Elbows Up For Climate, an alliance of more that 300 mayors, councilors and local elected leaders from across Canada, held an urgent climate summit today and issued a statement calling for the federal government to make climate change a priority.
Within the first five months of 2026, 1-in-5 Canadians have already been affected by climate disasters; floods, droughts, heat warnings, and wildfires.
In their joint statement, the municipal leaders called for federal action on climate change, rather than backsliding, saying the current government seems to see climate change as a ‘distant issue’ to be addressed later.
“Our climate emergency isn’t abstract. Northerns live with the physical impact of climate change every day as we warm two to four times faster than the rate of the rest of the world,” said Yellowknife mayor Ben Hendriksen.
Climate change is estimated to cost the Canadian economy between 1-5% of GDP and has added nearly $9 billion in maintenance costs for critical infrastructure, two-thirds of which was paid for by municipal governments.
Elbows Up For Climate called for investment in ‘nation-building not nation-burning projects’.
“More communities are likely to burn to the ground this summer as the Prime Minister doubles down on fossil fuel expansion,” said Richard Ireland, mayor of Jasper, AB which was decimated by one of the most expensive natural disasters in Canadian history in 2024.
Among the investments they called for were a national East-West-North clean electric grid and retrofits and mass heat pump and solar installations across the country.
“Investments like these will provide Canadians cleaner, cheaper, and reliable energy and make us energy independent,” said Hendriksen.
They also called for a national resilience, response, and recovery strategy to help communities rebuild after climate disasters, funded by taxes on excess profits earned by oil and gas companies from the war in Iran.
“We are asking the federal government to stand with us: to reject fossil fuel projects that divide us, and get to work on practical and popular projects that won’t burn down our country – but build us up, Canada Strong,” concluded their joint statement.
Elbows Up For Climate also debut their 2026 Climate Impacts Map, which will track climate disasters as they unfold over the summer. The map shows that already 7.6 million Canadians have experience extreme weather events this year.
“This map is about making these impacts visible and undeniable so that the federal government will be forced to take serious action,” said Hendriksen.
