What is hope?
How do we define it? And, where can we find it?
In her latest book Still Hopeful: Lessons from a lifetime of activism, author and activist Maude Barlow tackles these questions and provides much needed answers to a younger generation that isn’t necessarily aware of the long political battles that preceded them.
The book is also for the rest of us discouraged skeptics looking for meaning and motivation.
Barlow’s book follows her long and rich successful years of activism in Canada and internationally.
The book opens with highlighting the importance of building movements. She writes about, “the need for movements to have goals and plans.” She reminds us that movements go beyond a simple campaign or protest.
Not to diminish from the efficacy of the latter, but a movement is about being strategic, thinking in the long term, and passing the fight from one generation to the next.
“It isn’t about winning a particular cause or even a campaign,” Barlow writes, “it is about building a movement that is sustainable.”
And she is absolutely right.
Perhaps today some people don’t know about the Black American marches on the streets of Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. But everyone knows about the civil rights movement in America that gave Black Americans the visibility and freedom they longed for at the time.
Barlow’s book takes the readers back and forth from the past to the future with some important stops marked by crucial milestones in her activism. The first stop is on feminism; Barlow candidly describes her own upbringing in a time where women had to fight for everything. There were fights for freedom to choose education, careers, and political involvement, all of which posed particular challenges based on the women’s socio-economic background.
Following in her own advice, Barlow doesn’t stop at her own aspirations but spreads her activism to other women around the world to fight against inequalities and injustice.
Barlow understands fighting for women’s rights isn’t only a Canadian matter but in reality, the rights of women at home is strongly linked to the socio-economic rights of other women around the world. It is the interconnection between women’s issues and economic issues that took Barlow employ her approach in the corporate world. She aimed to stop the impact of globalization on small businesses and farmers in Canada and the Global South.
In 1986, Barlow established the Council of Canadians and lead it for three decades. “If activists don’t know about these forces of economic globalization, they are working with one arm behind their back.”
Barlow recounts the complexity and multilayered aspects of these fights and the harsh consequences of free-trade policies in the early 1980s.
I personally remember the terrible consequences for women after the implementation of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in my home country, Tunisia, dictated by the World Bank and The International Monetary Fund. Many lost their jobs in textile factories due to globalization and thousands of unionized decent jobs in the transportation sector, for instance, disappeared to the privatization that followed this wave of neoliberalism.
In Canada, Barlow and her activism became well-known because her organization fiercely took the lead to oppose the Canada U.S. Free Trade Agreement better known as NAFTA. It’s an agreement that drastically changed the socio-economic landscape in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Despite the fact NAFTA passed with the election of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the mobilization of existing and new opposition groups is considered a great milestone that paved the road to many future campaigns and movements.
The removal of tariff barriers continued and along it Barlow’s activism.
Her work with many like-minded people opposed the creation of new trade agreements that posed threats to Canadian businesses and citizens, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2008, and later the comprehensive and progressive agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership as well as the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) initiated in 2017.
Despite the noise activists made in the public sphere and the international solidarity movements, these partnership and agreements were signed. But it is all that noise that brought needed changes to these agreements and rallied opposition around them.
It is not a coincidence that many voices today, even among the staunchest neoliberalists, are rethinking globalization. Both The Economist and the Financial Times ran editorials declaring “globalization [is] dead.”
I think Barlow has a hand in this death.
The fourth milestone that marked Barlow’s activism is the fight for water justice. On her activist journey, Barlow realizes that one fights leads to another.
The seed of globalization flowered the fight for water justice. Access to water is a privilege that many Canadians living in big cities take for granted. Tragically and unfortunately, many Indigenous communities struggle to obtain clean water at home and continue to live with boil water advisories. Corporations like Suez and Veolia, the two largest private water operators in the world owning 8,500 water and wastewater facilities and systems around the world, are examples of how water, an initially public and essential good, became privatized, owned by multinationals corporations traded in financial markets and sold as a commodity on which profits and dividends are made of.
Barlow tells readers, that in 2020, her activism was instrumental in entrenching the right to water and sanitation in the UN declaration of human rights and deeming them: “essential for the full enjoyment of the right to life.”
That is one of many times that we see how her fights, campaigns and movements were successful.
Activists will find many words of experience and wisdom in her book. What makes it even more interesting to read is that it isn’t simply a dive into her activist past but rather a thoughtful reflection about solutions to the future.
This book is so useful for the youth discouraged by the lies and unkept promises of the politicians of this world. A book where hope isn’t an abstract concept, Barlow gifts us concrete and real stories that can be only inspiring and worth sharing with readers.
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