Big Oil should pay for Toronto’s billion-dollar flood. Here’s how

Like countless others, I got caught in the chaos created by the extreme rainfall that hammered the GTA last week.

A trip that usually takes me less than two hours took almost five — and I wasn’t sure if I would make it home at all. My train was cancelled, my station was closed, and flooded intersections and malfunctioning traffic lights resulted in countless delays and detours. My bus had rerouted, stranding dozens of us at a stop that had to be bypassed entirely.

As I walked north to try to find an operating stop, I passed a string of stalled-out streetcars and watched water rush through the cement walls of the bridge at King St W and Atlantic Ave, covering the sidewalk and pouring onto the road.

On social media, I saw terrifying videos of cars floating down the Don Valley Parkway, a waterfall cascading down the stairs at Union Station, and friends trying to empty half a foot of water from basement apartments. I read about flooded restaurants, daycares, schools, and local businesses. I heard from loved ones who were among the 167,000 people who lost power in one of the biggest outages in recent memory.

The widespread chaos and infrastructure collapse that hit my city last week was inconvenient, scary, and dangerous. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t a surprise.

Five years ago, Kim Gavine, general manager of Conservation Ontario, warned that the province was already “experiencing stronger and more frequent flood events as a result of climate change impacts."

Instead of taking this threat seriously, Doug Ford slashed Ontario’s funding for flood management programs and has recklessly tried to pave the Greenbelt, a crucial network of protected waterways and wetlands that help prevent flooding. By prioritizing the interests of his corporate developer buddies and expanding gas power plants when we desperately need to be transitioning to a green grid and investing in proactive resilience measures, Ford is making communities across the province more vulnerable to climate disasters like what I just experienced.

This isn’t just a Toronto or Ontario problem either. David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, described last week’s massive urban flooding as our new reality. Our governments, at every level, need to do what it takes to better prepare for these escalating climate impacts everywhere.

We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage from last week’s storms, but Global News' Chief Meteorologist reported that the flooding was likely to be “worse and more widespread than the recent benchmark event in July 2013 and that was a billion-dollar disaster.” A billion dollars that our already strapped municipal government doesn’t have, money that we desperately need for housing, transit, and social services.

It’s neither realistic nor fair that communities should have to shoulder the burden of costly climate disasters. Not while the fossil fuel corporations that created the climate crisis are raking in record profits.

That’s why my organization and others have been campaigning for a federal tax on Big Oil’s excess profits to fund climate action and direct support for communities affected by climate disasters. Over 15,000 people across the country have joined us to demand that polluters — those responsible for crises like the floods that hit my community hard last week — pay up.

A windfall tax on the fossil fuel industry is a common sense policy the UK, the European Union, and other governments around the world have already put in place. By taxing Big Oil’s excess profits, our government could hold polluters accountable, help climate-impacted communities, and get to the root cause of this crisis by accelerating the transition to renewable energy.

The climate movement came close to winning a windfall tax in the last federal budget, but the Trudeau government backed off at the last minute after intense lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. The climate impacts we are experiencing across the country this summer — from extreme heat to extreme rainfall — have made it clear we can’t stop pushing. With a federal election looming, holding Big Oil accountable would be a powerful way for Trudeau to demonstrate a commitment to communities across the country impacted by climate chaos.

I’m not sure how long it will take to clean up the mess that last week’s storms caused in Toronto. And I’m not sure how much the recovery and rebuilding will cost when all is said and done. But I am sure that more storms and floods are on the horizon. We need our governments to act decisively to address the climate crisis — and make Big Oil clean up the mess they made.

Johanna Lewis is a senior organizer for 350 Canada, an organization working to grow the movement for bold, ambitious climate action. Johanna’s team is running a campaign to make polluters pay for the climate crisis and a just transition.