Every summer since I was born, my family has spent time camping in Jasper. I grew up wandering the townsite, hunting for wild strawberries along the Athabasca River, hiking Old Fort Point and Valley of the Five Lakes, and playing tour guide for friends and family from across the country and world.
For most of my adult life, it’s impossible to miss the fact that wildfires and smoke are getting increasingly worse. I don’t remember smoke days impacting our summer camping trips when I was a kid. But over the past 10 years, the question has been not if there will be sweeping wildfires, but when.
I feel a deep sense of sorrow and solidarity with the residents of Jasper who have been evacuated, whose homes and beloved places have been burned, and who are reckoning with the aftermath of the fire that rampaged through their community. The outpouring of support for Jasper and other communities impacted by wildfires has been inspiring, but it has also been infuriating to watch politicians show up just to briefly connect with evacuees and express their grief.
Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Danielle Smith knew disasters like the fire in Jasper were coming. They might not have known where and when the fires might hit, but even the Government of Canada’s own Department of Natural Resources had already foreseen an increasing risk of wildfires due to climate change and the resulting record-high temperatures. So, despite the science, despite demands from communities affected by fires, floods, droughts, and heat waves, why aren’t our politicians doing anything meaningful about the climate crisis?
The climate is changing, so why aren’t we?
People and organizations like ours have been working for decades to hold our decision-makers accountable and inspire them to take bold climate action to protect the people and communities they represent. In the wake of the massive climate marches that swept the country in 2019, which had Justin Trudeau’s government promising Just Transition legislation, things felt hopeful.
But in the years since, we’ve seen our MPs and the Liberal government drag their feet on any sort of meaningful climate action – that same Just Transition legislation promised five years ago only passed in June 2024 and is significantly weaker than what we know is possible. Similarly, the federal government only just introduced emissions cap regulations that are riddled with loopholes for industry and has been silent on its promise to end fossil fuel subsidies in Canada.
In Alberta, things are even worse. Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party government are actively opposed to any policy that hinders the oil and gas industry responsible for the climate crisis. Last summer, the government imposed a moratorium on renewable energy projects that cost Alberta municipalities $91 million in tax revenue and saw the cancellation of 53 renewables projects, enough to power every house in the province and then some.
The Alberta government has also slashed funding for the wildfire service by about $30 million in the last few years. It’s also well-documented that forest management has been focused on profit for the forestry industry rather than fire prevention or community-oriented forestry. These factors, in addition to the climate crisis, have contributed to challenges in managing fires in the Alberta. Last year, the provincial government spent over $1 billion to respond to one of the worst fire seasons on record. While the Alberta government has increased the wildfire response budget this year by $55 million, that is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of years of climate denial and profit-motivated policymaking, this year and into the future.
Both the Liberal foot-dragging on climate policy and the actively hostile Conservative stance on the climate crisis make one thing clear: despite the increasing disasters, despite hearing from millions of concerned people across the country, our politicians are not listening to us or to climate science.
So, who are they listening to?
Or a better question: who benefits from toothless climate policies and cutting public and emergency services? When making decisions that could keep these fires from getting worse, our politicians are listening to fossil fuel CEOs and their designates. Corporate executives and their shareholders are the people who benefit from weak climate legislation that enables them to expand their business, pumping even more emissions into the atmosphere, and creating the conditions for other industries to continue profiting from the chaos.
There are oily fingerprints all over the decision to put a moratorium on renewables in Alberta. Similarly, we know for a fact that the federal government didn’t introduce a windfall tax on oil and gas companies specifically because the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers lobbied against it. This is not the first time that CAPP has directly undercut climate policy – in 2012 CAPP lobbied for much of the environmental deregulation under the Harper government, and at the onset of the pandemic they lobbied successfully for suspension of dozens of climate monitoring and labour laws. Pathways Alliance, an oil and gas lobby group, recently put out a release stating that they cannot meet their emissions goals unless the federal government rolls back a new law that requires environmental claims made by companies to be real – which begs the question of how long this law will remain in effect.
This corporate powerplay is clear from the hundreds of meetings our elected officials have with the fossil fuel industry every year, while ordinary people are the ones being evacuated from their homes because of fires and flooding, or while loved ones are going to the emergency room for heatstroke. It is impossible to ignore that the fossil fuel industry is getting tens of billions of dollars to build things like the Trans Mountain Pipeline and subsidies for false climate solutions, while the cost of keeping communities safe isn’t even close to being covered by the wildfire budget and communities have to rely on an emergency contingency fund instead.
It’s time to make them listen to us
Whenever there is a climate disaster like the fires in Jasper, there is always a chorus of people telling us we shouldn’t politicize tragedy. This reminds me of a song called Super Subtle Folk Song by Vancouver musician Geoff Berner:
“Let’s have another benefit for the victims of the symptoms
Geoff Berner.
Where it’s forbidden to speak of the disease”
It is absolutely critical to listen to the needs that communities have when they’ve been hit by a climate disaster, and it is important to address the cause of the disaster in the first place.
If we want change, we need to move politicians to confront their cozy relationships with the oil and gas industry and its lobbyists, and make conversations about corporate responsibility for the climate crisis a welcome part of climate discourse in Canada.
Together, as the people at the forefront of figuring out the climate problems we face, we have a chance to write a new and powerful story of change ourselves. Together, we must demand that our politicians put their money where their mouths are and make our democracy work for who its supposed to: us.
If you have been affected by the fires in Jasper, or anywhere else in Canada, and want to take action to push corporate interests out of climate policy-making, please write to me directly.
Chris Kruszewski
Chris is a Climate and Social Justice Campaigner with the Council of Canadians.
