May 17, 2016 - As the wildfire raged and 90,000 people including kids, the elderly, and hospital patients were forced to flee from Fort McMurray on the only highway that would take them to safety hundreds of kilometers to the south, Canadians saw a very different city than they are used to.
It was no longer just a symbol, an easy target in the ongoing conflict between those who want oil to stay in the ground and those who see it as key to their livelihood.
The Ontario government will spend more than $7-billion over four years on a sweeping climate change plan that will affect every aspect of life – from what people drive to how they heat their homes and workplaces – in a bid to slash the province’s carbon footprint.
With each day the bad news spreads. A gigantic wildfire now covering some 4,000 km2 is spreading through northeastern Alberta and into Saskatchewan — devastating much of Fort McMurray, the city in the heartland of the tar sands. Some 90,000 residents have been displaced and thousands of homes, many local industries and businesses, destroyed.
Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks.
It’s no secret that the drop in the price of oil has hit Alberta’s fossil fuel economy hard and hit Albertan families even harder. Our province lost over 51,000 oil-related jobs in 2015 and there’s no sign of them coming back any time soon.
The good news is that with increased provincial leadership and with the right policies and investments in the green economy we can put people back to work and create jobs in a province that desperately needs them.
As the climate crisis continues to deepen and as it becomes less and less plausible that current efforts to curb global warming will even come close to preventing our earth from crossing the 2 degree Celsius ‘red line,’ the climate movement has shifted towards a bolder vision for climate action. Virtually every pole of the climate movement has evolved towards a set of bolder, more urgent demands and the mantra ‘keep it in the ground’ has begun to dominate the discussion about fossil fuel extraction and use.
