The following is a re-print of the May 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.
King Charles delivered the throne speech in Ottawa with all the requisite pomp and obligatory overtures to Canadian nationalism that one would expect given ongoing annexation threats from our southern neighbour.
On policy, the speech reiterated the rightward political shift that Mark Carney’s Liberals promised during their winning federal election campaign and in the PM’s subsequent mandate letter to ministers. Expect an expensive build-out of Canada’s military capacity, expensive income tax cuts that will do next to nothing for low-income households, and cuts to public services and the public sector workforce.
For workers and environmentalists, the greatest opportunities in the government’s agenda are on infrastructure. Carney has promised major nation-building projects, including an east-west electricity grid that would support decarbonization efforts across the country. An acceleration of home-building through a new crown corporation is also promising, although the Liberals have only committed to vaguely “affordable” housing and not to truly non-market housing.
On climate policy, however, red flags abound. The Liberals remain as committed to “conventional” (i.e., fossil fuel) energy as they do clean alternatives. The new natural resources minister—an investment banker who once sat on the board of a Canadian oil sands company—recently stated that Canada’s oil industry is, in fact, a solution to the global climate crisis, not one of its principal causes. The throne speech offered no indication that reducing greenhouse gas emissions—let alone responding to the impacts of climate change—is on this government’s agenda.
The lip service paid to climate action in the throne speech was especially disappointing coming from the monarch dubbed—by supporters and detractors alike—as the “climate king.” Charles has spent more than half a century advocating for environmental causes, and correctly labels climate change as an existential threat to humanity.
It has me wondering: who, in 2025, is Canada’s climate king (or queen or monarch)?
Despite his deeply mixed record on actual climate policy—a legacy forever tainted by the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion—Justin Trudeau was the most visible advocate of climate action in Canada for the past decade.
Mark Carney, despite his globally-recognized career as a sustainable finance advocate, has shown little interest in taking up the mantle domestically.
Politicians such as Elizabeth May, Steven Guilbeault, Alexandre Boulerice and Nate Erskine-Smith have stronger climate bona fides and remain in office, but they have been politically sidelined in this new administration. Outside of government, figures such as David Suzuki and Naomi Klein are still respected voices, but there is no indication the government is listening to them.
By default, the climate crown is offered to Julie Dabrusin, the new federal environment minister. The fact that her appointment immediately riled up Alberta premier Danielle Smith is perhaps the strongest endorsement of her climate credentials. It remains to be seen if she will emerge as a public champion of climate action and a sufficient counterweight to the fossil fuel interests in the new Liberal cabinet.
I don’t mean to overstate the importance of the title. Making climate progress cannot and should not fall on the shoulders of any one person, of course. But having leaders who keep climate on the public agenda is vital for continued progress. Without them, we risk stagnation and backsliding that we simply cannot afford.
As usual, we’ve got lots of research to dive into this month, including a bevy of interesting international case studies. Let’s get to it.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Who needs a climate king when we can have climate democracy?
As a counterpoint to my opening assertion, the Climate Reality Project has released a timely new report, Advancing climate action through participatory democracy, that downplays the role of individual politicians in climate policy and calls for more direct citizen engagement instead.
The report focuses on four types of participatory democracy: citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, citizen advisory committees and public consultations. While consultations are common and often reduced to a box-checking exercise for governments, the other approaches offer better opportunities for citizens to meaningfully engage with climate policy and to influence public priorities and decision-making.
Report author Megan Mattes provides a helpful array of case studies of Canadian communities experimenting with each of these forms of participatory democracy at the local level. The big takeaway is that participatory democracy tends to produce policy recommendations with very broad buy-in, since the process forces a productive engagement between competing values and practical concerns—something our formal political systems often do poorly (especially under majority governments).
The report is mainly focused on municipal governments, but the lessons hold for federal and provincial governments, too. The Sustainable Jobs Partnership Council is a step in this direction, but I would love to see a national citizen’s assembly on climate.
LNG dreams are destroying BC’s hard-won climate credibility
For decades, British Columbia (alongside Quebec) has been at the forefront of Canadian climate policy. BC implemented carbon pricing and an electric vehicle sales mandate, for example, well before they became federal policy. The 2018 Clean BC plan was widely lauded for its ambition and still offers a strong framework for emissions reductions in the province.
Yet according to BC’s latest Climate Change Accountability Report, the province is going to miss all of its climate targets by a huge margin. The biggest problem in the short term is commercial trucking, which is offsetting emissions reductions from other sectors. In the long term, however, the fundamental problem is the province’s massive political and economic commitment to liquified natural gas.
We talk about LNG a lot in this newsletter. Despite being framed as a climate solution, LNG is a fossil fuel with lifetime emissions comparable to coal. LNG requires a huge amount of energy to produce and it leaks methane terribly, not to mention the downstream emissions when the gas is ultimately burned. It is absolutely a contributor—not a solution—to the climate crisis.
Seven major LNG export facilities are in development in BC. If they all proceed, it virtually guarantees the province (and, likely, the country) cannot achieve its long term climate commitments. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, who initially endorsed Clean BC, now calls the plan a shambles, largely because of LNG.
For a deeper dive into the environmental and economic perils of BC LNG, my colleague Marc Lee recently published Painting itself into a corner. As the report concludes, LNG development and climate action are fundamentally contradictory objectives.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
Environmental regulations could save Canada $21 billion in health costs. A new report from the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Healthy, Wealthy & Wise, estimates that four specific federal regulations, including the national coal phase-out and proposed clean electricity regulations, will produce cumulative savings to the Canadian healthcare system of up to $21 billion by 2050. The paper makes various assumptions, but the specific numbers are less important than the broader message that climate and energy policies should more explicitly account for their costs (and benefits) to human health.
Canada must double the low-carbon workforce by 2050. This one came in under the wire and I’ll do a deeper dive next month, but the Pembina Institute released Recruit, Train, Retain, which shines a light on the state of workforce development planning in Canada. It’s an underappreciated but essential component of any industrial strategy. We can’t build a clean economy if we don’t have the right workers in the right places.
China’s emissions are falling thanks to world-leading renewable investment. For the first time, China’s emissions have declined in absolute terms due to its energy transition (as opposed to temporary declines from economic downturns), as Carbon Brief reports. It is a massively important milestone for the global climate effort, and flies in the face of the stubbornly persistent myth that rich countries shouldn’t bother acting on climate change because China isn’t either. As the International Renewable Energy Agency’s latest Renewable Capacity Statistics report highlights, China was responsible for a stunning 63 per cent of global growth in renewable energy capacity in 2024—more than the rest of the world combined.
Scottish refinery closure reignites UK just transition debate. The Grangemouth Refinery became the latest and final Scottish oil refinery to cease operations, leading to hundreds of layoffs and backlash from workers and the community. The UK and Scottish governments have long promised a just transition for Grangemouth, and a recently published strategy called Project Willow outlines practical options for lower-carbon industrial alternatives at the site, such as plastic recycling and biofuels. The problem is that the plan comes ten years too late and no one has stepped up with the funding to deliver on its recommendations. It’s not a just transition if workers lose their jobs before alternatives are in place.
Scottish oil town calls for proactive transition planning. 160 kilometres northeast of Grangemouth, another Scottish community is grappling with its industrial future in a lower-carbon economy. In A Just Transition for Aberdeen and the North East, the Scottish Just Transition Commission reports back on consultations with workers and citizens in the Aberdeen region, which is closely tied to the waning offshore oil industry. The key takeaway—a familiar refrain any time workers and communities are asked for their input—is that governments need to make a proactive plan. Leaders cannot wait until plants close and people lose their jobs, as in Grangemouth, before investing in alternatives.
The oil industry can (and should) pay for the UK’s just transition. Where can money for these alternative investments come from? According to a new report from Oil Change International, Up For Grabs, eliminating subsidies and increasing taxes on the UK oil and gas industry could raise more than ₤6 billion ($8 billion) per year to fund transition initiatives. As a reminder, the UK introduced a temporary Energy Profits Levy in 2022 in response to oil industry profiteering during the pandemic. OCI calls for the levy to be strengthened and made permanent—a policy Canada should consider as well.
Making energy efficiency accessible is not just about money. Elsewhere in the UK, the city of London is considering how to make its home retrofitting programs more equitable and accessible. In a new report, A Just Transition in London’s Retrofits, the London Sustainable Development Commission finds that marginalized groups, including low-income and racialized households, are much less likely to benefit from retrofitting programs. It recommends engaging under-represented communities in the design of retrofits programs to ensure they meet households’ actual needs.
Corporate obstruction imperils South Africa’s just transition… Coal-dependent South Africa is a crucial, ongoing case study for just energy transitions. As a recent article in the journal Environmental Science & Policy explains, there is a structural disconnect between high-level government commitments to justice and the actual energy policies they’re implementing. A major obstacle, as in Canada, is the fossil fuel industry itself. A report by the South African NGO Just Share, The Obstruction Playbook, finds that industry lobbying has successfully compromised and delayed policies that would otherwise have supported a just transition in the country.
…but energy democracy offers a way forward. What would a truly just transition look like instead? A new report from a coalition of South African NGOs, Concrete models of socially-owned renewable energy, presents a hopeful alternative. The report describes how community organizing in the coal-dependent Sekhukhune District has laid the groundwork for clean energy democracy in the region. Success ultimately hinges on passing enabling legislation and securing public financing, but it’s encouraging to see an energy community seizing the reins of their own future.
Mexican industrial policy push hinges on social dialogue and open collaboration. The U.S.-based Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab published Seizing Mexico’s Green Industrial Opportunities in the Emerging Geopolitical Landscape, which comes at an important moment for the country. Like Canada, Mexico has been shaken by the erratic new U.S. administration. Unlike Canada, Mexico has a comprehensive strategy, Plan México, for achieving industrial independence—something we can learn from. The NZIPL report breaks down the steps the Mexican government will need to take to make Plan México successful. One key lesson is to create institutions, such as sector development councils, that facilitate collaboration between government, industry and workers. It’s Industrial Policy 101, but too often governments defer to the corporate sector and allow the industrial policy agenda to be captured for private gain.
Just transitions are happening everywhere! To top off all of these international case studies, Oxfam has published Pathways to a Fast and Just Energy Transition, which offers a series of even more clean energy case studies from around the world, including New Zealand, Kenya and Pakistan. The throughline is the imperative of integrating justice from the beginning of a project—through robust, community-level social dialogue—rather than attempting to tack on an equity agenda to an already-planned industrial policy.
Too many LNG ships are facilitating too much pollution. You thought we were done talking about LNG? The South Korean non-profit Solutions for Our Climate published No Room for More, which argues that growth of the global LNG shipping fleet is inconsistent both with global climate commitments and with expected LNG demand. If nothing else, the paper argues, countries should stop subsidizing new LNG ships and export projects that are likely to become stranded assets.
Climate action and activism is leading to human rights abuses around the world… A UN special rapporteur is soliciting input on the state of human rights defenders in the context of climate change. In its submission, Amnesty International highlights a disturbing breadth of human rights abuses connected to fossil fuel development, including militarized raids on Wet’suwet’en land defenders by the RCMP. In its submission, the Swedish NGO SwedWatch highlights how renewable energy development is being pushed through in many jurisdictions without consulting local communities. Disregard for Indigenous rights is a recurring theme.
…and so is mineral mining. In its 2025 Transition Minerals Tracker, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre documents 156 allegations of abuse related to the mining of critical minerals in the past year alone. Cases include violations of Indigenous rights, labour rights and human rights such as access to clean drinking water. Although Canada was the site of only two such allegations in 2024, Canadian mining companies operating abroad were implicated in 10 cases.AI deeply tied to the future of work and energy. The International Labour Organization has taken a stab at modeling the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on the workforce in a new report, Generative AI and Jobs. It concludes that one in four jobs globally is exposed to AI disruption, especially in clerical and administrative occupations, although it cautions that exposure does not necessarily mean risk. In a separate brief, the International Monetary Fund projects that by 2030 the amount of electricity used by data centres could surpass every country in the world other than the U.S. and China. Although the magnitudes are speculative at this point, it’s clear that AI will be an unavoidably critical factor for both the workforce and the energy transition in the next decade.
