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Twelve months ago, this newsletter wrote about reconciliation on the altar of extractive nationalism—the federal government’s willing and deliberate subjugation of Indigenous rights in service of resource industry profits.
This year’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is a stark reminder that little has changed. In fact, with Bill C-39, the federal government proposes to go even further in permanently curtailing Indigenous and environmental opposition to new projects, in part by establishing “regions of national interest” (i.e., sacrifice zones) that are not subject to typical assessment processes.
C-39 comes on the heels of recent regulatory amendments that exempt oil sands facilities and gas power plants from environmental impact assessments, one of the most consequential pieces of environmental deregulation in decades, as Anna Johnston explains. It also follows the federal government’s efforts to court foreign investors with an à la carte menu of Canadian assets, including airport privatizations. And the announcement of a major new tax cut that will, in part, subsidize new oil and gas projects.
These developments do not yet amount to the bulldozer politics of China (or of Chinese companies in East Africa)—the brutal state displacement of entire communities in service of new infrastructure projects—but they represent several worrying steps in that direction.
Indigenous groups in Canada are deservedly up in arms. But Indigenous reconciliation and energy investment can still go hand in hand, as Indigenous Climate Action argued in a report published earlier this year, Energy Sovereignty. There is a lot of good stuff in here, but it boils down to putting Indigenous Nations and businesses in control of new projects on Indigenous land. That’s a very different approach from governments bulldozing assessment processes so that foreign investors can build pipelines, mines, and data centres in record time.
If you’re looking for more good ideas, you’ll find plenty of them in the new 2026-27 Alternative Federal Budget. The AFB is, as always, a comprehensive blueprint for progressive public policy in Canada and an essential resource for activists. I was the lead author on the climate and artificial intelligence chapters, which address many of the issues discussed in this newsletter over the past year. Shift Storm readers may also be interested in the infrastructure and industrial development chapters, among others.
But that’s not all! There was a dizzying amount of new research released this month and I’ve done my best to cram it all in. Let’s hop to it.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
For Canada, the climate crisis is already in full swing—and just getting started
Every five years, the federal government conducts a comprehensive assessment of how climate change is unfolding across the country and where things are headed. The latest Canada’s Changing Climate Report is now public, and I think it should be required reading for, well, just about everybody in Canada. (If nothing else, please skim the headline statements.)
There is lots of good science here about rising temperatures—Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average—and all the spin-off consequences that entails, from longer fire seasons to thawing permafrost to rising sea levels. But I am particularly concerned with the future projections.
Based on current policies, Canada is on track for five degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century. That figure rises to a staggering seven degrees of warming if governments around the world continue to roll back their climate policies. At those temperatures, Canada’s glaciers would all but disappear, forest fires would consume three times as much land every year as they do today, and every part of the country would be subject to a calamitous cascade of droughts, heat waves, and/or storms.
The most important takeaway, however, is what happens if we change course. Getting to net-zero emissions, which Canada and many other countries around the world have nominally committed to, leads to a dramatically better outcome—little more extreme than what we’re already experiencing.
It’s a useful reminder that while climate change is as real and problematic as ever, we have every incentive to fight for a better future.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
Signs of hope in global emissions, even as Canada moves in the wrong direction
A widely publicized report from the UN Environment Programme, Limiting Overshoot, acknowledges that the global goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is now essentially unachievable. Many commentators framed it as an admission of defeat—that the fight against climate change is lost. That is incorrect and unhelpful. We may have locked in a certain amount of warming, but, as discussed above, everything we do moving forward matters in terms of limiting future damage.
One sign of hope is that global emissions from fossil fuels may actually fall in 2026 due mainly to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, as CarbonBrief reports. It’s a strong piece of evidence in support of supply-side fossil fuel policies—i.e., reducing coal, oil and gas production to curtail demand, rather than (as industry and petro-states would have it) claiming that demand must fall first.
Unfortunately, Canada is moving in the complete opposite direction. While the prime minister has admitted that his oil-first agenda will increase emissions, a new analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute illustrates just how bad it’s going to get. At this rate, we would be lucky to hit our 2030 emissions target by 2050. Net-zero by 2050 in Canada is completely off the table.
Clean electricity turns the corner
Two new reports, The Future is Electric from the Transition Accelerator and Electrification from the International Energy Agency, document the staggering rise of (clean) electricity in the global energy system. Although we’ve been talking about the renewables boom for some time, only in 2025 did fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation actually decline. That marks a significant turning point, and it is a key reason why the long-term outlook for oil and gas demand is so bleak.
For fossil fuel importers, such as Europe, another perk of transitioning from fossil fuels to electrification and renewables is job creation. Hundreds of thousands of workers are already employed in the EU’s clean economy, according to a new report from the European Environment Agency, which is far more than are at risk in the fossil fuel industry.
Oil stands on the precipice of an unpredictable collapse
Clean electricity may be a win-win for fossil fuel importers, but it is a big problem for fossil fuel exporters, including Canada. In Playing the oil endgame, the think tank E3G puzzles out what falling oil demand means for producing countries. The vital takeaway is that the greatest risks of economic and social fallout stem from “disorder in the transition, rather than the rate at which demand declines.” In other words, it’s going to get messy. As Matt Hulse and I warned in Heads in the Sands, a place like Alberta is going to witness its oil sector decline gradually at first and then collapse suddenly and unpredictably. We’d better have a plan in place for when it does.
In that context, building a new oil pipeline, which the federal government seems hell-bent on doing, is just about the least sensible plan possible. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis explains why it’s such a bad idea in a new report, Assessing Alberta’s proposed West Coast Oil Pipeline. The paper concludes that the pipeline’s ~$40 billion price tag would almost certainly never be recouped, which would either fall on the public (yet another fossil fuel subsidy) or on oil producers themselves (ironically undermining their competitiveness).
The case for liquefied natural gas (LNG) keeps getting weaker
LNG is in a stronger position than oil, but even here the argument for new investment is shaky given the exponential growth of renewables. A new article from IEEFA warns against Canada stumbling into a “bull trap,” which is an investment signal that appears positive in the short-term but is likely to reverse. While there is demand for LNG today, an excess of supply will come online around the world in the coming years. Many proposed Canadian projects will never be viable. That finding echoes an earlier report from the Pembina Institute, The LNG Gamble, which concluded that long-term demand for LNG in Asia is unlikely to materialize at the scale required to justify new investments in Canada.
As a reminder (and as a new report from STAND.earth points out), LNG investment in Canada is being driven mainly by foreign (mostly American) corporations, creating few jobs or net economic benefits, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, raising consumer energy prices and running roughshod over Indigenous opposition. These are ugly projects, and the public will be left holding the bag if and when the industry goes bust.
Data centres go brrr
Does this go in the climate section or the AI section? Either way, lots of research on the data centre front this month, starting with a pair of reports from the Pembina Institute, Footing the Bill and From Principles to Practice, which discuss how data centres could increase electricity costs for Alberta consumers and how the federal government could establish better guardrails for these projects.
A new report from STAND.earth, NVIDIA’s AI climate hoax, pours more cold water on claims that AI offers a net environmental benefit, which is almost exclusively due to the emissions associated with gas-powered data centres. Indeed, in Alberta, the provincial government is actively working to link new data centres with increased oil and gas production, as the Narwhal reports. Corporate Europe Observatory reaches a similar conclusion in a new article, “A deadly alliance of Big Tech and Big Oil,” which exposes how tech companies are using the fig leaf of carbon capture to justify massive new investments in fossil fuels.
And in Power under pressure, researchers at S&P Global document the bitter irony of how AI infrastructure itself is threatened by climate change. Droughts, in particular, are a big problem for data centres and for the hydro, nuclear and gas plants that power them (which is, incidentally, yet another argument in favour of wind and solar).
Dark clouds: artificial intelligence on the horizon
First they came for the schools
The education sector is, in many ways, ground zero for the impacts of AI on society. Tech companies are making a big push to get their AI products into schools, governments and many educational institutions are largely acquiescing, and teachers, parents and students are reeling. These issues are well summarized in a new policy brief from the Canadian Federation of Teachers, which calls for, among other things, clearer protections for students and greater public control over educational technologies.
It’s important to remember that nothing about AI is inevitable, as New York City proved recently by banning AI in primary schools. In a democratic society, we decide the pace of change.
See also a new report from UNESCO, The algorithm in the room, which includes more than two dozen essays from global thinkers addressing a wide range of related issues. A useful primer on the big questions facing education in the AI era.
Then they came for the workers
The UK-based Centre for Economic Policy Research published an interesting article, New jobs in 140 years of data, which attempts to draw lessons from previous technological revolutions and apply them to the AI era. The big takeaway is that even if AI systems automate a large share of tasks (the metric that many researchers use), they are unlikely to automate a large share of jobs (the metric most people actually care about). There are two big caveats. First, task automation can make jobs worse for workers even if they don’t get laid off (through intensification, alienation, etc.). Second, past technological revolutions created a lot of new jobs as well, and it remains to be seen whether modern AI will do the same.
Calls for AI governance grow louder
BC Policy Solutions published a new report, A roadmap for building BC’s AI public policy framework, that provides a comprehensive overview of AI issues in the province and next steps for governance. Its recommendations echo our own Citizen’s Guide to AI with an emphasis on collective ownership and democratic control over AI systems.
The federal government recently concluded its consultation on AI transparency. The CCPA submitted comments, in which we recommended maximum expectations of transparency across the entire AI supply chain. But we had concerns about the process, as Rachel Pettigrew writes for the CCPA blog. Stronger transparency rules are absolutely essential, but they will not, on their own, address any of the risks or harms that AI is causing.
Three important new books for understanding the current moment
Looking for something meatier than a policy report? The inimitable Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor published End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, which exposes the fatalistic alliance emerging between tech bros and the far right. The venerable Alex Himelfarb published Breaking Free of Neoliberalism in Trump Times, which charts a path for Canada away from Carney’s corporatocracy. And the brilliant Paris Marx published Hyperscale, which unpacks the data centre industry and its consequences for our collective future. All three are on my holiday wish list.
Got questions about AI? Ask the CCPA on Oct. 15
The CCPA’s AI research team will be talking about our AI research program and answering your questions about AI and data centres on October 15th. Register for the free public webinar here!
About the author
Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood
Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood (he/him) is a senior researcher and political economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. His work focuses on federal economic, social and environmental policy, especially in the areas of climate change, artificial intelligence and industrial strategy. Hadrian edits the monthly Shift Storm newsletter on climate and labour.
