Our nation is on fire.
We went from the coldest and wettest spring I can remember straight into fire season. Summer didn’t even get a chance. The latest fire map shows Canada’s north, from the Atlantic to British Columbia, under an extreme fire threat.
Mass evacuations are underway in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The army has been sent into Northwestern Ontario. Folks in major cities are coughing from the smoke of fires thousands of kilometres away.
Toronto had some of the worst air quality on the planet. People are being told to stay indoors.
And the hot months are still on their way.
In the 2023 mass climate fires, Canada released more carbon into the atmosphere than the entire industrial economies of major nations. Soot from the fires covered the ice shields, which hastened their melting.
It's called the feedback effect.
As the fires erupted across our northern landscape, an important story emerged that barely received notice. It was a new report on the accelerated collapse of the ice fields.
The report notes that even if we could limit global temperatures to a 1.5-degree Celsius increase, the world's ice fields will continue to melt, resulting in a massive rise in ocean levels. This will plunge the world into environmental and potential social chaos.
That story only made it to a few science blogs.
As Canada burns there is a massive disconnect in the coverage of the crisis. Weather reports talk about smoky the way they used to talk about rain. They advise whether it is dangerous to go outdoors. There is no talk about what is causing this.
The national news is focused on negotiations between Prime Minister Mark Carney and the premiers about speeding up massive projects that are in the "national interest."
In Canada, "national interest" always means oil pipelines.
With the Trump threat to break up our country, Canada's oil industry has seen a huge opportunity to play hardball.
Witness the sudden emergence of a militant separatist movement in Alberta trying to play havoc with the new Prime Minister. The threat is clear - unless Canadians are nicer to the oil industry, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will break up our country.
Spoiling for a fight, Premier Danielle Smith has put forward a list of "non-negotiables." One of them is to trash the standards that would improve fuel efficiency in cars. That is like threatening to break up the country to keep lead in gasoline.
Top of her list is building more pipelines.
It's the "if you want to save the country, you have to let us burn the planet" pitch.
The National Post pundits and Astro-turf Alberta separatists present us with a sense of outraged grievance that the dastardly Liberals have tried to destroy Alberta's energy sector.
They are lying.
Under the Trudeau government, oil production in Canada hit record levels. In fact, over the last ten years, Canada led the world in increased oil production.
While other countries in the G7 moved ahead with clean energy to meet their Net Zero commitments, Canada doubled down on expanding production in the tar sands.
This heavy commitment to oil expansion has meant that Canada has missed every single greenhouse gas emissions target it has set.
Environment Commissioner Gerry DeMarco says that Canada is an outlier among the G7, allowing increased emissions while other countries have dramatically reduced theirs.
Even as Canada's oil giants made record profits, the Trudeau government spent $34 billion in public money to build the TMX pipeline. This is because there wasn’t a company on the planet willing to take the risk. There was no business case.
So the taxpayers got stuck with the boondoggle to the tune of $1200 per household. And that still wasn't good enough for the oil execs.
They are pissed about the toll rates they have to pay to ship unrefined bitumen down the pipe. Toll rates are how a pipeline pays for itself over the long run.
Right now, every barrel is being subsidized over 50 cents on the dollar, and the oil giants are complaining that they deserve a better deal.
But in the interest of “national unity” better not talk about the sinkhole that is TMX because we’re being called upon to spend much, much more.
Prime Minister Carney has promised to fast track projects that are deemed in the national interest. He also states that Canada will promote "non-carbonized" oil to the world.
Non-carbonized oil is the ultimate industry lie.
It is based on the premise that the public (not the companies) should invest billions in unproven carbon capture technology, so that the oil giants can massively increase oil production and this will somehow diminish emissions.
There are two huge problems with this claim.
First, Canada's tar sands are the dirtiest source of fuel on the planet. There is simply no way the fields can be developed without massive impacts on the atmosphere.
And the second part of the lie is that oil being produced will be burned.
Hence emissions.
Duh.
Climate scientist James Hansen, writing in the New York Times, says that if Canada goes in big on the tar sands, it is "game over" for the planet.
What is most striking is that under Canada's "Net Zero" global promises, big oil was never factored to take a hit. The Liberal government accepted the premise that Big Oil could continue increasing production while bureaucrats fiddled with the numbers to somehow meet our international commitments.
I know this from hearings in Ottawa where I asked straightforward questions to regulators about how we planned to meet Net Zero.
It was an endless array of people promising that they could drink their way to sobriety.
The Real National Interest
It has been said that Canada is three giant monopolies in a trench coat. And so Big Oil just might get their way.
As thousands are being evacuated from their homes, no one asked the obvious question about what increased fuel burning means for Canada or our fragile planet.
Isn’t saving our country from climate disaster a nation-building project?
Every year, 34,000 people die prematurely in Canada from fossil fuel pollution. Around the world, the deaths from air pollution are 8.7 million people – more than deaths from smoking.
Canada has the third highest childhood asthma rates linked to pollution in the world. We are just behind fellow oil giants Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in this category. And we are dramatically changing the planet for those who will live with the disastrous consequences of today's decisions.
In Fire Weather, John Vaillant writes:
"By almost any measure, anyone born after 1990 is finding themselves in a new geological era, navigating a world fundamentally different from the one Baby Boomers and Gen Xers inherited. The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil."
The eight years leading up to 2021 were the eight hottest ever recorded. Then, 2023 blew all those previous records away. And by 2024, climate scientists were warning that global temperatures were "off the charts."
In 2025 we blew past the 1.5 degree red line.
Canada still has a chance to slow the rate of the coming disaster. But it will mean standing up to the MAGA/Big Oil disinformation scheme.
Could Alberta Hold the Solution?
The world is moving rapidly in the direction of clean energy. The technology on battery storage and improved solar is improving by leaps and bounds. One has only to look at states like California and Texas, which have transformed their grid into clean energy powerhouses.
There isn't a location in the world with better opportunities for clean energy than Alberta. They have the energy know-how, skilled workforce and geography, that could transform them into the clean energy capital of North America.
I worked with many labour unions in Alberta on the push to create clean energy investments to diversify the economy. A study by Calgary Economic Development determined that clean energy investments in Alberta could create 170,000 jobs and generate $61 billion annually for the provincial economy by 2050.
But all that was stopped dead in its tracks by Premier Smith, who put a moratorium on clean energy projects and chased out $33 billion in planned clean energy investments because of ideological opposition to non-fossil fuel energy.
And we would let this woman would break up our country?
Prime Minister Carney needs to put a plan on the table that is more credible than trying to keep the oil lobby happy. We need bring in the skills of the energy workers and make the most of our abundant natural advantages.
But to do so means taking on the ideology of MAGA Alberta. The window for action on a planetary crisis is rapidly closing.
When I was a kid, I lived for summer. I didn't live in fear of fire season. Our grandchildren deserve the same right.
Alberta has, ironically, in its oil drilling industry, all the technical know-how to become a world leader in geothermal energy production. This too is being ignored by the Alberta Cons.
We need to cleanse ourselves of far right maga Premiers.
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