TORONTO—Across Ontario, a broad range of Indigenous, climate, labor and political voices are calling on the provincial and federal governments to take responsibility for the ongoing wildfire crisis which is gripping the province and filling skies across North America with smoke. They are demanding immediate emergency action to address the situation.
The wildfires continue to destroy communities in Northern Ontario and displace Indigenous nations and many working people there. In the rest of the province and beyond, the blankets of thick smoke have led to disastrous health outcomes for working people hundreds of kilometers 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,” said Jack Copple, Communist Party organizer for Ontario.
“The climate crisis itself is the result of centuries of capitalist expansion, and this includes 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.
“Among these choices are the decision to spend billions in public funds to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline, and the recent announcements of the Mark Carney federal government and the Doug Ford provincial government in Ontario to use public funds to construct even more pipelines heading east and west from Alberta.”
Governments and corporations are pitching construction of these pipelines as a move towards energy sovereignty and security while also claiming they will boost the economy and create jobs. But in fact, these pipelines are simply a public subsidy for the oil and gas monopolies, who don’t want to use their own profits to build infrastructure and are instead forcing the cost and 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,” Copple noted.
“This is on top of the thousands of metric tons 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.”
In a grim indication of the consequences of more pipeline construction, the current wildfires are burning along the planned route of Ontario Premier Ford’s proposed pipeline and are causing massive destruction of the infrastructure currently in place.
Ottawa claims that the planned routes of the respective pipelines, to British Columbia’s southern coast and the border city of Sarnia in Ontario, are positioned to “open up Canadian energy to the world markets.”
In truth, however, they will only further integrate the Canadian economy with U.S. capitalism, sending oil south along the U.S. coast and across the St. Clair River to the U.S. interstate highways. For decades, monopoly corporations and their mouthpieces in Canadian governments have been committed to expanding the integration of energy infrastructure with the U.S.
In Ontario, part of this integration has been to actually shift away from emissions-free energy sources. In 2018, fossil fuel-based electricity generation in the province was at 4%; since Ford came to power in 2018, it has increased to nearly 20% of all production.
If Carney and Ford “were serious about energy sovereignty and environmental responsibility, they would begin a massive build-out of solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal power across the province,” argues Copple.
“But 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.”
Across Canada, the Communist Party is campaigning against Ottawa’s policy of spending 5% of GDP on military spending, a target that amounts to at least $150 billion annually. This policy deliberately deprives climate and environmental initiatives and emergency response services of badly needed public funds, and it further escalates the climate crisis through emissions-intensive construction of more military bases and infrastructure.
In the U.S. and Britain, hundreds of destructive wildfires have been decisively linked to activity on military bases. Ontario and Canada are not immune to this fact—expanding the military’s presence and activity here will only make wildfires like the current ones more likely and more destructive.
The climate crisis, rooted in centuries of capitalist expansion, is intensifying as a result of government policies which are also hampering emergency response. Since 2018, Ford has consistently underbudgeted for firefighting efforts in Ontario and has instituted cuts to budgets despite the increases in forest fires. In 2026, the provincial government budgeted only $150 million for emergency fire management, despite spending almost double that amount in 2025.
The Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs says 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. Perversely, as part of Ford’s “Ontario Corps,” huge swaths of Ontario’s emergency management system are being privatized to companies like Uber, who will profit from the crisis.
The first to pay for the impacts of these wildfires are Indigenous nations in Northern Ontario, who represent 42% of all evacuation despite comprising only around 5% of the total population in Canada. As Brandi Morin noted at Indigenous Insider, this is also a result of state policy:
“About 80% of majority-Indigenous communities sit in fire-prone boreal regions—because that’s where colonial reserve policy put them, on land nobody else wanted, land that now happens to be burning hotter and more often than almost anywhere else in the country.
“An estimated 60% of reserves sit directly in the wildland-urban interface, the exact zone fire agencies treat as highest-risk—and lowest-priority, when the water bombers and crews get allocated.
“When the smoke clears, it’s Indigenous evacuees who make up the overwhelming majority of people pushed into unfamiliar cities, cut off from land-based food, medicine, and each other. Some of these communities have now been forced out five, six, seven times in a couple of decades. Almost all of them are First Nations.”
Addressing these fires will require immediate, decisive action from all levels of government but, as Copple notes, there also needs to be 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.”
The Communist Party also calls for all governments in Canada—federal, provincial, and municipal—to uphold UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 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,” says Copple. “Labor 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 still have a world to win, and they have a planet to save.”
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