Survival is Affordable

On May 21, Vancouver city council voted seven to four to undo one of the country’s strongest municipal climate policies, and the mayor who moved it barely had to make an argument of his own. He borrowed one. Ken Sim’s motion carries the title “Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Housing Affordability Through Alignment with the Provincial Building Code.” Buried in its eighth WHEREAS clause is the tell: “In 2025, the federal consumer carbon tax and provincial carbon tax were removed, including for natural gas residential customers, highlighting a material change in the economic context where Energize Vancouver was initially adopted.”

Read that twice. A conservative city government, rolling back a gas phase-out that doctors and builders both lined up to defend, cites the BC NDP and the federal Liberals as its authority. The motion’s second clause goes further: “Both the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia have identified housing affordability as a national and provincial crisis, and have called on municipalities to remove unnecessary regulatory barriers.” Sim did not invent the case for gutting Vancouver’s climate rules. Eby and Carney wrote it for him, and he just read it back into the record.

I write this as a New Democrat and an ecosocialist, which makes the BC NDP’s drift my own problem, too. Under Eby the party delivers: free prescription birth control, the first in Canada, a renter’s rebate, real movement on housing supply. The government does good things for people, and that is exactly what makes its harmful climate retreat so hard to name. Both things are true. It builds, and it retreats from ground it already held. A party that keeps ceding that ground is worth pushing, not subserviently defending as it stands.

This is what ceding terrain looks like once the bill comes due. In 2025, both the federal government and the BC NDP killed consumer carbon taxes and justified the move in a single word: affordability. Carney went even further. He scrapped the emissions cap on oil and gas, repealed the electric-vehicle mandate, shuttered the program to plant two billion trees, and signed an accord with Danielle Smith to clear the way for a new West Coast pipeline carrying a million barrels of Alberta crude a day to Asian markets. Each retreat arrived wrapped in the language of cost relief. The policy was the smaller story. The frame was the larger one: climate action recoded, by its own former champions, as a thing working people cannot afford.

Sim understood the gift immediately. His own press release calls Energize Vancouver, a building-emissions program, “the Energize Vancouver carbon tax,” and claims the motion “aligns Vancouver directly with the direction being set by Prime Minister Mark Carney.” When BC Housing Minister Christine Boyle wrote to ask council to wait, Sim fired back that her own government “is currently pursuing the largest expansion of natural gas development in BC history through LNG Canada Phase 2 and the Ksi Lisims LNG project.” At the public hearing he put it plainly: “Prime Minister Carney and Premier Eby are strongly in favour of natural gas development. Why would we ship our gas to China and ban it in Vancouver?”

That question is hard to answer once you have conceded the premise. And watch what the concession does to the people trying to hold the line. Boyle’s letter is the most revealing document in the whole fight. She has the facts cold: buildings are nearly 60 per cent of Vancouver’s emissions, thirty-two BC communities covering 45 per cent of the province have already adopted the same standards, the city has led on green building for a decade. Yet she defends the ban as a scheduling problem. “Any sudden changes to Vancouver’s approach introduces confusion, costs and delay for builders,” she writes, and asks council to hold off until a provincial cost-and-impact analysis lands in the fall. A New Democrat with an accomplished record of climate leadership, defending a climate win, has to reach for the vocabulary of builder certainty. The retreat is that complete.

Gregor Robertson makes the confusion impossible to miss. He sat as a BC New Democrat, served three terms as Vancouver’s mayor, and now serves as Carney’s federal housing minister. As that minister he gave the fullest defence of the gas phase-out anyone in power managed all month, backing it “for affordability, health, and climate reasons.” He said it from inside the cabinet that cancelled the carbon price, killed the emissions cap, and cleared the Alberta pipeline. One man holds the climate line on a file in his old city while serving the government that leads the retreat from it everywhere else. Call it a portrait of the problem rather than simple hypocrisy: conviction survives in the individual while the institution surrenders the ground, and the institution is what governs.

Here is the part the affordability frame was built to hide: the trade-off is fake. Jim Stanford and Erin Weir have shown, in detail, that the cost-of-living spike that broke over Canada in 2022 came from global oil prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not from the carbon tax, which added pennies by comparison. The honest conclusion runs the opposite way from the one Eby and Carney drew: getting off fossil fuels is affordability policy. The Vancouver builders said as much at the hearing, where they told council that heat pumps now cost the same or less than gas, and that financing, permitting, and land prices drive housing costs, not emissions limits. The doctors added the part nobody costs out: gas leaks benzene into the home, and a 2024 Stanford study found Vancouver’s gas carries the highest benzene levels of any North American city tested, a carcinogen with no safe level of exposure.

Follow the money in the room. Sim’s own senior advisor, David Grewal, runs two private LNG firms, as the Vancouver Sun reported. The coalition lobbying for the motion gathered propane companies, gas-trade associations, and business groups under the friendly name “Affordable Dependable Energy,” and gave it a familiar spokesman: Bill Tieleman, who ran communications for NDP premier Glen Clark in the nineties (the same Glen Clark who left politics to run billionaire Jim Pattison’s empire) and now lobbies for the gas trade. The affordability disinformation did not wander across party lines all on its own! The people who once built New Democrat campaigns and served New Democrats in government carried it there.

The gas the province is racing to expand, through LNG Canada Phase 2 and the Ksi Lisims project, is built for export to Asia, not to warm a single Vancouver apartment. So, the word is affordability, but the business is moving molecules for profit, and the household budget is just the cover story. While gas prices gouged those budgets in 2022, profits in the oil futures market tripled, and fossil-fuel firms booked the richest returns of any sector in Canada, twenty times those of grocery chains, most of it handed straight to shareholders and stock buybacks. That is the engine the affordability frame exists to protect.

So the NDP and Liberal establishments gave away an argument they were winning. And once you concede that climate is a luxury good, the other side keeps moving, because concession is an invitation. Watch the word “survival” change hands. Carney now describes a “three-dimensional energy crisis” in which, by his own ranking, “the most immediate aspect of that crisis is affordability,” energy security comes second, and “the last is related to the existential challenge of climate change.” Existential, and last. Right-wing political operative Sharan Kaur, defending the Smith pipeline deal in a CTV op-ed, completes the move: “Energy security is now a matter of national survival,” and the fourteen Liberal MPs who objected to the deal “appeared to choose ideology over nation building.” The left spent a decade letting the right own “affordability.” Now it watches the right take “survival” too, and rebrand a million barrels a day as the thing that keeps us alive.

None of this even works as the triangulation it pretends to be. A year out from the election that secured his spot as premier, Eby’s approval has fallen from 53 per cent to 33 in Angus Reid’s May polling, fifty-seven per cent of British Columbians say the province is on the wrong track, and the issue they judge him hardest on is the cost of living. The NDP adopted the right’s frame and still loses on the right’s frame, because you cannot out-promise a Conservative on cheapness while a Conservative is the one defining the terms. Federally the cost of this fumbling shows up as defection. Fourteen Liberal MPs sent Carney a private letter warning that “the government’s credibility will be seriously compromised” and insisting that “climate change remains the greatest threat of our time.” Steven Guilbeault already quit cabinet over the Alberta deal, and as I write this, on May 26, he is expected to leave the Liberal caucus entirely, possibly his seat with it. A party that abandons the terrain does not buy peace. It loses the people who believed it meant the thing it used to say.

There is a way back, and it starts by refusing the trade the right keeps offering. Affordability and survival are the same fight, and the ecosocialist case has always known it. Public power and regulated energy insulate a household’s bills from the speculation that drives them. Decarbonization that lowers your heating costs is decarbonization that sticks around. The fossil-capital interests who profit every time the price of gas swings are the ones emptying a working family’s wallet, and naming them is the populist move the nihilistic consultant class keeps flinching from. The line is not hard to draw. It is hard to hold, because holding it means picking a side in the fight instead of just managing it.

Carney will not be moved, and neither will Sim. They are doing precisely what they intend. The argument is with the BC NDP, my own party, and its stakes run well past the next election. Every time a New Democrat reaches for “affordability” to justify a retreat, the party ratifies the other side’s whole premise: that climate action is a cost, that survival belongs to the pipeline, that a livable planet is a luxury working people cannot afford. That ratification is the weapon left for our opponents. Sim lifted it off the council-chamber floor and read it back word for word, and other elected officials working for fossil capital will too.

Kaur, defending the pipeline, lands on a principle worth stealing: “If you have objections, say them. Put your name to them.” Guilbeault did. The fourteen Liberal MPs, so far, have not. Drawing that line in public, and holding it, is the work now, because terrain a party cedes does not sit empty waiting for better days. It gets occupied, and turned on the rest of us trying to continue the work. The bill for a livable planet and the bill at the end of the month are the same bill, owed to the same people. A party that keeps conceding the ground does not merely lose elections. It arms the people wrecking the climate we all live in, and teaches everyone else to mistake that wreckage for common sense.