Canada’s apex oil and gas lobby group may rue the day it made foreign-funded political meddling a public issue. For good reason, China’s election interference has sparked outrage in Canada. But China’s ability to sway a broad spectrum of Canadian voters is far weaker than the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producer’s foreign-funded political interference.

The Canadian Mining Journal, an industry magazine catered to insiders, has released its annual ranking of Canada’s top 40 miners. Describing 2022 as “a remarkable year” for Canada’s largest mining companies, editor Tamer Elboki praised the mining sector for “prov[ing] to be as solid and robust as it could be” in the face of the pandemic and geopolitical instability.

“System change, not climate change.” It’s amazing how these few words so accurately sum up the challenges that face us when it comes to climate change–the single largest challenge humanity has ever faced. As far as slogans go, it’s not as succinct as “no war” or “freedom now,” but on the other hand it represents how far social movements have come in a few short decades.

If Canada wants to build a truly sustainable economy, the federal and provincial governments must implement meaningful consultation measures, respect constitutional treaty rights, and ensure that companies comply with their environmental commitments. Without these changes, any Canadian move toward “sustainability” will occur at the level of branding, not action.

At the same time that Ottawa is shunning Canada’s global responsibility for the climate crisis, the Trudeau government continues to subsidize the industry that is fanning the flames of a national emergency. For a country that brands itself as an international climate champion, Canada’s domestic and global actions are rank with hypocrisy and unearned self-congratulation.

The fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to discredit climate science and block climate action hasn’t come to an end, it’s just reached a new phase. The industry, with its army of public relations firms, is painting itself as an ally in the fight against climate change. Governments like Canada’s are helping them do it, gaslighting us at every opportunity.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) may rue the day they made foreign funding a public issue. Did it not dawn on CAPP that crusading against a pittance of foreign funding of environmentalists trying to block the transportation and carbon pollution of oil sands oil would blow back and reveal just how foreign funded CAPP and Big Oil in Canada are?

The shrill panic of new Cold War rhetoric is a big business, after all, and clearly companies like Datametrex are finding the moment ripe to capitalize on the appetite for broadening Canadian state censorship. So what is to be made of the effect of such blacklisting and smear campaigns on democratic debate in Canada?

Led by former Harper-era cabinet minister and far-right evangelical Christian Jason Kenney, the UCP government is currently taking a sledgehammer to Alberta’s provincial state, gutting the province’s fiscal and regulatory capacities, attacking its public servants, and eliminating any and every barrier to the fossil fuel industry’s profits—the climate crisis notwithstanding.

This marks the fifth installment in an ongoing curated series that asks contributors to imagine the perils and possibilities that will ground our collective response to or emergence from the COVID-19 crisis. The fifth edition is about extraction, with contributions from Michelle Daigle, Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez, Anna Stanley, Arn Keeling, and James Rhatigan.