Canadian teens need to see Gore's Inconvenient Truth, says businessman

A Vancouver businessman has launched a fundraising campaign to pay for the distribution of the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth to every high school in Canada.

Will Cole-Hamilton said he, his partner and a few friends started the Learning Climate Educational Society after seeing the Al Gore film just before Christmas, callingit a life-altering event.

The society has raised about $10,000 of the $50,000needed to provide a DVD copy of the film to high schools, and has obtained approval from Paramount Pictures for the film to be shown in classrooms across Canada.

Cole-Hamilton said he is focusing on teens because they need to better understand the future they face.

"Young people are going to be dealing with the opportunities and the challenges of climate change for the rest of their lives. And I think that a film that can give them a clear and comprehensible introduction to the scope and shape of that challenge is something that they need as they head forward."

Cole-Hamilton said his group is also putting together an educational package to go with the film.

Similar attempts to put the movie into some schools in the U.S. have met with opposition. A Seattle-area school board temporarily banned the film, but later decided to allow it under strict conditions.

Cole-Hamilton said partisan politics was part of the problem in the U.S., and he expects a different response in Canada.

"The science has been recently confirmed by the inter-governmental panel on climate change and so I think in the U.S., it really boiled down to a political issue, centring around Al Gore as the Democratic presidential candidate. I think that was at the heart of things."

The Vancouver School Board has no official position on the film, although it has received requests from schools to show it.