It's time for a fossil fuel emissions cap

My daughter Helen had just turned five when the fire hit Lytton. She was away from home for a few days, escaping the heat dome that turned fir needles red on the branch. She didn’t have to run from the flames like I did, or like her friend Mimi did, eyes wide with five-year-old fear, small hand holding her mom’s as they ran. I saw Mimi and her mom on the sidewalk outside my café for a brief moment. The air was heavy, black, filled with fist-sized embers as the shimmering fire spread, building to building, house to house.

After I evacuated, I drove to Helen’s grandmother’s to pick her up, tears streaming down my cheeks as I followed the empty highway from Lytton to the coast. When I turned into the driveway I wiped my eyes, trying to pull myself together, trying to be the parent Helen would need now that everything we trusted in was gone.

This Thursday, the CEOs of five of Canada’s biggest oil and gas companies are expected to speak at Parliament Hill, where they will insist Canada does not need a limit on carbon pollution from oil and gas, despite the fact that carbon pollution is driving the climate impacts — fires, floods, droughts — Canadians are already suffering from.

Three of the five companies — Imperial, Suncor and Cenovus — are members of the Pathways Alliance, a lobby group that is working to derail and delay a proposed cap on oil and gas emissions that would be a significant step in limiting the fossil fuel emissions that drive climate change.

I’m going to Ottawa this week to talk with politicians as a survivor and a parent. Canadians are already suffering from climate impacts, and the frequency and intensity of climate disasters is going to grow, from coast to coast, unless we can curb the accelerating pace of climate change. We need a cap on fossil fuel emissions now — there is no time for more delays.

The fire destroyed my café and our community, but our house was saved by firefighters. After a month-long evacuation, we returned home to the edge of a burned-up town. There was no electricity and Helen cried, afraid of the dark, when we couldn’t turn on a nightlight at bedtime.

All through that summer and into the autumn, every time that it rained, more burned trees let go of the mountains they were holding, and roads flooded, washed out. Autumn turned into winter and the heaviest snowfall in decades blocked our road, unplowed because the village’s snowplows had burned in the fire. Through it all, through the fear and anger and terrifying depths of grief, I tried to be the parent that Helen needed.

How is it possible that Canada doesn’t have any limit for how much oil and gas companies are allowed to pollute our climate?

Last year, scientists found climate change made the weather conditions that led to fires in Quebec twice as likely. Another peer-reviewed study found that emissions from 88 major oil and gas producers were directly linked to increased wildfires across Western Canada and the United States

Left to itself, the industry isn’t cutting emissions. The latest National Inventory Report shows while other sectors in Canada are cutting emissions, the oil and gas sector’s are growing — now 31 per cent of Canada’s emissions. Poll after poll shows a majority of people in Canada want the federal government to put a cap on oil and gas emissions.

In a few weeks, Helen’s best friends will come to our house for her eighth birthday party. She wants an ice cream cake and a slip ‘n’ slide. Mimi and her mom will drive down from their home an hour away, where they have lived since the fire destroyed their apartment, and Helen’s friends from the Nlaka’pamux communities around Lytton will be here. The kids, survivors of the fire that destroyed our town, will laugh and celebrate.

I don’t want to tell Helen that the sunshine forecasted for her birthday is part of an ongoing drought. That the snowpack is a fraction of what it should be. That the river level is drastically low for this time of year. That we’re coming into another bad fire season.

In Ottawa, I will share our story with decision-makers. When my daughter asks me about her future, I need to be able to tell her that I’m fighting for it.

She didn’t run from the flames, but Helen is afraid of fire. She doesn’t want any candles on her birthday cake.

Meghan Fandrich is a resident of Lytton, a parent, a neurodivergent writer, and author of Burning Sage: Poems from the Lytton fire.