If You Were Prime Minister...

Last night, David Suzuki (renowned environmental activist and author) stopped in Montreal for his If You Were Prime Minister Tour, a cross-Canada dialogue on the environment. Over 1,000 people, including Justin Trudeau, came to hear Canada's "foremost environmental conscience" deliver a passionate call to get involved not only with local environmental organizations, but also in the political process.

Before Suzuki took the stage, an eloquent address from the members of the Mohawk tribe stirred the crowd with insights into the First Nations' relationship with Mother Earth. Asking first how their actions and decisions will affect their children and their children's children, the Mohawk of Kanawahke seem to understand their duty to protect the one resource we cannot live without - planet, our home.

Suzuki's speech was a forthright 45-minute take on the good, the bad and the ugly. Since he's been at the forefront of environmental activism for so long, he's got plenty of stories to tell, including a neck-tingling one about Lucien Bouchard (former Quebec Prime Minister), who told Suzuki in 1988, when he was Brian Mulroney's Environment Minsiter, that his greatest concern was global warming and the devastating impact of greenhouse gases. This was 1988, almost 20 years before scientists supposedly arrived at a consensus that global warming was caused by greenhouse gases.

The tour is a 30-day, election-style campaign operation that will stop in 40 communities across Canada, before wrapping up in Ottawa, where Suzuki will take Canadians' concerns about the environment to the politicians on the hill (in the form of I Vote for the Environment cards and short 20-30 seconds video clips that audience members can record on-site.

So what does this have to do with persuasion? OK, good question. Here's my answer:

David Suzuki has been doing fighting for the environment for a long time – he was in Rio in 1993 (Earth Summit), and in Kyoto in 1997 – and one of the key messages that stood out last night, and it's the one that will probably make all the difference moving forward, is that there is now agreement among all the major political parties in Canada that it is time to take the environment seriously. Why is that? Because we are on the verge of realizing that we have more to lose by not sustaining the environment than we have to gain by ignoring it. And as human beings we are programmed to avoid loss. As the Law of Scarcity so clearly states: we are more motivated by loss than we are by gain.

So, this is a perfect example of how the principles of persuasion do not operate independently. In this case, fear of loss (scarcity) drives and helps establish agreement (consensus) on the need to act.

For more information, please visit the foundation at http://www.davidsuzuki.org/