Green-collar jobs for Toronto

I saw a TTC streetcar wrapped in a Diesel Jeans ‘Global Warming Ready’ ad today. My first thought was ‘Can the end be far away?’ when environmental concern is being milked to sell overpriced pants with the tag-line “You can’t be too well-dressed for the apocalypse.”

Fortunately my faith was restored when I came across the wonderful phrase ‘green-collar jobs’ in an interview with Van Jones on Grist. According to Jones, “All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that’s and that’s been missing from the conversation.” Now that big business has realized there’s money to be made in going green, he wants to make sure that low-income Americans and people of colour get a piece of the action.

So he’s arguing for an investment of millions to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future — things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.

Will I see this in tomorrow’s provincial budget? Probably not, as the green-collar wave hasn’t yet swept Canada away.

But we do have some action on the ground. After years of pointing out the value of green jobs, Toronto’s Carpenters’ Union (Local 27) got tired of waiting for someone else to do it and ponied up $100,000 of their own money for a training program for youth from Toronto’s poorer neighbourhoods. The bit I love (and would no doubt warm Van Jones’ heart) is that they are teaching them carpentry skills by having them do energy retrofits of social housing units in their own neighbourhood. This will make for more comfortable homes, free up some of Toronto Community Housing’s scarce dollars for better uses than heating the great outdoors, and lays the groundwork for participants to get a leg up in the coming ‘green-collar’ economy.

Because we aren’t going to get there without them.