Tina Winterlik: What Will Happen to Our Kids, Canada??

Saturday, July 19, 2025

If we change course, listen to Indigenous wisdom, and reconnect with the Earth.

1 Year: School gardens and land-based education spread across BC. Kids start learning how to grow food, save seeds, and protect water.
2 Years: More youth-led climate and housing movements emerge, inspired by Greta, Ta’Kaiya, Autumn Peltier, and local leaders.
5 Years: A shift in values: wellness over wealth. Mental health programs in schools include meditation, storytelling, and Indigenous knowledge.
10 Years: Our kids inherit a country where healing matters more than profit.
They live in resilient communities — with local food, clean rivers, solar power, tiny homes, and thriving cultures.
Canada becomes a model for ethical transition, not extractive empire.

If we do nothing, and just “hope for the best.”

1 Year: Bill C-5 speeds through massive infrastructure: LNG ports, railways, and highways through unceded territories.
Schools lose more funding. Fewer supports for kids facing mental health, hunger, and poverty.
2 Years: Fentanyl deaths keep rising. Kids walk past overdoses on the way to school. No national mental health plan.
5 Years: Kids grow up used to wildfires, smoky summers, drought warnings, and evacuation plans.
Most food is processed. Fresh, clean, local produce becomes a luxury.
Indigenous youth see their lands fragmented by corridors of commerce.
10 Years: Our kids are still fighting the same fights — for housing, healthcare, land, and truth — with fewer tools and more trauma.
Canada is a corporate corridor, and the children of the poor inherit disease and disconnection.

If we ignore the warnings, silence the voices, and sell the future for profit.

1 Year: Consultation becomes performance. Development explodes. The Cedar LNG model is copied across the country without proper consent.
Displacement rises. First Nations youth face even more barriers to education, identity, and safety.
2 Years: Surveillance increases. Protests are criminalized. Environmental defenders are targeted.
Food insecurity becomes chronic. Processed, GMO food dominates schools and low-income communities.
5 Years: A generation of kids grows up numb, addicted, or enraged. Suicides increase. The Earth screams louder.
Climate migration begins. Urban areas swell with displaced families.
10 Years: Canada looks nothing like what we promised.
Clean air, water, and housing are for the elite.
Kids live in fear of the next storm, fire, or crash.
Their dreams are shaped by collapse, not hope.

Every law we pass, every pipeline approved, every blueberry sprayed, every tent we ignore…
…shapes the future our children will inherit.

We can’t afford to stay silent.

Even small acts of truth-telling, growing food, resisting injustice, and defending land are acts of love and protection for future generations.