Now she is Canada's - and arguably the world's - most famous "journalist-activist," a columnist for the Globe and Mail and The Guardian and author of the ground-breaking book on corporate branding, No Logo. Klein was in Montreal this week to speak at the opening forum of a Concordia University week-long program in community development.

VINCENZO D'ALTO, GAZETTE / Naomi Klein signs copies of her book on Monday.

At age 30, Klein is front and centre when global activists congregate.

So much so that the National Post paid her the backhanded compliment of starting a "where's Naomi?" reportage during the Quebec City summit, a tongue-in-cheek search for her in places like The Gap and other "branded" sites.

So much so that she's now turning down all media requests for an interview - including one by The Gazette, saying she wanted to devote all her time to writing and research.

"Also, I feel I have been profiled more than enough," she commented via E-mail, "and it is now giving the false impression that I am the movement, when in fact one of the great strengths of this movement is that no one can speak for it."

It's the very diversity of the movement that will ensure its success, Klein told the Concordia audience this week. Dressed in jeans and a jean jacket (no brand name in sight), Klein argued the time has come to let go of the notion of a single David (the anti-globalization movement) fighting Goliath (global deal makers like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund).

"Many Davids can surround Goliath," she said.

The incredible success of No Logo, translated into 13 languages and this year's winner of the Canadian National Business Book Award, along with her pro-activist newspaper columns, has ensured Klein's place among the Davids she speaks of.

It was not always so. For years, she fought a family tide of political activism - her grandfather was a Disney animator, fired for organizing the company's first strike; her parents were American hippies who came to Canada in the 1960s in protest against the Vietnam War and settled in Montreal's west end. Klein's father, Michael, a doctor, was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, while her film-maker mother, Bonnie, won fame with her ground-breaking anti-pornography film, Not a Love Story.

"When I was at school I found it very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother," she told The Guardian in an interview last year. "It was not cool in 1980 to be making a film about pornography. Not in my high school anyway."

So she opted for consumerism; her childhood notion of rebellion was to argue with her parents to persuade them to stop at McDonald's during road trips or whining about getting her own designer jeans.

Her brother Seth (now director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Vancouver), who is two years older, didn't have such a rebellious streak, she told The Guardian. "I don't think he was quite so much a victim of the '80s as I was." In her high-school yearbook, she was pegged "most likely to be in jail for stealing peroxide."

Then, several events shook her world. First, as Klein was planning to go to the University of Toronto to study philosophy and English, her mother suffered two strokes. The severity of Bonnie Klein's strokes, at age 46, were such that she struggled with almost complete paralysis. Klein spent a year at home caring for her mother, who now lives in Vancouver with her husband and is mobile with a wheelchair.

"I think that's what stopped me from being such a brat," said Klein, who is now married to TV current-affairs host Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis and Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg.

A year later, while at the University of Toronto, she was horrified by the December 1989 massacre of 14 young women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

"It was a hate crime against women," she said. "It politicized us enormously. Of course, after that, you call yourself a feminist."

Activism at university, which she documents in No Logo, took the form of arguing about "representation" - for gays, women, minorities. "We knew," she writes, "that the fast-food chains were setting up their stalls in the library and that profs in the applied sciences were getting awfully cozy with pharmaceutical companies, but finding out exactly what was going on ... would have required a lot of legwork, and, frankly, we were busy."

Ironically, the need for diversity that her own generation championed was smoothly accepted by both media and business. In fact, it was co-opted by them. "Identity politics, as they were practiced in the '90s, weren't a threat, they were a gold mine," she said.

So Klein began to reflect, at last, on the commercialization of culture. Her book may have touched a nerve with today's youth in no small part because she doesn't let herself off the hook in the course of this investigation.

"My generation's campus identity politics boiled down, in the end," she writes, "to a set of modest political goals that were frequently (and deceptively) cloaked in immodest rhetoric and tactics. This isn't a P.C. mea culpa - I'm proud of the small victories we won for better lighting on campus, more women faculty members and a less Eurocentric curriculum."

Things Fell Apart

But as the economic reach of corporations extended around the world, things fell apart.

"In this new globalized context," she writes, "the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down. Yes, there are more multi-ethnic sitcoms and even more black executives - but whatever cultural enlightenment has followed has not prevented the population in the underclass from exploding or homelessness from reaching crisis levels.

"And though girls may, indeed, rule in North America, they are still sweating in Asia and Latin America, making T-shirts with the 'Girls Rule' slogan on them and Nike running shoes that will finally let girls into the game."

This understanding of the threats of corporatism is leading, Klein believes, to what she calls "the next big political movement - and the first genuinely international people's movement."

A movement that has now exploded, Klein explained to her Concordia audience, because of a handful of multinationals. "Thanks to Monsanto (and their drive for seed patents)," she said, "Indian activists are working with activists in England."

With the global economy, she says, policies have been designed to open up economies, to get out of the way of the markets. She calls this model "McGovernment." "It's the pursuit of economic growth above all else," she said. "When we talk about globalization, we're talking about using the carrot of trade to enforce the stick of McGovernment."

Klein has her critics, many in journalistic circles.

Took Her to Task

In April, the National Post's editorials editor, Jonathan Kay took her to task for her anti-corporate position. "At its core, it's a vestige of the Marxist belief that the battle between workers and capitalists is a zero-sum game, and that a corporation's profitability should be taken as prima facie evidence of the proletariat's exploitation," he wrote.

"This economic fallacy is the specious mantra at the core of globaphobia."

On the other hand, Lance Evoy, co-ordinator of Concordia's Institute of Management and Community Development, praised Klein for bringing her youth and gender-sensitivity to the table when speaking to the students and community activists.

"She brings a different lens," he said, "believing that transformative social change is necessary. Hers is not a neutral, generic explanation."

That she reaches the young is clear; No Logo has been called "the Das Kapital (Karl Marx's epic work) of the growing anti-corporate movement."

Their new awareness, she reminds the Concordia audience, does not mean "the revolution is just around the corner."

She tells them that the challenge the movement must face is "to prove globalization is built on the back of destroying protections to health, housing, schools. We need to focus not on trade, but trade-offs."

The crowd took it all in. Evoy describes how some students, after Klein's address, came up to thank her, and tell her how much she articulated things they feel and think.

Granddad would have been proud.

Copyright © 2001 CanWest Interactive and The Montreal Gazette Group Inc.,

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