The following is a re-print of the December 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.
All activism exists on a spectrum from the idealistic to the pragmatic, and all activists need to ask themselves how much they are willing to compromise to make progress.
For the past ten years, the Canadian climate movement has answered that question in different ways. For some, especially those with a seat at the table, compromise led to some major wins, such as carbon pricing and sustainable jobs legislation. For others, any apparent progress has come at an unacceptable cost, exemplified most clearly by the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline.
Personally, I’ve gone back and forth. Although I have been highly critical of the federal government’s unwavering support for fossil fuels, which has ultimately sabotaged our climate efforts, I have also gone to bat for the government’s broader climate agenda. Despite my reservations about carbon pricing in particular, I’ve done more media interviews and written more op-eds defending that policy than I have any other climate issue over the past decade.
At some point, however, the policy window shifts so far that compromise is no longer possible. And I wonder if we’ve now reached that point.
The federal election was a wake-up call for some. The federal budget was a wake-up call for others. But despite all the backsliding on climate over the past year, many climate advocates remained supportive of the federal government’s broader climate agenda.
And then the federal government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Alberta to build a new bitumen pipeline.
The MOU is, as my colleague Marc Lee explains, an early Christmas present for the oil and gas industry—a compromise in name only that, in one fell swoop, throws a decade of climate policy under the bus.
The Alberta MOU was the final wake-up call for many climate advocates, including the former environment minister and two prominent members of the government’s climate advisory body. Organizations that, only weeks earlier, lauded the federal budget for its “clear steps to strengthen Canada’s climate [policy]” suddenly decried the “unravelling” of years of work.
There are holdouts that I won’t name—climate advocates who continue to give this federal government the benefit of the doubt—but their numbers are dwindling. For the lion’s share of the movement, it may be time to acknowledge the hard truth that this federal government is no ally on climate, and that further compromise—which gives the government political cover to push additional fossil fuel infrastructure—is likely to do more harm than good.
There is a time for pragmatism, but there is also a time for idealism. What time is it now? That’s the question I’m thinking about.
Thank you for reading Shift Storm in 2025. We’ll be back in the new year, but, for one last time, let’s get into the research.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Canadian oil jobs are disappearing—and they’re never coming back
The political pretense for oil and gas investment in Canada often includes a jobs pitch that is accepted on faith by politicians and pundits. The Alberta-Canada pipeline MOU, for example, claims that increasing Alberta oil and gas production will create “hundreds of thousands of new jobs” based on no evidence whatsoever. It’s an incredible claim that has somehow avoided scrutiny in the aftermath of the MOU announcement.
As a new report, Worker Voice and Effective Transitions for Fossil Fuel Workers in Canada, by Jim Stanford and Kathy Bennett for the Centre for Future Work, points out, it’s an assumption that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Since 2014, Canadian oil and gas employment has fallen by 18 per cent—a net loss of 38,000 jobs—even as oil production increased by 35 per cent and gas production by 24 per cent. This apparent paradox is largely explained by the transition from job-intensive project construction to capital-intensive project operation. In other words, now that most oil sands projects and some liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities are fully up and running, the construction workforce has been rendered expendable.
But it’s not only on the construction side. The oil industry is actively automating its operations jobs—a strategy oil sands companies proudly own—which is reducing the workforce even faster as production levels increase.
Building a new bitumen pipeline would create a few thousand temporary construction jobs, but even if the pipeline achieved its goal of increasing oil sands production by a million barrels per day—about a 20 per cent increase in Alberta’s production levels—there is no guarantee of long term job gains. If global oil prices enter structural decline, which is an increasingly likely scenario in the next decade, far more jobs will be lost.
The good news, as the Stanford-Bennett paper argues, is that the continued shedding of jobs from the fossil fuel industry is entirely manageable. Fossil fuel jobs amount to merely one per cent of national employment, and a managed workforce transition can ensure that not a single worker loses their job involuntarily. Pulling it off will require a collaborative planning process that gives workers a voice in shaping their own futures. Failing to prepare will ensure unnecessary pain for those workers and their communities.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
First report from sustainable jobs council puts industrial strategy front and centre. The Sustainable Jobs Partnership Council was named earlier this year with a mandate to advise the federal government on its sustainable jobs (i.e., just transition) policy. The council has now released its first annual report, which makes the crucial link between equitable workforce development and proactive industrial strategy. The report is fairly thin overall and the recommendations lack specifics, but it lays the groundwork for more thorough consultations and rigorous recommendations next year.
Best practices for effective just transitions. The Institute for Research on Public Policy and Future Skills Centre published Learning from Place-Based Approaches on the Road to Net Zero, which draws ten lessons from international case studies of climate-driven workforce transitions. Key takeaways include the importance of worker and community voice in transition planning, proactive economic diversification, and generous social programs to mitigate displacement. A paper from the OECD, Employment and Skills Policies for the Green Transition, similarly draws on case studies to identify best practices for just transition plans. However, while the OECD piece gets place-based policy right, it downplays some key Just Transition 101 elements, including social dialogue and industrial strategy.
Public leadership is a prerequisite for effective climate action. The godmother of contemporary industrial policy, Mariana Mazzucato, released two new reports, State Capacity and Capabilities for a Just Green World and Mission-Oriented Country Platforms, which together make the case that global climate action will inevitably fail in the absence of strong, market-directing public institutions. The key takeaway is the state’s responsibility for setting a long-term economic vision and redirecting all available resources—public and private—toward achieving it. It is not sufficient to merely incentivize or “de-risk” private investments in a cleaner economy, as Canada is doing, especially when the state is incoherently supporting conflicting sectors, such as oil and gas production.
Just how bad is LNG for the climate, anyway? In Refuel, the Public Policy Forum and Canadian Chamber of Commerce argue that the Canadian LNG industry could reduce global emissions by up to 70 megatonnes per year (equivalent to 10 per cent of Canada’s domestic emissions). That flies in the face of many other studies, including a new deep dive from the International Institute for Sustainable Development and an analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute that we discussed last month, which conclude that LNG expansion is as likely to increase global emissions as it is to reduce them. What gives? Basically, the climate argument for LNG is that it will displace coal use in Asia. On paper, it might just work (although the PPF paper isn’t transparent about its modeling). In practice, there is little evidence that Asian countries will replace coal plants with Canadian LNG. To make matters worse, any climate benefits from LNG will be temporary, since LNG investment locks in continued fossil fuel consumption that crowds out truly zero-carbon alternatives.
UK bans new offshore oil wells. The UK government’s new North Sea Future Plan places a moratorium on offshore oil licenses. It’s not necessarily a production cap, since existing oil fields can still be expanded, but it’s an important first step toward curtailing unfettered fossil fuel extraction. Throw the UK onto the pile of countries that made major climate moves in 2025.
Climate-related heat is a big drag on productivity. An article I’ve previously cited in the journal Nature was retracted for overstating the projected costs of climate change. It was an outlier in predicting a loss of nearly two thirds of global GDP by 2100—double what many other studies have found. Although climate deniers have, predictably, seized on the retraction, the evidence for catastrophic climate-related costs remains overwhelming. Indeed, a new study published by Duke University, Counting the Cost, finds that the U.S. is already losing US$220 billion per year due to lost productivity from extreme heat alone.
Alberta is $50 billion short on oil sands cleanup costs. A report from the Auditor General of Alberta finds that the province has only collected $1.8 billion through its Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP) to cover an estimated $52 billion cleanup bill for the oil sands. To make matters worse, the assets it has collected are significantly overstated. The upshot is that oil sands operators are shirking the financial risk of cleaning up their projects onto the public—a longstanding problem the province has refused to address. Last year, Matt Hulse and I published Heads in the Sands, which finds that these unfunded liabilities will get worse as global oil prices fall and oil sands projects go prematurely offline. Matt is currently supporting the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s legal challenge to the inadequate MFSP.
Training of new electricity workers isn’t keeping pace with global demand. According to the latest World Energy Employment report from the International Energy Agency, the global electricity sector now employs, for the first time, more people than the fuel sector. That’s good news for global decarbonization efforts, but new workers are not being trained fast enough to meet demand, putting the pace of further electrification at risk. For better or worse, the report notes that artificial intelligence, which is being uncritically adopted across many other sectors, cannot replace the often hands-on technical roles that are in greatest demand in the electricity sector. To address these gaps, the report calls for better wages, improved job quality and efforts to make the energy sector safer and more appealing to women.
