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Chantale Després and Kent Hovey-Smith, Al Gore ambassadors for greening the planet, in Beaconsfield.
Spreading the word about climate change
Canadian ambassadors for Al Gore
Ian Howarth
The Gazette
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Chantale Després and Kent Hovey-Smith, Al Gore ambassadors for greening the planet, in Beaconsfield.
The impact of Al Gore’s 2006 Academy award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, has, among many things, spawned an army of Al Gore soldiers, some 2,300 trained presenters in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Britain, India and Spain dedicated to promoting dialogue about and possible solutions to climate change.
After Gore’s appearance in Montreal in April as part of his international Climate Project initiative, the Canadian component of that army grew exponentially from just over 20 to more than 250 – 50 of whom are working in Quebec spreading the word on climate change in their respective geographic areas.
For Chantale Després, director of marketing research and communications for CN Rail and recent transplanted Beaconsfield resident, the Gore training session was a chance to champion the climate change issue both within her company and community. She was one of three CN employees who participated in The Climate Project Canada training at the Hyatt-Regency Hotel in Montreal last April.
“My job involves the environmental aspects of transportation already,” Després said. “The two elements of the job and the Climate Project go hand in hand.”
She and one of her fellow employees, Serita White, have done presentations to the CN environmental department, using materials from Gore’s Inconvenient Truth film along with some slides from last spring’s floods in New Brunswick, her home province.
“We’ve tried to give the presentations more Canadian (and bilingual) content,” she said. “I come from a small town in New Brunswick where people depended on the fisheries, where people knew intuitively what was wrong with the environment.”
Després, along with all other Al Gore trainees, does not get paid by The Climate Project and is willing to make herself available on her own time.
“I grew up in the outdoors,” she explained. “I have a love of nature that makes it easy to connect with environmental issues.”
Delivering the message of climate change to the corporate community has its own set of challenges, unlike in other groups, where the audience might be already sympathetic.
As director of communications for Schering-Plough pharmaceuticals in Kirkland, Kent Hovey-Smith knows that only too well. Even The Climate Project representatives from the U.S. thought Canada was clean and green.
“It was hard to convince them that there was a need for a Canadian program, but they came around,” said Hovey-Smith. “The fact is, Canada is the No. 2 producer of green house gases in the world, behind the U.S.”
Like Després, Hovey-Smith considers himself well placed in the corporate community to address environmental issues. He has, as have other Al Gore soldiers, agreed to make at least 10 presentations over the next year.
Earlier this year, he spoke to the West Island Palliative Care Centre staff and management.
“I want to reach people who are concerned and want to learn more. I want to offer people hope, too.
“We’re past the tipping point with climate change, but not past the point of no return,” he said.
“The business community is leaning more and more towards a greener workplace,” a fact illustrated by Schering-Plough’s 2008 Safety and Environmental Achievement Award for reductions in paper waste and fuel consumption.
Both Després and Hovey-Smith come to The Climate Project Canada flush from the influence of veteran presenter and current vice-president of Climate Project Canada, Desirée McGraw.
McGraw was one of the original three Al Gore presenters working the Montreal area– and instrumental in getting the former U.S. vice-president to come to Montreal. She now shares mentoring duties for the 50-odd Quebec Gore recruits.
“Our mission was always to train more Canadians and I think we’ve achieved that,” she said. “The presentations now have more Canadian scientific input, with policy decisions that are province and city-specific.”