Put people and the planet before profit, to end the climate catastrophe!
The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) calls for immediate, emergency action to address the ongoing wildfire crisis which is gripping the province. The rapidly expanding wildfires are destroying communities in Northern Ontario and displacing Indigenous nations and many working-class people there. The fires are blanketing the rest of the province in a thick coating of smoke, leading to disastrous health outcomes for working people hundreds of kilometres away from the fires themselves.
As is the case throughout Canada and around the world, Ontario is seeing an increase in the occurrence and severity of wildfires, an outcome of the global climate crisis. The climate crisis itself is the result of centuries of capitalist expansion, including the scandalous, profit-seeking political choices made over decades by the federal and provincial governments who have falsely counterposed climate justice with “bread and butter” cost-of-living issues. This includes the decision to spend billions in public funds to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline, and the recent announcements of the Carney government and the Ford government in Ontario to use public funds to construct even more pipelines heading east and west from Alberta.
Construction of these pipelines is being pitched as a move towards energy sovereignty and security, as well as a program to boost the economy and create jobs. In truth however, these pipelines are being proposed to publicly subsidize the profits of the Canadian oil and gas monopolies who are no longer interested in reinvesting their own profits to build infrastructure, and are instead forcing the costs – and the risks – onto working people.
Despite claims that these pipelines are a “good investment,” the government’s own actuarial tables reveal that the Trans Mountain pipeline will recover less than half of the total public expenditure spent on building the project. This is on top of the thousands of metric tonnes of emissions the pipelines dump into the atmosphere, intensifying the climate crisis, displacing more and more Indigenous nations in Canada, and costing hundreds of billions in economic damage.
The wildfires are burning along the planned route of Ford’s proposed pipeline, and are causing massive destruction of the infrastructure currently in place along the corridor – a grim foreshadowing of the consequences of more pipeline construction.
Further, the planned routes of the respective pipelines, to BC’s southern coast and the border city of Sarnia in Ontario, are not positioned to “open up Canadian energy to the world markets” but to further integrate the Canadian economy with the United States, sending oil south along the US coast, and across the St. Clair river to the US interstate highways. Expanding the integration of energy infrastructure with the US has been an ongoing project which has taken place over decades.
In Ontario, this integration has included Ford’s cynical shift away from emissions-free energy sources powering Ontario’s grid. Since Ford came to power in 2018, gas-powered electricity generation has increased to nearly 20% of all production, up from 4% in 2018. If Ontario, and Canada, were serious about energy sovereignty and environmental responsibility, it would look to successful approaches being taken internationally and begin the massive build-out of solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal power across the province.
Instead, both the federal and provincial governments are committing huge amounts of public funds to the increased military budget and the global drive to war, slashing socially useful spending in the process. Ottawa’s target of spending 5% of GDP on military spending – to at least $150 billion annually – not only deprives climate and environmental initiatives and emergency response services of badly needed funds, but it further escalates the climate crisis through emissions-intensive construction of more military bases and infrastructure. Internationally, hundreds of destructive wildfires in Britain and US have been decisively linked to activity on military bases – expanding the military’s presence and activity in Ontario will only make wildfires like this more likely and more destructive.
As the climate crisis continues to intensify as a result of these policies, Ontario will be less and less prepared to respond to emergencies thanks to the slash-and-burn austerity measures being undertaken by Ford’s Conservatives. Since 2018, Ford has consistently underbudgeted for firefighting efforts and has instituted cuts to budgets despite the increases in forest fires. In 2026, Ontario budgeted a measly $150 million for emergency fire management, despite spending almost double that amount in 2025. The Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs have indicated that these budget shortfalls have forced them to simply let some fires burn, as they do not have the crew or equipment in their budget to tackle every fire. Worse still huge swaths of Ontario’s emergency management system is being privatized to companies like Uber, who will profit from the crisis, as part of Ford’s “Ontario Corps.”
The first to pay for the impacts of these wildfires are Indigenous nations in Northern Ontario. Despite only representing 5% of the total population in Canada, Indigenous peoples represent 42% of all evacuation caused by wildfires. This follows centuries of forced displacement and relocation brought on by colonial policies which scattered many Indigenous nations onto reserves, so that over 80% of majority-Indigenous communities currently live in fire-prone regions in the country. This is exacerbated by the sharp disparities in water infrastructure, emergency services and resources characteristic of persistent colonial underdevelopment. These disparities are sharpest on reserves, but exist throughout Northern Ontario.
Because of the threats to their lives and livelihoods, Indigenous nations have joined the efforts in Northern Ontario to beat back and extinguish these fires despite the lack of government supports for the workers battling the blaze or the Indigenous nations themselves. The Communist Party stands in solidarity with all those battling the apocalyptic wildfires in an effort to protect working people across the province from their disastrous health and environmental consequences.
Addressing these fires will require immediate, decisive action from all levels of government, and a reorientation of the economy away from rapacious profit-seeking and toward a green transition. In the immediate term, the government must redirect the $150 billion in war profiteering, and the billions more in pipeline expansion, to extinguish the fires, build climate resilience, and transform the province to a sustainable, full-employment economy. Further, all energy, mining, and natural resource extraction industries must immediately be taken into public hands and placed under democratic control. The cost of this transition must be borne from the profits of the fossil fuel industries, with jail-time for executives who refuse to pay.
We must also uphold UNDRIP as binding law, ensuring Indigenous rights to full, free, prior, and informed consent over all development on their territory, including reversal of all provincial measures that circumvent Indigenous consent.
Ultimately, the only cure for the climate crisis is the abandonment of the wanton destruction of the profit-seeking embedded in the capitalist system. Labour and the people’s movements face an existential crisis as the twin threats of war and climate change loom large on the horizon. But, while these threats are temporarily overwhelming, they are not insurmountable, and the sharpening contradictions in Ontario continue to sow the seeds for a working class fightback to win change in the province.
Workers have a world to win – and a planet to save.
