Anglican Deacon Michael Van Dusen typically has plans for the Christmas season that do not involve a Toronto courthouse.
Perhaps he would be preparing his Christmas Day sermon or visiting with family. But on Tuesday, he stood beside a painted banner that read “no faith in fossil fuels” and spoke to a small crowd, including some of his parishioners, about what had brought him before a judge — and not of the divine variety.
For the first time in his life, the 80-year-old was arrested and charged with trespassing last year during a sit-in at a Royal Bank of Canada branch in protest of the bank’s fossil fuel financing.
Canadian banks, he said, were choosing to ignore climate science to profit from the destruction of the planet, and he felt a moral obligation, affirmed by his baptismal covenant, to take a stand.
“We are here because we have a different view. We care about the planet and its inhabitants. We value it as a gift of our creator,” he said.
“We want to live in harmony with creation. We are here because we are motivated by love, not profit.”
A climate protest against RBC in Halifax in 2023. (Jeorg Sadi/CBC)
Van Dusen, a co-chair of the spiritually minded Toronto group Faith and Climate Action, is among the faith leaders who are speaking out, and even facing arrest, for their climate activism. At his court date Tuesday were a handful of other people in the group, including a 78-year-old Catholic sister who had been arrested at two recent bank sit-in demonstrations.
Emissions not coming down fast enough, studies say
Human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, is changing our climate — intensifying wildfires, droughts and floods. Those impacts are already cutting into Canadian budgets and are expected to further entrench economic inequalities within and between countries.
Canada’s emissions have started to come down, but not nearly at the pace studies say is consistent with averting some of the most serious climate effects.
Canadian banks last year invested almost twice as much in the fossil fuel industry as they did in low-carbon alternatives, a higher rate than the global average, according to a recent BloombergNEF report.
In response to the report, a spokesperson for the Canadian Bankers Association said banks are committed to supporting clients in their transition efforts as part of the country’s strategy to address climate change. For its part, RBC has previously responded to criticism by saying it’s proud of its climate work and its increased funding for low-carbon energy.
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Pope Francis became influential voice in climate fight
The fight against climate change became known as one of Pope Francis’s most important causes, helping persuade world leaders to sign the Paris climate accord and earning the pontiff fans in the scientific community.
Meanwhile, the share of Canadians who consider the environment to be a top issue has cratered in recent years, down to below 20 per cent from as high as 42 per cent in 2019, according to recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute.
Science and economics cannot spur change alone, Van Dusen said. What he and other faith leaders say they can bring is a moral and spiritual dimension to the cause.
“We’re making progress, but we’re not making progress fast enough,” he said. “It needs to be more radical. It needs to be taken more seriously, and I don’t think it is.”
Interfaith connections on climate
In May, Faith and Climate Action helped organize a mock funeral and sit-in at the headquarters of RBC to protest the bank’s fossil fuel financing, similar to the protest last year where Van Dusen was arrested.
In September, the group released an open letter signed by more than 100 Canadian faith leaders urging government and corporate leaders to stop investing in new oil-and-gas pipelines. Then, on the eve of a major United Nations climate summit in November, the group marched to Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin’s constituency office in Toronto’s east end to deliver the letter after holding a multifaith service.
Irshad Osman, a Toronto imam who spoke at the service, says Islamic teachings hold humanity to be God’s stewards, or khalifa, on Earth, who will eventually be held accountable for any ecological damage.
He says his conversations through the Muslim-Indigenous connection program he started in 2021 — intended to help Muslim youth develop a deeper understanding of Indigenous culture — has helped clarify how to turn those teachings into action.
“The Indigenous community, in terms of the environment, is doing amazing work,” he said in an interview this month.
“So, this is something which I teach — you know, what can we learn from the Indigenous community about protecting the environment in practical terms, in real-world actions?”
Bishop’s trip to Belem
A similar spirit of learning followed Roman Catholic Bishop Jon Hansen on his trip to the Brazilian city of Belem for last month’s UN climate summit, known as COP30. The bishop for Mackenzie-Fort Smith, covering all of Northwest Territories and parts of Nunavut, is not a self-described activist but has seen how climate change is reshaping his diocese.
In Brazil, he heard from survivors of unrelenting climate-fuelled typhoons battering the Philippines and from Amazonian Indigenous people fighting to preserve the rainforest — a struggle he saw mirrored among First Nations back in Canada.
“It’s because of those stories that I heard in Belem — and feeling responsible to keep their voices alive in the North,” he said in a recent interview.
Hansen said the connection between his faith and climate change “snuck up on him.” He became involved in the Laudato Si’ movement in Canada, born of Pope Francis’s 2015 climate change encyclical of the same name. The late Pope’s sweeping call to action says the Book of Genesis enjoins humanity to care, protect and oversee the Earth — rejecting biblical interpretations that have encouraged an unbridled exploitation of nature.
Hansen, who was raised in northern Alberta, said he’s still trying to figure out how to best support a climate change message, though he hopes his position may appeal to more moderate voices who feel turned off by more activist types.
People walk outside the COP30 venue in Belem, Brazil. (Joshua A. Bickel/The Associated Press)
He also praised the work of religious sisters who he says have helped lead the way within the church. One of them is 78-year-old Mary-Ellen Francoeur, arrested alongside Van Dusen and then again earlier this year for sit-ins at RBC branches. A clinical psychologist, Francoeur is one of the last remaining members of the Sisters of Service, a religious community whose origins date back to the 1920s.
“A relationship with the Earth, love for the Earth, is what’s underneath everything I want to be about, and what I am about,” she said in an interview from her Toronto highrise apartment.
Her climate activism initially came out of her longer-standing involvement in peace movements. But she said the connection between her faith and the environment has been apparent since she was a child.
At home, her devout parents introduced her “to a God of love,” she said. Her father’s prayers, rather than prescriptive, were always spontaneous, and helped her pursue a more personal relationship with God.
What she found, Francoeur said, was that “God radiates through it all.”
Climate competing with other challenges
Yet even faith leaders who care deeply about climate change say it’s taken a back seat to other issues.
Rabbi Dan Moskovitz said it had often been a unifying issue in Vancouver’s multifaith circles, where he’s the senior rabbi at Temple Sholom. But in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel and the war in Gaza, he said his Temple Sholom synagogue has “lost a lot of partners.”
“Our very safety and security and dignity and survival in Canada has been top of mind for the last two-plus years,” Moskovitz said, underlining an increase in antisemitism reported in Canada.
After the first phase of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, “I was able to breathe,” and begin to broach other issues, Moskovitz said. Then, two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hannukah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach earlier this month, the worst mass shooting in Australia in nearly 30 years.
“I haven’t been able to talk about climate and it would feel — honestly, it would feel out of touch and out of tune right now for where I think my members are,” he said.
At the same time, he said faith leaders could use climate as a common ground to re-establish strained partnerships, while also elevating the issue above political score-settling.
“Climate and the Earth are something that [faith leaders] can and should be able to speak about broadly and collectively.”
Coalition-building was also on the mind of Van Dusen, the Anglican deacon, when he sat down for an interview in the pews of St. Aidan’s, his church in Toronto’s east end. His church is the only faith-based group to join the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
Van Dusen says his group is protesting climate inaction because “we are motivated by love, not profit.” (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)
“We, even as a church, a big mainline Protestant church, aren’t going to move the needle. What we have to do is build coalitions,” he said.
The broader church, Van Dusen said, has perhaps historically done too good a job of creating a mini heavenly experience inside its buildings, often leaving people with the impression their service was done after a visit on Sunday.
“The idea, and my job, is that it doesn’t end at the door when you walk out. It’s God among us everywhere.”
Van Dusen had prepared a speech for the judge on Tuesday and was even mulling whether to eventually pursue a constitutional challenge if the trespassing charge against him were upheld.
So it was with a hint of disappointment that he learned it had been withdrawn.
When his name was called, the prosecutor indicated the arresting officer had not produced their notes about what happened at the bank. Van Dusen, who stood silently before the judge, was free to go.
As he returned to the street, Van Dusen lingered and turned his thoughts to the future. Toronto would inevitably see more extreme climate events in the coming months. So, too, would it see more direct action from him and his partners, he said.
“There will be any number of climate events that will affect a broad swath of people,” he said.
“We have to give people a sense that there are things that can be done, if there’s a willpower to do them.”
