Climate conference in Edmonton calls for windfall tax on oil companies
Author John Vaillant and Jasper's mayor spoke to hundreds of municipal leaders about how supercharged wildfires are reshaping Canada.
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A standing ovation for a federal environment minister in Alberta. A call for a national windfall tax on oil companies. Both happened Thursday at Edmonton's Art Gallery of Alberta, where more than 300 mayors and municipal councillors gathered for the Elbows Up for Climate conference.
Author John Vaillant, who wrote the bestselling Fire Weather, and Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland pulled no punches about wildfire risks. Ireland lost his own home in the 2024 fire that razed his town — and he made clear that preparation wasn't enough. The fire was "supercharged," he said, with cyclonic winds that carried embers like tiny meteorites into town, setting buildings and homes ablaze. "We spent a lot of time planning and preparing, but we were not prepared for the ferocity, the intensity and the size of that fire."
Vaillant went further, laying blame at oil and gas companies. "There's no getting around the fact that weather is different now, and fire is different now," he said. "We've always had big fires, that is true, but not this bad, not this often." He predicted a future where planes get grounded because it's too hot to take off and pavement buckles from extreme heat.
He called the current $100-plus-a-barrel oil price an example of "war profiteering" and argued Ottawa should tax those windfall profits. "One way to understand capitalism, as it currently practiced, is as a Ponzi scheme," Vaillant said, where the environment is leverage and rising global temperatures are "the interest on that debt."
The conference underscored how fire has become the lens through which even Alberta's municipal leaders are rethinking climate action — and pushing back against energy interests.