38. Radicalized at 15 by Climate and Corporate Greed w/ Emily Lowan

Episode 38: Radicalized at 15 by Climate and Corporate Greed Guest: Emily Lowan Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski, host of Antifascist Dad Podcast. This is episode 38, Radicalized at 15 by Climate and Corporate Greed, with Emily Lowan. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntifascistDad, and the Patreon for this show is AntifascistDadPodcast, where subscribers not only support this work but get early access to a second weekly episode. Sometimes it's the second part of the main feed topic — like I ran the second part of my interview with Dean and Matt of the Magnificast last week on the Patreon — but this week it's an audio essay that I'm quite pleased with, actually. It's looking at the distinction that Antonio Gramsci makes between two types of political warfare and how fascists always tend to use both, and everybody else often constrains themselves to one. And remember, if you can't afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked. Also in the show notes you'll find a link to order my book. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. There is a growing cadre of Gen Z politicians rising to visibility at the moment. Born in 1995, Zohran Mamdani is not technically Gen Z — he's a very late millennial — but he's playing the Gen Z game really hard. Maxwell Frost was born in 1997 and is the first by-the-numbers Gen Z member of the US Congress, representing Florida's 10th district since 2023 as a progressive Democrat and former March for Our Lives organizer. Then we have Kat Abu-Ghazala, who was born in 1999. She is a Palestinian American democratic socialist and former Media Matters journalist, and she ran for Illinois's 9th congressional district in 2026 just recently. She's been indicted for ICE protest activity and has had those charges dismissed, but she also lost her primary to Daniel Biss, so she's not in office yet — but she could well be, or she'll continue outside the electoral track, just disrupting stuff. I am not quite sure what to call this feeling I have when I see these younger people do their thing. I kind of want to say proud, but that's a little uncomfortable. I worry that I'm patronizing, or like taking credit, or I have an inflated self-perception as some sort of universal parent, which I'm not. So maybe it's not pride, but I do feel a strange surge of hope that is validating. Maybe that's the combination — because despite the apathy and the errors of my generation, we've also maybe kept a bit of a flame alive. And so when I started seeing Emily Lowan, who's the leader of the BC Green Party, all over my Instagram feed doing excellent political education and agitprop, I wanted to learn about how she got to where she is. Lowan is a climate justice organizer, investigative researcher, and became the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia in September of 2025 at the age of 25 — so the first Generation Z leader of a major political party in Canada. She was brought up in Victoria on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen. She was politically radicalized at the age of 15 during the 2016 US election, along with a whole bunch of other people, but maybe not that young. This is when Trump's first victory intersected with her growing understanding of the climate crisis and convinced her that the wave of fascism in the US would not stop at the border. So she started organizing youth voter shuttles for a provincial election and campaigned on behalf of one of her teachers who was running for the BC Greens. And then a decade of movement work followed: divestment campaigning at University of Victoria, solidarity organizing alongside Wet'suwet'en land defenders resisting the Coastal GasLink pipeline, policy research at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' Corporate Mapping Project, and climate campaign leadership at Climate Action Network Canada. And then she won the BC Green leadership in two weeks of insurgent organizing, taking 61% of member votes on the first ballot. So here's Emily Lowan in her own words. Matthew Remski: Emily Lowan, welcome to Antifascist Dad. Thanks so much for taking the time. Emily Lowan: Yeah, it's so lovely to be here, Matthew. Matthew Remski: Okay, I want to start with some breaking news stuff. First of all, it's 40 degrees or higher across huge swaths of Europe right now. You are here in the position that you have because you're an environmentalist. I suppose you look at this with eyes of recognition and also urgency. Emily Lowan: Absolutely. I was radicalized by these climate events growing up in Victoria on the island. And I remember, I think it was 2016, maybe 2017, and just summers were never the same after that. We would have weeks that were just filled with wildfire smoke where everyone was wearing masks to have some semblance of protection. And we had the heat dome a few years back that killed 600 people across our province. And so I think the real struggle has been connecting the dots, because when people are in survival mode, responding to these tragedies or these extreme weather events, I think it's an excellent opportunity for communities to come together and fill the gaps that governments intentionally or unintentionally leave in their wake. But certainly I think we're all really feeling a lot of climate grief and anxiety right now, and it's important to find those bright spots of hope. Matthew Remski: I think that your report from 2016 is really striking because it might be that my Ontario experience is a little bit different and over a longer period of time. I mean, we have had a huge uptick in fire smoke coming from the north, but also coming from Quebec, sometimes coming from New York State. But what I've seen over my lifetime is we could consistently flood the backyard and freeze it for hockey in the winter for maybe a month or even six weeks at a time. And that almost never happens now. The dads who want to do that can't actually do it, and it's almost fading out of memory that this was a thing that happened in Toronto. Emily Lowan: Yeah, no, exactly. And I think it was just a few years ago that other parts of Canada started to really feel the intensity that we felt in BC over the summers for a long time. But certainly with the snowpack, there's huge concerns in BC about our continued drought conditions. This is really impacting BC Hydro, and it means we're actually a net importer of coal-fired electricity from the United States right now. We used to be powered by hydro completely. Matthew Remski: Okay, so the other piece of breaking news that I have to bring to you is that Kristi Noem — and I found this out from your Instagram account actually, which is very, very informative, we'll link to it in the show notes — Kristi Noem, one of the world's top ghouls, the dog-killing cheerleader of the carceral state, fired by Trump for probably not being violent enough, has been hired by a Vancouver-based mining company. To do what exactly? Emily Lowan: Globalize their market. It's a shadowy position. She's been hired on as a strategic advisor, and I noticed that the rest of the staff of this so-called BC mining company are pretty much all American, a lot of them with military backgrounds. So for me that is not normal, and it tells me that this is a company that is sure headquartered in BC but it's using this company to rip and ship BC minerals for US munitions, from my view. And yeah, I think people are just horrified by this. And I think what I struggle with is what can actually be done. And I think for me it just points to this greater pattern of a government who is just all too willing to turn a blind eye to what US imperialism and control actually looks like. And we've had all this talk about annexation and there's been widespread fear about Canada becoming the 51st state. And so what I was trying to say with this story is that it's less likely going to be this direct military invasion than people were imagining in their mind's eye, but more likely the corporate capture and the increasing control of our resources. And I think we can see that with people like Kristi coming over to BC. Matthew Remski: Yeah, I think it will feel like at a certain point you'll try to go to a restaurant in Vancouver and you'll walk in and it will feel like you're at Mar-a-Lago or something like that. That's what the people will kind of vibe like. And I think you're absolutely right that it's not really a territorial or border or military thing. I mean, it's a techno-feudal kind of world in which that border is very, very porous. I mean, there are border guards, there's the border stations, they exist, passports exist, but it seems that the information and the money just flows wherever it needs to make more of itself. Emily Lowan: Exactly. And yeah, Harsha Walia has written about this a lot on border rule and how borders are so porous for elites, for high-value goods and services, military, and obviously impenetrable to the people in many cases. Matthew Remski: So the American shadow, I think, has always loomed over your politics, as far as I know from your story, because I know that when you were 15, Trump is elected for the first time and this has a huge impact. What about that moment? Can you tell us what did you and your friends feel and say when you found out that was happening, and did it immediately connect to local politics for you? Emily Lowan: So I was taking a train trip across Canada with a group of my high school classmates, supervised, and we were visiting different legislatures and then making our way to the House of Commons. It was sort of a social studies trip that we were taking. It had a big sort of climate lens. We were looking at all the different histories of so-called Canada. And I just remember this news coming in and feeling like my brain broke. There is this distinct feeling that my future, as I had envisioned it, was completely uncertain and actively being stolen from me. This was at a time in my life when I was grappling with the reality of the climate crisis, its true scale and implications for the first time. And yeah, this election really sort of intersected with that. And I remember being just slumped against my friends, just feeling completely depressed and reeling from this news. And I remember one guy said, stop freaking out, it's only four years, and here we are. But I remember just feeling kind of activated by that and thinking, we have to have a conversation amongst us — what can we do to engage young people, to build a movement of our generation to stop the same wave of fascism rising here in BC where we live. And so yeah, that was my analysis very early on. And for me it actually quite immediately translated into local politics because there was a provincial election coming up and one of our teachers who was part of this trip was running for the BC Green Party. So the BC Greens was my entry point pretty much right away. And after that campaign I was mostly focused on building my own projects on youth voter engagement. So for that election, I remember storming into my principal's office a ball of nerves and saying, we have to do something about youth voter turnout, and what if we organize all the buses in the district to have a voluntary voter shuttle system to the polls? Because we lived a bit more rurally, it was hard to get to and fro at the polling stations. And so that was my own little contribution. But I think it really sparked a sense of autonomy that I can just do stuff. And so yeah, then I went on to do divestment campaigning at my university, and the rest is history. But it's sort of a nice ten-year full circle coming back to the BC Greens here. Matthew Remski: That moment where your friend says it's only four years is quite a moment. Because I mean, that's what you would expect. And also if you have the sense that, well, actually this particular election means that there's something broken about democracy, then no, actually. Or if you have a longer view of the history of neoliberalism and this kind of ping-pong between various capitalist powers, that doesn't really change much — yeah, it's not just four years. It's four years until the next ritual, but it's a lifetime until something happens. Emily Lowan: Right, exactly. Yeah, that's really how it felt. Matthew Remski: Okay, so you grew up in Victoria, which for our listeners who are not familiar with Canada — most Canadians, I think, think of Victoria as a very white town, a very quaint town, very provincial, lots of tea shops, very cute cottages that are all probably more than a million dollars now. An older lore of being more English than England. And I think that's outdated because I think it started to shift a little bit in the 1990s with the election of the NDP. But I'm wondering what Victoria you grew up in and whether it was a Victoria that was trying to be less stuffy or becoming less stuffy. And was that a history that you knew about and that you were growing out of? Emily Lowan: Yeah, I think I have always known Victoria as a somewhat sleepy government town, surrounded by some of the most beautiful nature, beaches, forests you can think of. But I think in certain corridors of town, honestly, particularly in the tourist districts and where I work at the legislature, I think it's retained that older lore of this English character, and to some charm. But I think I grew up in the Victoria that was slightly more rebellious, slightly more alternative. There's, I think, really — at least in my memory, probably in the nineties as well, two-thousands — an emerging punk scene in Victoria and definitely a lot of alternative subcultures. And I think Victoria's always had a hard time, and this partly intersects with our housing crisis, in that we have this arts and culture and music scene that's always sort of fighting for its life, and we have some amazing local artists and musicians. But yeah, I think that has become just increasingly strained with the cost-of-living crisis we've had. This year specifically, a whole bunch of festivals canceled over the summer, some that have been running for 18 years, like Rifflandia and others. And so yeah, I think Victoria has always struggled with its identity, but I find that it's part of its charm. You have this sort of mishmash of younger and older generations. Matthew Remski: Okay. And I have to ask this question because I know a fair bit about this part of Victoria history. It's also the birthplace of one of the most impactful fascist-adjacent conspiracy theories in recent history. Victoria is the birthplace of the Satanic Panic, because Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith published Michelle Remembers there. I think they got help from the local parish, as I remember. I think the Archbishop of Victoria actually sort of blessed the book, with some reservations. But is this story still haunting the air? I think Michelle is still alive. You might run into her in a tea shop. Is this still part of the city? Emily Lowan: Yeah, I think there are two Victorias. There's the Victoria of community and Fern Fest — just recently, thousands of people came together to save a local community festival. And then there's also a Victoria of this metaphorical satanic panic. And I think there are so many people who still feel alienated from their communities and are deeply suspicious of their neighbors. Look at any local Facebook page and you'll see what I mean. But I think that's just a casualty of our system, one that puts people in competition with one another and where resources are kept so scarce. Like I was saying, with cost of living and housing in Victoria, I think people feel like if they let their guard down, they're going to lose all their security. So I really think over the years this has driven this cultural paranoia that prevents people from connecting with one another. And it's why it's more important than ever to fund community programs and to give people something to actually look forward to and connect with. But I will say, I feel like we're going to see more actual satanic panic emerging as the BC Conservatives have become more openly, religiously far right. There is a quip — the new Conservative leader, Carrie Lynn Findlay, calling students who protested her satanic. Matthew Remski: Oh, great. That's fantastic. Yeah, she can call up Michelle and have her help out, do some counseling. Emily Lowan: Yeah. Matthew Remski: Did you also grow up with a sense of First Nations presence, and sort of a feeling for or knowledge of the history of colonization? Emily Lowan: I did, certainly later in my high school years when that became part of the curriculum. And I had just a few good teachers who understood the history and ongoing colonization of our province. But I'm thinking back to every social studies text I had growing up, and it's the dustiest ancient textbook that really would talk about Indigenous nations as an object of the past, which of course is a colonial myth. And I think the sort of early education on Indigenous peoples as I was growing up was sorely lacking. But I would say that I think my deeper understanding really came to me in university, and partly because my peers — I was doing group projects, student union work with a group of Wet'suwet'en and Gitxsan leaders, who then became sort of the figurehead land defenders as part of the Coastal GasLink fight and the Wet'suwet'en resistance, which out east you might remember really being the tip of the spear that started Shut Down Canada protests across the country. And so yeah, I think my environmentalism was radicalized when I was in university, honestly, camping out on the front steps of the BC legislature, standing alongside my friends, led by Wet'suwet'en youth, in resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline. And I think it just crystallized all of the forces of — or really just how colonialism, capitalism, and the military all work hand in hand to force through projects like this and maintain this unjust rule of law and criminalize Indigenous folks. And yeah, how that works is part of the broader project of colonization. And so yeah, that all sort of came at me fast and furiously. And I then spent my years after graduating just mostly working on pipeline fights, and through my role at Climate Action Network, focusing on building solidarity, channeling resources, building up movements around these frontline fights. Matthew Remski: You have an acute sort of interest and awareness of Indigenous rights and the ecological impacts of the various gas projects, and you plunge into that kind of activism ten toes down. Is there a point at which the themes all sort of come together, maybe under the sort of umbrella of capitalism, maybe under the umbrella of colonialism writ large, becoming neocolonialism? Was there a point at which you had this sense that all of this is connected? Emily Lowan: I'm trying to remember if there was an exact moment, but I think really the start of my environmentalist journey was really marked by the science, the scale of the challenge in front of us, and the solutions — I just never felt like we were meeting the mark. And so all that I would hear about in at least my earlier years in high school is, well, we're going to build some renewables and we're going to really tinker around the borders of what I felt was a deeply broken system. And so I always had a sense, an innate sense, of that mismatch — the green tech tools that we were being given to fix this massive crisis never felt like they were meeting the mark. And so I think I wanted to carry that optimism and that sort of mood of the moment in the late two-thousands and tens — that we can do this and fix this and we certainly have solutions at hand. But as I grew up, I think I just realized that we weren't even implementing the most basic solutions at hand because of this broader broken system. And so I need to better understand that and find other inroads and different politics to better intervene. And so I think honestly a lot of this came together through my mentors in the divestment student union and the movement on my campus. And so I got pretty burnt out from electoral politics. I did a federal Green campaign, and it was unsuccessful. And I feel like a lot of these interconnections weren't quite landing for me either. And so yeah, I felt really drawn to the divestment student movement because I felt like it was actually directly tackling a pillar of power — the social license of this fossil fuel industry. And I was like, yeah, let me kick the tires. This feels meaningful. And so I think it was really through just conversations with grad students and older folks and mentors in that movement that it all sort of came together. Matthew Remski: I can imagine that there's a maturation process in having your entry point through the Green Party, which as I understand it from the history is usually sort of the home of this conflict between: can Green New Deals work, can green capitalism work, can we find solutions within current market systems? That's always part of the tension, I think, of Green Party politics. And I think when people spend enough time in it, or they come into it young and then they realize that actually we have to break some more fundamental systems first — I wonder if your story is part of the story of the Green Party changing in that way, actually, and becoming a little bit broader in its scope with regard to political economy. Emily Lowan: I hope so. We've been through a few eras and along the way picked up the name of Tories and Teslas. So I think my ecosocialism is a stark departure from that. Matthew Remski: And you won. Right, so people agree. Emily Lowan: Yes, resoundingly. And I think that's — we're now just, I feel like we're on the map for the first time in a while, and we're bringing in people who are non-voters who are completely disillusioned with establishment politics. Young people, people that — even like young men who have fallen prey to the far-right alt pipeline. So I'm really encouraged by some of these stories and folks that are joining our movement, and it's really exciting to see. Matthew Remski: So this story that I'm telling — because I've never voted Green, because it has always struck me that I'm not really hearing an anti-imperialist argument, I'm not really hearing an out-of-NATO argument, there's not a lot of focus on the sort of international political structures that I view as being integral to environmental policy — I'm wondering if you even need to rebrand with regard to that aspect of Green history. Or do you just get out there and tell your message and you attract who you attract. Do you feel any kind of burden of the past that you have to shift? Emily Lowan: Part of the gift there is that people's political memories are short and limited. And so I feel like I've just been able to go out there and do my thing, and people I think have taken notice — like, oh yeah, this is a new party, this is a different approach. And yeah, so I think we have the gift of having this long-standing base of Green Party members who've really been in it since the beginning. And we've retained the vast majority of those folks who are just so deeply committed to the party. We have two strong seats and if we had a third, we'd hold the balance of power. Matthew Remski: Amazing. Emily Lowan: I think that is such a gift. Of course I want us to strongly hold the balance of power and be able to bring in something like proportional representation, that would just fully change the game. But I think one of the issues in the past is that Green parties have been thinking like an establishment party and less oriented towards building power outside. Because when you look at Green Party histories, the only times where we've actually won power and influence and built a movement was not by appealing to the shrinking political class or moderate voters. It's by talking to the people who don't vote, who are disillusioned and really squashed by the status quo. Matthew Remski: Right. I mean, when at a certain size, you don't really have the right to treat yourself as a mainstream party, do you? Emily Lowan: Right. But I think it's, in some ways, this sort of paradox or relationship where you're fighting for a voice and a seat at the table and you contort yourself to be part of this crew or to be taken seriously. Matthew Remski: To fit in the chair. Emily Lowan: To fit in the chair. To be taken seriously interpersonally amongst people in this building. And I'm not elected and I don't care whatsoever what these people think of me. That's not my audience. Matthew Remski: So let's talk about that. Because you are in leadership, the Greens as you said have two MLAs, you don't have a seat, which has its advantages. You share a lot with Avi Lewis, actually. And so does this split role of outsiders seeking insider power have advantages? It's like you can almost be in two places at once. Emily Lowan: Yeah, I think absolutely it's an advantage. I think the legislature has this effect of shielding a lot of elected officials from working people. And so many of these politicians are huddled away talking with industry lobbyists in their office more than they meet with their constituents and their actual riding. Matthew Remski: Which is all you're going to do. Emily Lowan: Yeah, exactly. And I think the system there can really trap people who might have wanted to make change. They find themselves entrenched in this broken, corporate-captured system where it's one step forward and twenty steps back. And so I think by not being there twenty-four seven, I can actually go out and meet with the people who are affected by decisions being made in the legislature. And we're getting updates from our Green MLAs, Rob and Jeremy. They're doing the work of making sure their constituents are being represented and cared for. And we have this great relationship where they're sort of my eyes on the inside, and I come in when there are big votes being made and we're hashing out decisions on that. But I think it's quite an advantageous dynamic that a lot of people think is a shortcoming. Matthew Remski: Well, Lewis has said — I went to one of the events in Toronto and he went on, and so many of the speakers went on about, I love and hate the NDP and that's the way it's been for a very long time — and I look at this insurgent candidacy as an opportunity to use this somewhat sclerotic structure and infrastructure for extra-electoral activities. Building electoral power is one thing that you have to do, but also using the structure of the party and its assets to actually communicate with people so that something else can happen — we're not quite sure what. That's really important as well. Have you approached it the same way? Emily Lowan: Yeah, absolutely. And I didn't expect to be doing this at 25. Just off the top — this was not a year in the making. This was two weeks. And I decided to do this and throw my hat seriously in the ring. Matthew Remski: Seriously. That was a two weeks where you could wind up — I don't know, I mean, you're going to be a different politician — but you could wind up Elizabeth Maying for the next thirty years or something like that, right, for the Green Party. Emily Lowan: And it's funny because yeah, it was a big decision and I tried to get so many other people to do this. And I just got so obsessed and convinced by the potential of the party that I was talking to all my climate activists and socialist movement friends, and it just got a lot of fingers pointing back at me, like, oh well, it seems like you're really keen on this. And so yeah, I ended up throwing my hat in the ring and building my entire campaign and website and platform literally in two weeks and launching it into the world. Matthew Remski: It almost sounds like an intervention. Like you have this problem and you're going to your friends and then they say, okay, let's get together, we're all going to have to tell Emily that she's going to have to take this path. It's not about going to rehab. I mean, it's going to be just as difficult. But yeah, they pointed back at you pretty much. Emily Lowan: Yeah. And all to say that I didn't expect to do this, but I just saw the math. I saw that we could win this race by signing up a few thousand young youth members for free. This is a clear opportunity to take the reins and to build a genuine ecosocialist movement around an insurgent campaign. And the strategy was that a lot of the older members as well, I think, would be genuinely excited by the young people coming in the door. I know from working in 2019 on those campaigns, this is something that they hoped and dreamed for. And that really ended up coming to life. And so we got 60% of the vote, and it's been a new life force in the party to bring generations together. Matthew Remski: You know, there might be something more flexible about Green culture that way, because I went recently to the Capitalism Can't Be Fixed conference in Toronto, that was run by the kind of remnants of Eve Engler's campaign. And it was a great day, fantastic speakers, good panels. And there was an age problem. There was definitely a demographic issue. Like, there was probably amongst the 150 people in the room, there might have been 25 who were under thirty or something like that. Not good. And more than that, there are a bunch of guys generally in their sixties or seventies who have decided that they've figured out exactly which strain of Marxism-Leninism is exactly right, and they're going to — instead of ask the panelists questions — they're going to come up to the microphone and grandstand and soapbox for five minutes until the moderator waves them off. Emily Lowan: Well, that's everywhere. Matthew Remski: Yeah, it is everywhere. So you get that in the Greens too? Emily Lowan: Yeah. And I worked in the past as a facilitator and a coalition leader, so I'm pretty comfortable cutting folks off. But it's not a problem unique to that part of the socialist left. It's in the Greens as well. Matthew Remski: Okay. I wasn't aware, because I was wondering — are there sort of really rigid forms of ecosocialism that are just really totally doctrinaire, and you have to follow this, and if you don't have my ten-point plan then somehow we're not going to be able to form a coalition? Emily Lowan: There is, I think, a greater degree of flexibility and openness, because a lot of people, at least in the party historically and currently, come to this party feeling this deep sense of dread and urgency around climate specifically. And so I think that actually does create a little bit more flexibility of — let's go where the energy's going, let's entertain different strategies. Matthew Remski: Maybe more pragmatism as well. Emily Lowan: A little bit. And just being willing. I think there's been a great amount of listening across generations. And I think because of the 2019 climate strikes and the Greta Thunberg movement, there's more muscle and willingness to let young people lead in the party. So yeah, that's been my theory. Matthew Remski: Probably more gardeners, right? More gardeners, more farmers showing up. Less people spending their time completely buried in the books. Emily Lowan: Yeah, no, it's a real mix. There are a lot of nerds, but I would say less obsessed about social and left theory. I think my generation brings more of that to the table, honestly. Matthew Remski: Okay, let's turn to some issues that are on your plate. You have got American billionaires buying up land in BC. Who are they? How much land are they buying? Is it for data centers? Why is the NDP handing it over to them? Emily Lowan: Basically, I stumbled across this story talking to the National Farmers Union and a community in the Robson Valley called Dunster. It's to the northeast of the province, closer to Prince George. This is the first story I heard about. And basically there are two American billionaires that have teamed up to hollow out effectively half of this valley, driving out half of the farming population. This started, I think, five to ten years ago, and it's accelerated. And local community members are just noticing these no-trespassing signs going up in their communities and all of a sudden the farms are empty and people are trying to figure out what's going on. And there's a great amount of secrecy — they're not hearing anything from the government, they're not hearing anything from local officials. And I think they started to form a coalition more recently to take these billionaires to task and get real restrictions from government on this kind of monopoly ownership. And the horrifying thing is that because of our relaxed agricultural land reserve laws, these American billionaires are using this farmland — incredibly arable farmland — as a luxury hunting ground that they go up to a couple times a year and bring their buddies and shoot elk and stuff. And I have no real issue with subsistence hunting. I have an issue with billionaires coming into BC and pushing out farmers. But yeah, so that was the first example. And talking to the coalition leaders there, they were like, is this happening in other areas of BC? Because if we can sort of make the case that our province is being hollowed out by non-residents coming up and buying up huge swaths of land and pushing out farmers, maybe we can get some real legislation in place. And so it was like midnight on a Wednesday, I'm Googling away, and I realized that Stan Kroenke — heir to the Walmart fortune, who owns a whole bunch of sports teams in the US, like Arsenal in the UK — but the American billionaires in Dunster, it's Mark Walter, who owns the Rams and is connected to ICE detention centers through his equity fund, and was literally announcing recent partnerships with Palantir. So anyways, the second example is in the south of the province. Matthew Remski: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's just the first example. Okay, second example. Emily Lowan: That is just the first example. So that's happening in the northeast. And I'm trying to find other instances to mount a case. And this blew my mind — I found out that the heir to the Walmart fortune, Stan Kroenke, Trump donor, controls about 1.2 million acres of land in BC, making him the largest private landowner in BC. 1.2 million acres is basically — if you know Vancouver, it's the largest city in our province — that's effectively fifty-six Vancouvers by our math. So basically Stan Kroenke has bought up BC's largest, most historic ranches over the past few years because there are no real guardrails around this. And my sense is that it's effectively a tax haven for him, because when you look at his footprint in the United States, he is also the largest private landowner in the United States. He is using these properties as just speculative investment, being able to move his money around and avoid some taxes under the farm laws. Basically our agricultural land reserve rules prevent this land from being used for things like data centers — hypothetically. Matthew Remski: Hypothetically. Emily Lowan: That doesn't stop the billionaire class from using it as their personal playground. And we've seen other examples in Pemberton — farmland being bought up, helipads being built, mansions being built. And yeah, I think it's a real issue, and we're seeing these examples scattered all across the province. Matthew Remski: Okay, so you have BC laws that govern agricultural use of land. And is that the backstop here? Because I mean, we've got a federal prime minister now who is doing whatever he can to loosen or scrub away any kind of resistance, legislatively or culturally, that there might be to corporate industrial development anywhere. So there's a whole raft of bills that work in that way. Here in Ontario, Doug Ford with a majority government is doing whatever he can to erase whatever kind of democratic input people might have on how land is used. The way data center stuff is going so far, in most places it involves backroom deals and laws that are circumvented and committee of adjustment meetings that are missed. And then if townships or municipalities try to sue over upcoming plans, they'll get sued back. So do you feel like the provincial protections are going to be effective? Do they have to be defended in some way that they haven't had to before? Emily Lowan: It's a real cluster. And so my hope with this work on the ALR is that we will be expanding and strengthening the rules on agricultural land and preventing data centers from being rammed through. And we do have decent provincial autonomy over this area specifically. But as you say, I'm totally cynical and a skeptic, because we know that our premier will bend over backwards to please Mark Carney. But I am interested in following the lead of provinces like Quebec on non-resident restrictions and investment trust restrictions, for instance, which were brought in even last year. And so yeah, we're chatting with folks in Quebec about what that looked like. And I think what we're seeing in the response to this issue — people are fired up. We have a real culture of protecting food security and farmland sovereignty in BC, and so I'm hopeful that this is something that we can mount a real movement around and get some guardrails in place. Matthew Remski: Yeah, I think from the ecological side, from the pollution side, from the noise side, from the clear corruption around how land is being appropriated or these data centers are being bullied through, there's a tremendous potential for a populist movement arising out of resistance to data centers. So there's some hope in that because it's just so in your face. Emily Lowan: Right, totally. Yeah, all of these things are intersecting. And I'm so inspired by the movement mounting globally against AI data centers. And I think we're feeling this global dual embrace and resistance to AI. But I think what excites me the most is that young people more than any other generation are taking a stand against AI. Because when you look at this exact moment, young people in BC — a lot of them not able to find decent work over the summer — we're sweating with no AC in a shitty apartment that we can barely afford and enduring yet another heat dome. And seeing that in these drought conditions, an AI data center is able to just circumvent every community consultation and be built and hoard all these precious water and energy, and in the broader sense shunt off our jobs and our future. Matthew Remski: So that they can more efficiently take your jobs. Emily Lowan: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Matthew Remski: It just gets worse and worse. The sentence gets longer as you're describing what's happening, and every clause it just gets worse and worse and worse. It's really in our faces. There's another international issue, which is about the cost of calling the war on Gaza a genocide. What was that cost for you, and are you feeling good support around that? Emily Lowan: It was a really important moment in our campaign. Back in July, we came out with a strong stance naming this a genocide. We put out a platform on what BC could do to not only be a moral authority and to be drawing some real lines here, but also in terms of our education, on our curriculum and on food distribution, including boycotts on Israeli wine and other products. So I think just taking any moral stance, of course it causes some people to decide we're not the political project for them. That was an inevitability. But you can't expect to change the systems of power if you're not willing to speak truth to power. And that looks like calling Israel's atrocities what they are — it's a genocide. And of course this has cost some amount of goodwill with the establishment, but that's not my concern. And when we look broadly in BC politics and the relationship to the Israel lobby, David Eby has repeatedly cozied up to CIJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, which the Jewish Faculty Network has called a hub for genocide denial and anti-Palestinian racism — I believe that's a report that Avi Lewis actually co-authored. And the BC NDP has never used the word genocide to describe what Israel is doing to Palestinians, unsurprisingly. And that's a contentious debate within their caucus, but Eby is quite clear that — I've even heard reports from folks who haven't been able to run or haven't been able to progress through the party because of their support for Palestine. And I mean, Carrie Lynn Findlay, the leader of the BC Conservatives, had her husband calling Palestinian kids inbred and walking time bombs. I don't even want to say this stuff out loud. And I think we just have to ask ourselves, if these leaders aren't willing to stand up to a genocide, what will they stand up for? And I mean, we're practically three years in, and it's just so mind-boggling. And I just want to also recognize the incredible groups and advocates who've been fighting to stop the genocide. There have been so many people who have been organized into a really formidable force. I was so inspired — I started my Fight the Oligarchs tour in Vancouver, meeting with a group of Palestine solidarity activists, many of whom were Palestinian themselves, to talk about how we're supporting one another and building up our strength and collective movements. So yeah, it's a haul, but we're holding the line. Matthew Remski: What's the best support and advice that you've received from your elders in your journey, Emily? Emily Lowan: I love this question. I think it's actually a visualization exercise. This is from some movement elders who were calming me down in a pre-campaign-launch freakout where I was kind of spinning out about whether I was capable, whether I could do this, if this was just going to be a huge failure and at worst an unworthy experiment. And so yeah, they taught me to picture — as I'm sort of taking some breaths — all of my matrilineal or family heritage, my mentors, movement elders that have come before me, in sort of a line, holding my shoulders from behind. And then thinking forward to all of the people that I hope to reach and build power with and who I'm fighting alongside. And it's a really grounding and nice way to sort of feel less alone in the work we're doing. Matthew Remski: That's really a wonderful visualization. It sounds very west coast. I think we could do that all over the country for sure. And I also think that maybe there are people around you, given your age, that can recognize that you need that support. Because you're telling me this and I'm 54, and I'm like, if I were in your position, I would love for somebody to come up to me and say, hey, you know what, you could visualize this. But I don't think older folks do that for each other as much. So that's really great. Last thing is — you got started really early on this at 15. What would you say, if you had two or three things to say to a group of fifteen-year-old kids who wanted to be as engaged with this material as you are, what would you tell them? What would your advice be? Emily Lowan: I would tell them to get quiet and spend a lot of time thinking about what actually sets you on fire and makes you feel just uncontainably excited, or transfixed by, or fascinated by. And I think a lot of young people in these spaces — it's overwhelming to find your place in a movement like this. What can I even contribute? I'm interested in these ideas. And honestly for me it was just a ten-year process of trying on every role, every hat. And I would say, don't get too attached, just try things out and trial by fire. And the most important thing is just surrounding yourself with people whose work catches your eye and that you feel excited by. For me, that was — I really recognized myself in the work of the Corporate Mapping Project. That was a research institute shining light on the entire fossil fuel lobby, how they've been influencing and watering down and scrapping climate policy in our governments, how they've been influencing civil society. And so it was projects like that in university that really helped me sort of ground myself in a politics and just meet other people who are interested in tackling this issue from different angles. So yeah, I think it's about going internal and sitting with yourself and finding those spark points, but it's also just getting out there and trying a whole bunch of different things, and meeting and sticking by the people who you feel a genuine sense of solidarity and kinship with. Matthew Remski: Emily Lowan, thank you so much for taking the time and good luck with all of this. We'll be following closely. Emily Lowan: Yeah, thank you so much, Matthew. Such a pleasure. Matthew Remski: So that's the show for this week, folks. Episode 38.1 is now up on Patreon. It's called Gramsci's Wars of Position, Wars of Maneuver. And it's about how Antonio Gramsci distinguishes wars of position — the slow struggle over culture, values, and consent — from wars of maneuver, or direct confrontation with capitalist power. It's about how the reformist and moralist left can mistake position work for the whole war, believing that changing hearts, winning elections, and making moral arguments constitutes victory. But fascists have always known elections are one instrument in a multi-pronged strategy, while they also engage in all other forms of war, including perpetual violence. So the essay is about how we can think about that. Until then, take care of each other.