private water utilities and bottled water companies like Nestlé. However, even the Canadian government was opposed to this most basic right.

In Still Hopeful (her 20th book), Barlow explains Ottawa “knew that if the UN were to formally recognize that water and sanitation are fundamental human rights, it would be held to account for the appalling condition of water services in First Nations communities.”

In 2010, the United Nations formally voted to enshrine access to clean water as a human right.

Despite such significant victories, however, Barlow acknowledges that despair is not unreasonable in the face of the multiple existential crises that humanity is facing regarding democracy, our environment, growing inequality and poverty, and military conflicts, to name a few.

Not surprisingly, it is young people who are the most affected by these threats to our collective well-being. It is their futures especially that are in danger. Barlow asks what can be done to “inspire young people to see that the life of an activist is a good life … find joy in the struggle to make a better world … help them not to be overwhelmed with the enormity of the task ahead?”

That concern was the primary reason for her to write Still Hopeful.

Barlow’s writing is clear and concise, and she uses many personal examples to illuminate the lessons she has learned in her more than 40 years of fighting for social and environmental justice. One of these insights is that it’s not up to “leaders” to do the work of creating a better world, and it makes no sense to just sit back and “hope” they will suddenly decide to do the right thing. In her view, consistent and visible grassroots organizing, at both the local and national levels, has the best chance to lead to the kinds of change that will improve our ecological, political, social and economic realities.

Such movements need both “a vision of what we want” and “concrete goals and plans” that have a chance to make that vision a reality. She notes that every achievement societies have made — such as workers’ rights, medicare, steps toward Indigenous sovereignty, and so on — took years of community effort.

Barlow provides a host of inspiring examples from around the world where people’s movements have succeeded in winning spectacular victories, such as the 10-year struggle of the people of Bolivia to reverse an agreement between the government and the World Bank to privatize the water system of its third-largest city, Cochabamba.

Summing up, in the aftermath of the pandemic, Barlow stresses that:

“We now truly understand the need to ensure public health at a global level and that means it cannot be profit-driven. The fight for human rights and racial, religious and gender equality has entered a new stage and is widely supported. Public appreciation for working people and their unions has never been higher as we commit to class justice as well… Never has there been a greater need for principled and informed activism — and hope.”

And very often, nothing will change until a tipping point is reached and then everything changes.

More than ever, we should remember that, as The Rascals sang: “If we unite, it will all turn out right!”

Peter G. Prontzos, faculty emeritus at Langara College in Vancouver, taught political science for over 25 years. His courses included international political economy, Latin American studies, peace and conflict studies, developing nations, political ideologies, social movements, international relations, political psychology and political philosophy.