The Village of Pemberton (VOP) is bringing the number of B.C. communities suing the world’s biggest polluters into the double digits.
During an April 15 meeting, mayor and council voted unanimously to join a class-action lawsuit against oil producers to recover a share of the community’s rising climate costs.
“This campaign could provide municipalities with much-needed revenue to help us [adapt to climate change]," Councillor Katrina Nightingale previously told council. "As it stands now, taxpayers are shouldering the entirety of this financial burden."
If the case proceeds, the Village will commit $1 per resident to help cover legal costs. The Village’s population, as of the 2021 census, stands at 3,407. Council motioned to use up to $4,000 from the Speĺkúmtn Community Forest Legacy Fund to cover that cost.
Sue Big Oil is a campaign to get municipalities to sign onto and file a class-action lawsuit against the oil and gas industry for its role in knowingly fuelling climate change.
The campaign was launched by West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL) in 2022. That same year, journalist Geoff Dembicki published The Petroleum Papers, which discussed how the American companies who founded Alberta’s oil sands knew as early as 1959 that burning fossil fuels would lead to a warming climate, but worked to sow doubt about the existence of human-caused climate change. As recompense, WCEL and its partners are looking for those companies to cover the financial costs of climate change.
“Like the tobacco industry, which was forced to pay tens of billions of dollars in compensation to victims and governments, fossil fuel companies should also be required to ‘pay up’ to protect communities from the harms that they’ve knowingly caused,” said WCEL staff lawyer Andrew Gage in a statement. “Climate change is costing B.C. communities billions of dollars, and it’s time that global polluters paid a fair share.”
The Sue Big Oil campaign was originally invited to Pemberton in 2024 by Nightingale. She noted at the time the Village’s finances were already sufficiently constrained by infrastructure upgrades, service maintenance and the upcoming policing transition.
“Now, factor in climate change. As the severity of climate-related events increases, the strain on resources is only going to become more. One stark example is the millions of dollars required to upgrade our dikes to protect this community from more extreme flooding events,” she told council.
Nightingale also cited damage to infrastructure and economic costs caused by wildfires, along with the cost of emissions-reduction strategies like new housing and transportation options, as being onerous for the Village.
“Small B.C. communities like Pemberton cannot afford the emergency and disaster management programs and massive upgrades to infrastructure that are increasingly needed because of climate change,” said WCEL Climate Accountability Strategist Fiona Koza.
Pemberton follows Gibsons, View Royal, Slocan, Qualicum Beach, Squamish, Port Moody, Sechelt, Cumberland and Burnaby—with some stipulations. Burnaby will participate as long as another municipality with a population of at least 150,000, like Abbotsford, Coquitlam, Kelowna, Richmond, Surrey or Vancouver, joins in. Port Moody’s accession is contingent on another municipality acting as the lead plaintiff.
Sue Big Oil is looking to get between 10 and 20 municipalities and regional districts representing a total 10 per cent of the province’s population. The tally currently sits at just over six per cent of B.C.'s population, including those municipalities with asterisks accompanying their participation.
Once that threshold has been reached, a legal team will be retained, one or more lead plaintiffs will be selected and local governments will be expected to develop a cooperation agreement with one another for the duration of the case.
The Squamish advocacy group My Sea to Sky (MSTS) emphasized this marks a step forward for the Village. They also nudged Pemberton’s neighbouring municipalities.
“By signing on to the Sue Big Oil campaign, Pemberton is standing up for climate justice and protecting their residents from the rising costs of climate change,” said Tracey Saxby, MSTS executive director, in a statement. “We encourage Whistler, West Vancouver and the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District to follow their lead.”
