The Fort McMurray Wildfire Isn’t ‘Ironic.’ This Is How Climate Change Works

The northern Alberta oil town of Fort McMurray has been burning for days now, forcing over 80,000 people to evacuate. A province-wide state of emergency has been declared. The military has been called in, and now neighbouring communities—where many of those who lost their homes had fled seeking shelter—are under threat from the spreading fire, forcing even more people to run.

To the critics of Alberta's dirty oil sands—and there are plenty—the Fort McMurray fire can seem like some kind of karmic retribution. This is the town that was built on oil, and has become synonymous with one of the most controversial energy sources out there.

"Karmic .climatechange fire burns CDN oilsands city," former Alberta NDP candidate Tom Moffatt reportedly posted, in a now-deleted tweet.

"Burn, tarsands, burn!" said another, apparently ignoring that burning the oil sands would only release more carbon into the atmosphere.

#Wildfires threatening Fort McMurray gives me shivers of irony as the oilsands contribute so much to the warming emergency globally.
— michael james (@brightabyss) May 2, 2016

Yes, climate change likely contributed to the Fort McMurray wildfire, and will certainly make events like this more common in the future. And yes, it's absolutely true that the oil sands are contributing to global warming. They're dirty and unsustainable.

But we need to stop calling the Fort McMurray wildfire "ironic," or implying that this is somehow what the community deserved. The reality is that this is exactly how climate change works: It isn't the big oil companies, or policymakers, who bear the brunt of the catastrophe. It's the poor and vulnerable, people displaced from their homes.

That's what happens in every climate change-related disaster, and it's what will happen here.

As recently as the 1960s, Fort McMurray was a remote Métis trapping town of about 1,200 people. As The Globe and Mail reported in its year-long investigation into the town and all it's come to symbolize, once Suncor and Syncrude landed, everything changed. The population ballooned and it became a destination for oil workers, drawing in people from across Canada and around the world. Today, Fort McMurray is a city of expats.

Take a look at the most recent census data: For such a small, northern town, it's really pretty diverse. People living there report speaking Cree, Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, and Tagalog, alongside English and French—as well as many other languages—at home.

Lately, the once-booming community has been hard-hit by slumping oil prices. The Alberta oil patch has been shedding jobs, and house prices are tumbling. Fort McMurray's food bank has been helping more and more people get by, according to a local news report.

Now, countless face the prospect of losing their homes.

"It's gone. My house is all gone," 29-year-old Rachel Cusimano told Fort McMurray Today, as she choked back tears. "I don't know if there's a city left."

When this fire is finally under control, lots of people won't have anywhere to go back to. As many as 90 percent of homes have already been destroyed in some parts of the town, and countless evacuees don't even know what's left for them, if anything.

That food bank, it seems safe to say, will be stretched to its limit.

The Fort McMurray wildfire should be a call to action on climate change—just like other wildfires we've seen recently in Western Canada, in Slave Lake, in Yellowknife, in Saskatchewan and BC. But nobody should be saying "I told you so," at least not to the town's evacuees. It's the big oil companies, and more importantly our policymakers, who need to get the message. Not people who've just lost their homes in a fire.