McGraw puts local face on ‘Inconvenient Truth’
(This item by Michelle Lalonde of The Gazette is reprinted by permission.)

MONTREAL

Act locally: Désirée McGraw, in her Montreal West home, says a cultural change is needed if the effects of climate change are to be reversed. That's the message she'll be delivering here on behalf of environmental guru Al Gore.

She doesn't look or sound anything like Al Gore. She's younger, female and Canadian, but Montrealer Désirée McGraw has just spent three days learning how to deliver the former U.S. vice-president's famous slide show on climate change to a Canadian audience.

Last week, McGraw attended a kind of }climate change boot camp~ run by Gore in Nashville, Tenn., where she got tips from the climate change guru on how to explain the science and impact of global warming in a way that inspires action rather than despair.

In the past six months, Gore has trained 1,000 people, mostly Americans, to adapt his slide show for smaller, locally active groups across the U.S. and in a few other countries with key roles to play in the global battle against catastrophic climate change. The idea is for local personalities to tailor the presentation by adding information on local impacts and solutions.

McGraw is one of 20 Canadians chosen to bring Gore's show, which took him 18 years to put together and inspired an Oscar-winning documentary, to Canada. Gore was looking for people with strong environmental backgrounds, some kind of public profile, or great speaking skills. McGraw had all of the above.

In her teens, McGraw, now 37, completed a cross-country speaking tour on the nuclear arms race and co-hosted a video series with David Suzuki on nuclear issues. At 19, she served as youth adviser to the Canadian delegation to a United Nations special session on disarmament.

She served on the Canadian delegation to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, worked as a consultant, researcher and university lecturer and then landed a job as director of policy and acting chief of staff to Canada's minister of international co-operation. Most recently, she headed the Liberal Renewal Task Force on Environment and Sustainable Development, producing a report last fall that has become the blueprint for the party's current environmental policy.

Each participant in Gore's boot camp went home with a copy of the slide show and signed a contract to present it at least 10 times over the next year. The presenters are not paid by Gore, and can only charge enough to cover their expenses. This is in stark contrast to Gore's practice, which is to charge hundreds of dollars for tickets.

McGraw couldn't explain why Gore is now handing his material over to amateurs. But she says it makes sense to have local presenters take it farther.

She'll be translating the material into French, probably adding slides about local phenomena, like the 1998 ice storm or problems with polar bears in Canada's North. Because surveys show most Quebecers are already convinced climate change is happening and must be stopped, she'll focus more on solutions than Gore does, she said. And she'll be trying to connect on a personal level.

McGraw was nine-months pregnant when she attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal in December 2005. Her son was born as the conference was wrapping up.

~The whole thing has become more real for me. It was a policy challenge before and I'm a bit of a policy geek, so that's how I was approaching it. But then Jack was born and I just think about it differently. It's more real and more raw.

~McGraw's first audience will be a playgroup in Westmount.

~They are all moms, most of them professionals who've taken time off to look after young children. I think they are a very powerful audience.

~She said the Gore proteges are from all different walks of life. In her session were a professional football player (Dhani Jones from the Philadelphia Eagles), a couple of mayors, a state senator and his son, and several high-ranking business executives.

~There has to be a cultural shift, so that it becomes just embarrassing to own an SUV, for example. It has to be a combination of a series of culture-changing conversations that we have with our families and neighbours, as well as new government incentives and disincentives.

~McGraw notes she is no environmental hero. She describes herself as a middle-class person with a big old house in Montreal West that uses a lot of energy.

~I like my comforts and I know I've got to drive less. But as long as I'm moving in the direction of trying to change, I think my audiences will relate to me.

For information on Al Gore's project, visit www.theclimateproject.org. For more details about a slide-show presentation in Montreal, send an email to: theclimateproject-Montreal [at] hotmail.com