Stop cheering Big Oil — Our children, and the planet will lose

Charlie Angus / The Resistance – Jul 03, 2026

Do you remember the summers we grew up with?

Those long, lazy, hazy, crazy days that seemed to last forever?

When dealing with forest fires was handled by college students as a summer job?

Before the mass evacuations and the heat domes?

Before the Super El Niño, a destabilized ocean and the multitude of urban deaths in heat-stressed cities all over the world?

This summer has made me think of a frightening prediction in John Valliant’s book Fire Weather,

“Anyone born after 1990 is finding themselves in a new geological era, navigating a world fundamentally different from the one Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers inherited. The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil.”

Vaillant’s book on the frightening world of climate fire captured our imagination in the summer of 2023, when hundreds of thousands of Canadians were forced from their homes by an unprecedented burning of the boreal forest.

I invited John Vaillant to testify in Parliament as the government was trying to square an impossible circle — reducing emissions from the tar sands while heavily investing in their expansion.

In that summer of unprecedented climate fires, Richard Kruger, CEO of Suncor, made an equally apocalyptic statement. He urged the oil industry to take up the “urgency” of the moment.

But Kruger wasn’t talking about the urgency of the growing climate disaster. He was talking about the need for the oil industry to slow down investments in clean energy to double down on profits from the tar sands.

I also brought Kruger to testify before parliament.

My focus was pushing the government to follow through on the series of initiatives they claimed would be a quid pro quo for Canada’s oil and gas industry.

The Trudeau government had made massive public investments to help the Alberta oil industry. They vowed they could meet their global Net Zero obligations by tweaking regulations to address rising emissions.

The “quid” part of the deal came in the form of the TMX pipeline built by the public at a cost of $34 billion. That worked out to a subsidy of $850 per taxpayer nationwide. This was a massive boost to the industry, increasing production from 2.9 million barrels a day to 5 million.

But the oil giants balked at doing their part, which was paying the toll fees, the standard way to get a return on investment. The public is being forced to subsidize the barrels being shipped down the TMX pipeline to the tune of 50 cents on the dollar, a potential $18 billion giveaway that would cost $1248 per household.

Given this massive amount of public largesse, the Trudeau government thought they were on solid ground to set targets to increase clean-fuel regulations for vehicles and clean-energy regulations to push certain lazy-assed provincial governments away from coal and GHG-emitting power plants.

Stronger methane regulations were a no-brainer.

The government also placed a slow but steady rise in the industrial price on carbon as a way of pushing industry to reduce emissions as they increased production.

But the Trudeau government didn’t understand the game: Canada’s oil giants don’t do quid pro quo.

The Smith government, acting as a mouthpiece for the oil CEOs, derided these measures as an attack on Alberta and proof of a woke hatred of the oil industry. Trudeau was trashed and blamed as an enemy of the West. These reasonable measures fanned the flames of separation and were used as an excuse to break up our nation.

Prime Minister Carney didn’t want to fall into the same trap.

He has rolled back the regulations. In fact, he has gone much further — committing Canada to building another pipeline, even though there is no private-sector interest in putting up the money.

I was struck by the PM’s reasons for capitulating so completely to the oil agenda. He said that meeting our Net Zero targets through the measures to lower emissions wasn’t “sustainable.” In the midst of a climate disaster, the issue of sustainability has been turned on its head.

But there was another striking statement made by the Prime Minister to justify his decision to walk away from Canada’s global commitments to Net Zero.

He said that dealing with emissions had created an “opportunity for those people who wish to pull Canada apart both at home and abroad.”

He didn’t say exactly who he thought would see “opportunity” in breaking up the country, but let me tell you about my modest attempt to hold the oil giants accountable.

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In 2023, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment reached out with a seemingly simple proposition.

They wanted me to take on the fight against the disinformation coming from the oil and gas advertising machine to spread “greenwashing” claims about the sustainability of ever-increasing oil and gas emissions.

The oil and gas industry relied on numerous front groups who purchased bus shelter ads, billboards, and online advertising. There were darker players running online misinformation campaigns against EVs and launching online BOT battles as if the love of a diesel engine was a cultural symbol of freedom.

It is reported that globally the oil giants spend $6.97 billion annually on falsely “greenwashing” the industry and lying about the impacts of their product. The United Nations has been calling on countries to outlaw advertising by the petro giants because they swamp public space with overkill of falsehoods.

It was like the Big Tobacco days when the cigarette manufacturers sold the image of lifestyle choices and suppressed the obvious threat.

The doctors who met with me framed the issue within the same focus that led to the fight against Big Tobacco — the threat to human health.

Every year, 34,000 people die prematurely in Canada from fossil fuel pollution. Around the world, 8.7 million people die from exposure to air pollution — more than deaths from smoking. Canada now has the third highest global level of childhood asthma (caused by vehicle pollution). We are just behind competing oil states of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The United Nations estimated that in 2018 alone, air pollution from fossil fuels caused $2.9 trillion in health and economic costs. Other estimates suggest that, in Canada, the annual cost of health care alone exceeds $50 billion and could range between $59 and $110 billion by 2050.

As I was writing this article, I came across a new report that states that in the United States, five people die every hour from complications of inhaling car emissions. The report tracked 41,800 American deaths in 2024 due to vehicle emissions.

On top of this, there are the tens of thousands who are dying every year from the complications of breathing smoke from climate fires. A paper published in the journal Science Advances identified 24,000 deaths a year in the lower 48 states.

In California, the cluster of deaths was shockingly obvious: 2,231 smoke-related deaths in Santa Clara County, 2,063 deaths in Contra Costa County, and 2,057 deaths in Alameda County.

In 2024, I introduced the Fossil Fuel Advertising Act, Bill C-372, to end decades of greenwashing and disinformation from Canada’s hugely powerful oil lobby.

The legislation was based on the clear and straightforward regulations used to curb tobacco advertising. With a few tweaks and adjustments, the regs could help rein in 60-plus years of false advertising and paltering by the oil giants.

The attacks came fast and furious.

The first out of the gate was the indicted conspiracy leader Tamara Lich. Within minutes she was followed by tweets from Premier Danielle Smith. And not to be outdone, the Alberta and Saskatchewan NDP quickly denounced my bill as a threat to the West.

In the right-wing press, I was accused of everything from trying to kill jobs to wanting to arrest people who love the internal combustion engine.

Then came the death threats.

For nearly two weeks, my staff couldn’t answer the phones because of the volume of violent threats.

I didn’t back down.

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The Big Tobacco Playbook

For decades, the tobacco industry was untouchable because of an endlessly deep war chest for lawyers, lobbyists, and ad agencies. They funded false studies, paid for front group agitators, and ran relentless ad campaigns that seduced new generations of smokers.

But by the early 1990s, a concerted strategy was used to bring down Big Tobacco and hold them accountable for the harms they were causing.

The oil giants had followed the Big Tobacco playbook. As early as the 1960s, they knew that they were on track to upend the climate stability of our planet. In 1980,, Exxon undertook detailed atmospheric measurements that accurately predicted the crisis we are now in. Company scientists warned that by the time the public began to notice climate instability, it would be too late.

Exxon and the other companies suppressed the evidence and launched massive advertising campaigns to deny climate science.

Nonetheless, in 2023-24, it felt like we might be reaching that Big Tobacco moment with the oil giants.

In 2024, the Competition Bureau took up the fight with a simple change to their advertising rules stating that companies couldn’t make false environmental claims about the products they sold.

After all, would we want car manufacturers to make false statements about car safety or mining companies to lie about dumping toxins in the water?

Nonetheless, the oil industry lost its mind. Rather than undertake the due diligence to ensure their advertising was truthful and accurate, they shut down their publicity sites altogether. Smith publicly blamed me, even though I had little to do with the Competition Bureau changes.

When Prime Minister Carney was elected, one of the first things he did was to change the advertising regs. He stated that the rules ensuring that companies did not engage in false greenwashing were an attempt to “silence” the industry.

He said the rules impeded companies from encouraging investments in clean energy and environmental action. The regulations did no such thing; they were focused on ensuring that industry didn’t lie in its claims.

But with the oil industry, there is no such thing as negotiation and compromise. They demand the whole pie.

In doubling down on the false notion of economic sustainability versus the need to find climate sustainability, Mark Carney is pitching us the lie that we can massively increase production today and kick the can down the road to some more convenient time in the future.

But we have run out of road.

That was why there was such a sense of urgency at the Paris Accord a decade ago. The planet is at peak C02. The climate breakdown is happening all around us.

It seems darkly ironic that, in a summer of heat domes and climate stress, the PM has announced his “win-win” strategy to build another pipeline.

There is zero business case for this pipeline. It is a total subsidy to the industry. Nonetheless, Mr. Carney assures us it will be a “public-private” partnership.

It is the public who will pay.

The private interests of the oil giants will make out like bandits. They win.

Our children and the planet will lose.

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