The following is a re-print of the September 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.
This month’s introduction comes courtesy of Rachel Pettigrew—a grad student from the University of Calgary that I have the privilege of working with this term—who offers an important and timely reflection on Indigenous sovereignty in an age of extractive nationalism.
September 30, 2025, marks the National Day for Truth & Reconciliation in Canada and 10 years since the Liberal government promised to implement the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. A decade later, only 15 have been completed—a reality the Yellowhead Institute describes as a “decade of disappointment.”
It is also 10 years since Canada entered the Paris Agreement, pledging to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That target is now out of reach as Canada continues to expand fossil fuel production.
It’s a pattern that has become all too familiar in Canada: rhetorical commitment to Indigenous rights and climate action while doubling down on resource extraction and the continued violation of Indigenous sovereignty.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Carney announced the launch of the Major Projects Office to fast-track extractive projects “for the greater good of Canada’s economy.” Framed as “nation building,” the office promises opportunities for Indigenous equity ownership and even established an Indigenous Advisory Council to help guide investment decisions. But as Indigenous Climate Action warns, these are false promises designed to integrate Indigenous leaders into frameworks that ultimately serve industry interests rather than Indigenous rights.
On the ground, Indigenous communities are already charting a different path. More than 250 Indigenous-led clean energy projects are either operational or in development, compared to only eight natural gas and two nuclear projects. Indigenous nations are overwhelmingly investing in climate solutions and moving away from extractive projects that harm the environment even as the federal government continues to do the opposite.
Truth and reconciliation are inseparable from climate justice. Indigenous communities across Turtle Island have long defended forests, protected waters, and fought for a liveable planet—not only for themselves but for future generations. In my work with the shíshálh Nation, I have seen firsthand how Indigenous governments carefully review resource development projects, weighing environmental impacts, sustainability and community access to food and cultural resources. These reviews are holistic and rooted in long-term responsibility.
I have also witnessed governments and corporations attempt to rush these processes, cut corners and ignore conditions of approval in the pursuit of profit. Indigenous nations do not work this way and neither should Canada. Yet instead of honouring this leadership, governments criminalize land defenders, enforce injunctions and pour billions into fossil fuel projects without the free, prior and informed consent of those most impacted. In doing so, Canada perpetuates the very colonial harms—dispossession, environmental destruction and suppression of Indigenous rights—that Truth and Reconciliation is meant to confront, all while undermining its climate commitments.
The National Day for Truth & Reconciliation cannot be an empty ritual of remembrance. It must be a moment to recognize how colonialism continues to structure Canada’s relationship to land and resources, and to learn from the Indigenous communities carrying the weight of protecting our collective future.
Our task is to amplify Indigenous resistance by supporting those already leading this work—through national networks like Indigenous Climate Action, legal campaigns by RAVEN Trust, and frontline struggles such as Wet’suwet’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline. It also means demanding that Canada fulfill both the TRC Calls to Action and its Paris Agreement targets, while following Indigenous leadership in building sustainable, reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
Thanks to Rachel for this important reminder as we gear up for a busy and consequential fall. The climate policy conversation is heating up again in Canada as we close in on a momentous federal budget set to coincide with COP30 in early November. There’s lots of new research to dive into this month, so let’s get into it.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Oil jobs are dying; green jobs are just taking off
Three new reports paint a picture of a Canadian workforce in transition as traditional oil and gas jobs disappear and cleaner industries scramble for new workers.
In Drilling Down, the Pembina Institute documents how oil and gas employment has decoupled from oil and gas revenues over the past decade. The number of workers in the sector peaked at around 200,000 in 2014 even though both production and profits have risen dramatically in the years since. This change has been driven by cost-cutting behaviours among oil companies, including the automation of labour, but also by structural weaknesses in the sector. The long term outlook for oil demand is poor, which is discouraging investment. As Matt Hulse and I argue elsewhere, the collapse of the oil industry in Canada is a question of when, not if, and governments are not prepared for it.
The good news is that there is an incredible demand for labour in the clean economy. A new report by Tyee Bridge and Jim Stanford published by the Centre for Civic Governance, Jobs for Today, finds that achieving net-zero emissions in Canada will create between 6.3 million and 9.5 million job-years of construction work by 2050—in the ballpark of 300,000 jobs per year. Indeed, Canada’s challenge is not in creating enough jobs to offset those lost in dirty industries, but rather to ensure we have enough skilled workers available to meet ballooning demand.
The Conference Board of Canada reaches a similar conclusion in Building Tomorrow, which breaks down the specific trades that are most needed for the clean economy. Occupations likely to experience the greatest relative growth in the coming years include heavy equipment operators, pipefitters and welders. In absolute terms, electricians, carpenters and labourers will be in greatest demand in the green construction workforce.
The reports are light on specific recommendations, but a through line is the necessity of large scale workforce development. Ensuring a just transition for oil workers while simultaneously training hundreds of thousands of new workers for green jobs won’t happen by accident. Public coordination is absolutely essential.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
Canada is building projects for the sake of building projects. My latest for the CCPA blog breaks down the initial list of major projects announced by the Carney government. The fundamental problem here is not the projects themselves—although there is good reason to be critical of LNG Canada, in particular—but the fact that the government has explicitly positioned itself to serve the private sector rather than identity and accelerate projects in the public interest. Rubber stamping commercial projects does not constitute an industrial strategy in the absence of, well, a strategy.
Workers are showing governments what a just transition actually looks like. I’ve got three fantastic labour-led initiatives to highlight this month. The United Auto Workers (Region 6) published Organize, Industrialize, Decarbonize!, which lays out a green industrial plan for California grounded in state planning and coordination. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers published Reclaiming Our Future, which lays out a plan to fight for good, unionized jobs in burgeoning clean industries. And, in the UK, the NGO Platform published Transition on Our Terms, which reports back on surveys conducted with North Sea oil and gas workers who broadly support the transition to renewables, especially to wind power, but demand a seat at the table and more tangible transition support from industry and government. In each case, workers are not shying away from the realities of climate change or the necessity of decarbonization, but they expect to have a say in what happens next.
EU energy jobs boom linked to green transition. In the EU, which is generally less dependent on the fossil fuel industry than Canada, the U.S. or the UK, transitioning to a clean economy offers even more clear-cut employment benefits. An article published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, “Green jobs and just transition,” finds that total EU energy jobs rise from 1.3 million today to 3 million in a net-zero scenario, while only 300,000 jobs are lost in the coal and oil sectors.
China is almost single-handedly driving the global green manufacturing revolution. Two new reports provide an illuminating deep dive into China’s clean energy transition, which is so often misrepresented in the West. In their latest China Energy Transition Review, the think tank Ember explores the exponential growth of the country’s clean economy, both domestically—China is on the cusp of peak oil consumption due to electrification of transportation and industry—and internationally—China produces 60 per cent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 per cent of solar panels. In China’s Green Leap Outward, the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab documents China’s efforts to push green manufacturing overseas through US$250 billion in foreign investments in 54 countries—a larger and more sustained geopolitical effort than the Marshall Plan. It is difficult to overstate how central China is to the global energy transition, for better and worse.
The evidence keeps mounting against new fossil fuel investments. In a new report, The Implications of Oil and Gas Field Decline Rates, the International Energy Agency finds that the global oil and gas industry is spending more and more money just to maintain current levels of production. If demand (and thus prices) start to fall, as they are expected to in the next decade, many producers will become unviable even faster than previously assumed.
But that isn’t stopping world governments from doubling down. As the latest Production Gap Report from the Stockholm Environment Institute concludes, governments continue to ramp up approvals and investments in fossil fuel production capacity, increasing the gap between their collective plans and the global carbon budget. A looming oversupply of fossil fuels is bad news for the climate but also for the countries that depend on high fossil fuel prices, which brings us to…
Canada and BC are gifting a $4 billion subsidy to the LNG industry. The shaky economics of fossil fuels should be giving investors and governments in Canada pause, yet as a new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Launching a Loss, reveals, the federal and BC governments are subsidizing new liquified natural gas facilities to the tune of $3.93 billion. As IISD points out, these projects may never be economically viable without continued subsidization, making them boondoggles just waiting to happen.
Carbon capture remains a risky and ineffective distraction. The NewClimate Institute, a German think tank, released Companies’ role in scaling up durable carbon dioxide removals, which finds that most “carbon capture” today is not a long-term solution. Companies will often receive credit for, for example, planting trees even if they later burn down. To make matters worse, an article in the journal Nature finds that there are hard limits to how much captured carbon can actually be stored in the planet, which means that even if the technology worked as well as proponents claim, it still couldn’t solve most of our climate problems. Finally, the Australia Institute highlights on their blog just how ineffective Australia’s publicly-subsidized carbon capture projects have been when it comes to reducing emissions. Altogether, carbon capture remains a dangerous distraction from the essential task of true decarbonization.
Everything you need to know about just transition policy in one place. The UNFCCC has published a synthesis report on just transition frameworks drawn from a huge array of global submissions. If you’re already steeped in the just transition literature you won’t find much new here, but I appreciate how comprehensive the report is, especially its detailed breakdowns of 52 existing just transition policy frameworks from around the world. It’ll be a really useful citation moving forward.
Climate investment targets might succeed where emissions targets failed. One of my favourite industrial policy writers, Bentley Allan, has a new article in Noema Magazine that discusses the geopolitics of the green transition. One of the big takeaways is that many developing countries are aggressively adopting renewables not only for climate reasons but also because they offer freedom from the extortionist fossil fuel trade (and, as a bonus, are increasingly the cheapest option). The article offers some big ideas for reorganizing global climate governance to capitalize on these trends, including a new mandate for the UNFCCC focused on climate investments and green industrial policy.
The health impacts of climate change are increasingly dire. A report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine documents in rigorous detail the wide variety of ways climate change harms human health, including through heat, pollution and disease. An article in the journal Nature finds that air pollution from the 2023 Canadian wildfires alone was responsible for 64,000 deaths worldwide. And an article in Nature Medicine estimates that extreme heat waves in Europe in 2024 killed 63,000 people. These warnings are echoed by the Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment in a recent commentary for the CCPA blog. Health risks are one of the most important yet underappreciated consequences of climate change.
AI is gutting youth labour markets. A working paper from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, Canaries in the Coal Mine?, flags six worrying trends for AI in the labour market. The headline finding is that young American workers in AI-exposed industries, such as software development or customer service, have experienced a 13 per cent decline in employment since the release of ChatGPT in fall 2022 even as employment among older workers in those industries remained stable. That’s a massive impact for a technology that’s just getting started.
Canada is racing blind into an uncertain AI future. An excellent new article by Canadian researchers published by the University of Essex, “Canada’s High-Stakes AI Gamble,” exposes Canadian governments’ blind faith in technological progress, including the current federal government’s insistence that public interest regulation not get in the way of private sector innovation. We should be following in the EU’s footsteps, not the U.S.’, when it comes to AI regulation.
