The following is a re-print of the October 2025 edition of Shift Storm, the CCPA’s monthly newsletter which focuses on the intersection of work and climate change. Click here to subscribe to Shift Storm and get the latest updates straight to your inbox as soon as they come out.
In a recent speech, prime minister Mark Carney promised that the federal government’s forthcoming Climate Competitiveness Strategy—his government’s first emission reduction plan—will focus on “results over objectives” and “investment over prohibition.” It was a curious choice of words that reveals much about this government’s climate policy thinking.
First, while tangible results are of course the core of progress, there is no way to measure results outside the context of a broader objective. Downplaying those objectives, such as Canada’s 2030 Paris Agreement commitments, as Carney has done, muddies the waters—perhaps deliberately—about what constitutes climate action.
Is building a liquified natural gas (LNG) plant a “result”? Not if your objective is to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But if you have no long-term targets or guiding principles besides economic activity in the abstract then… sure, why not?
Second, while “investment” is inoffensive enough as a priority—we do, in fact, require transformative investments in a cleaner economy—there is something both underhanded and misleading about labelling public interest regulation as “prohibition.” Many of the most successful climate policies in history, including Canada’s phase-out of coal power, have incorporated “prohibitions” of one sort or another. These policies work because they lead to an absolute reduction in the amount of pollution being produced, which is the only metric that matters from the perspective of climate change.
It does not matter how many electric vehicles we put on the road, for example, if we don’t take internal combustion engine vehicles off the road. We can’t negotiate with planetary physics.
In other words, a true climate competitiveness strategy needs to include results and objectives, investment and prohibition. Delivering half a strategy—especially one without a guiding vision and without the regulatory tools to enforce it—is no strategy at all.
The Carney climate plan was originally supposed to be a stand-alone document, but it now looks as if it will be folded into next week’s federal budget. It’s the first thing I’ll be looking for during the budget lockup in Ottawa, so stay tuned for the CCPA’s post-budget analysis.
On a related note, the latest Alternative Federal Budget was released this week, which is essential reading for progressives in Canada and the benchmark against which we will be evaluating the government’s budget. The AFB is produced each year by a committee of almost one hundred contributors and it offers a rich and compelling vision for truly progressive federal policy.
I pitched in on several chapters this year, including the AFB’s first ever chapter on artificial intelligence. It’s a topic that is absorbing more and more of my attention these days, as you’ll see in this month’s research highlights. But there is plenty of climate and labour news to dive into as well, so let’s get started.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Making climate action entirely about economics is missing the point
Over the past few years, the climate movement has drifted toward couching climate action entirely in economic terms rather than foregrounding any sort of moral or social imperative. Governments, corporations and households care about the bottom line, the argument goes, so if we can only explain how costly it is to keep burning fossil fuels—and how much money can be made in the clean economy—then perhaps they will acquiesce to the rationality of emissions reductions.
It’s not all wrong and I’m not pointing fingers here. Foregrounding the economics of climate change is sort of my whole thing. But losing sight of the bigger picture (i.e., human and planetary well-being) introduces some big risks that are laid bare in several recent studies.
Unjust Transition, published by Oxfam, exposes the neo-colonialism inherent to much of the global climate project. The scramble for minerals, in particular, is reproducing patterns of exploitation that are harming the Global South for the enrichment of the largest corporations in the Global North. Similar patterns are evident in the proliferation of international climate finance, which is being delivered mainly as loans (increasingly via the private sector) rather than as true aid. Instead of unlocking the climate and economic potential of developing countries, it is exacerbating crippling levels of indebtedness.
A study by the United Nations Environment Programme, Financing the Responsible Supply of Energy Transition Minerals for Sustainable Development, reaches a similar conclusion, highlighting that human rights abuses and equity issues are endemic to the global mining industry and will be perpetuated in the absence of new legal standards and financing structures.
And a report published by the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology, Futures Under Siege, finds that climate policy across Canadian jurisdictions is systematically excluding marginalized groups, including the Indigenous and racialized communities that are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The report points out that emissions reductions and clean investments achieved outside of an equity framework may, in fact, make many people worse off.
The real purpose of climate action is not to reduce emissions or to increase green investment for their own sakes. It is to create a liveable world for ourselves and future generations. When we lose sight of that imperative, we risk becoming trapped in a short-sighted economic logic that may not actually improve well-being now or in the future.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
The oil and gas industry is not a part of the renewable energy solution. Despite the industry’s claims to be supporting the transition to a cleaner economy, a new article in the journal Nature Sustainability finds that the 250 largest fossil fuel companies in the world account for only 1.42 per cent of global investment in renewables, and those investments account for only 0.13 per cent of the total energy produced by these companies. The idea that the fossil fuel industry is “part of the solution” is textbook greenwashing.
Canada’s oil industry is lining the pockets of foreign shareholders at the expense of Canadian workers. A new report from the Alberta Federation of Labour and Canadians for Tax Fairness, Exporting Profits, finds that oil industry profits are increasingly being distributed to foreign shareholders rather than domestic workers. The ratio of shareholder profits to worker wages is now three-to-one—the reverse of the rest of the Canadian economy—and the gap is widening over time as oil companies reduce investment and increase dividends and share buybacks. It’s hardly news, but, like greenwashing, the argument that the oil and gas industry is acting in the best interests of its workers does not hold water.
Canada violating commitment to end fossil fuel finance. In 2021, the 40 signatories to the Clean Energy Transition Partnership, including Canada, agreed to end international support for fossil fuels. Yet as a new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Holding Course, Missing Speed, reveals, seven of those signatories, including Canada, continue to support the industry financially. Not only do we need to stop doing so, the report argues, we need to be rapidly redirecting international financial flows to support clean development instead.
UK plans to create 420,000 green jobs in five years. The UK’s new Clean energy jobs plan includes funding of £1.2 billion ($2.2 billion) per year for skills development in strategic sectors. It’s one of the first green skills plans I’ve seen that actually sets targets at the correct order of magnitude—a weakness of Canada’s skill training programs that I’ve long criticized. We need to be training tens or hundreds of thousands of new workers each year to meet demand in a clean economy, yet programs such as the Sustainable Jobs Training Fund only aim to support a few thousand workers per year.
Green industrial policy continues to enter the mainstream. In An Industrial Policy Renaissance, the International Institute for Sustainable Development offers a helpful primer on the history, purpose and promise of green industrial policy. The paper dives into a number of recent case studies, such as in Brazil and Korea, that weren’t on the map when the CCPA published our own guide to green industrial policy just a few years ago. An industrial policy orientation is increasingly essential for competing in the global economy.
Labour conditions are an underappreciated tool for enabling workforce transitions. In its latest report, Just Transition Conditionalities, the Scottish Just Transition Commission gets into the weeds of the policy levers available to governments for ensuring that public and private investment is producing pro-social outcomes. For example, governments can require that infrastructure projects employ a certain share of apprentices or that a certain share of profits are reinvested into communities. In Canada, our governments are increasingly requiring that developers sign community benefit agreements in order to access public funding, which is a promising trend that should be accelerated.
Just transitions are more likely to succeed when they are localized and planned in advance. A study from the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change, Place-Based Just Transition, unpacks the energy transitions underway in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan. Although the paper is aimed more at investors than policy makers, it reaches the important conclusion that proactively managed transitions that are responsive to local contexts are more successful and less disruptive than reactionary, generalized transition programs.
A green bargaining toolkit for teachers unions. The U.S.-based Labor Network for Sustainability released Bargaining for Green Schools, Good Jobs, and Bright Futures, a report that provides a useful set of case studies and best practices for advancing climate action in schools through labour organizing. Decarbonizing schools offers many benefits, including reduced energy costs and improved health outcomes for students.
New book unpacks the coalitions challenging the corporate power of the fossil fuel industry. I’m really looking forward to a new book from McGill University’s Amy Janzwood, Mega Pipelines, Mega Resistance, that is set to release next month. It promises a deep dive into the activist coalitions that have opposed exploitative fossil fuel development in Canada. If I can get my hands on a copy, I’ll review it in a future newsletter.
Dark clouds: artificial intelligence on the horizon
Canadian public service especially vulnerable to AI job loss. A report from the Future Skills Centre, Adoption Ready?, finds that half of public servants in Canada are in occupations categorized as high-exposure and low-complementarity in the context of AI, which means they are more likely to be replaced by AI than augmented by it over the long term. Unfortunately, rather than calling into question the desirability of displacing such a substantial and critical part of the workforce, the paper offers only milquetoast suggestions for mitigating harm as AI inevitably washes over the public sector.
Global unions are pushing back on anti-worker AI development. In contrast, four major unions have released papers that offer a strong and principled defence of workers in the face of AI proliferation. A report from the International Trade Union Confederation argues that workers need to be at the table in the development of AI regulations. A report from the global union IndustriALL highlights the need for international coordination to rein in exploitative multinational tech companies. A report from the UK’s Trades Union Congress offers a framework for AI development that prioritizes public value over private profit. And a brief from the U.S.’ AFL-CIO calls for stronger worker rights in the face of AI surveillance and discipline—a topic addressed in a separate report this month from the think tank Data & Society. The essential through line in all these reports is not opposition to AI in principle, but rather the argument that new technologies should be deployed with the intention of making workers better off. AI development for its own sake, especially where it comes at the expense of workers, is a dead end.
