The BC government has warned private corporations that they will be held accountable for producing products that kill and injure people in British Columbia and drive up healthcare costs. West Coast Environmental Law and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) are calling on our provincial officials to turn their sights on Big Oil. Burning global fossil fuel products kills hundreds of British Columbians every year and causes widespread harm, including heat injury, asthma, the spread of disease and heart disease. Additionally, there are local health impacts in communities where fossil fuel extraction occurs, including higher rates of lung disease, cancer and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
BC sues manufacturers of health-harming products
The latest signal that BC aims to hold producers of health-harming products accountable is found in the mandate letter from Premier Eby to Attorney General and Deputy Premier Niki Sharma, instructing her to:
Protect British Columbians from unfair healthcare costs and ensure accountability for wrongdoers by identifying opportunities to recover expenses.
In many ways, this is a continuation of a strategy that BC has been pursuing for years, as evidenced by BC’s laws and lawsuits targeting manufacturers of products that contribute to public health problems and increase healthcare costs. Examples include tobacco, opioids, and PFAS (aka “forever chemicals”). The BC government also introduced legislation that would have enabled a wider range of health-related lawsuits, including legal action against social media giants for the ads and marketing of harmful products, but subsequently put it on hold due to pushback from those social media companies.
We’re not the first to note the similarities between BC’s approach to unhealthy industries and proposals to hold fossil fuel companies accountable. In 2017, three law professors published a paper in which they took a 1997 statement by BC’s Health Minister about the Tobacco Damages Recovery Act, and reimagined it as a defence of a Climate Change Recovery Act:
Hon J. MacPhail Jr. (Minister of Environment and Climate Change): “This legislation ... gives the government … the legal authority to proceed to courts to collect [infrastructure, healthcare] and other prescribed costs resulting from [climate change-related effects] such as [rising sea levels, increased flooding and disease].
CAPE, taking a page from the campaigns against Big Tobacco, is mobilizing over 700,000 healthcare professionals to demand a ban on fossil fuel advertising, warning that fossil fuel greenwashing is fueling climate change – the greatest public health threat of our time.
But instead of holding the fossil fuel industry to account, the BC government continues to subsidize the industry in many significant ways. With the climate change-related costs to the healthcare system from climate change over time running into the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars, we are challenging the government to re-evaluate its stance.
What we know about climate-related healthcare costs
BC’s health-related climate costs are large and many, including:
- The healthcare costs associated with the 2021 heat dome have been estimated at more than $12 million, with more than 600 people killed and 5,000 or more who were seriously injured. While we haven’t seen another such dramatic heat event since then, the number of people treated for heat-related injuries is increasing over time.
- Smoke from wildfires, now an almost-annual event, contributes in very significant ways to respiratory, heart and other conditions requiring hospitalization and increased healthcare costs. A tragic example is the death from asthma triggered by wildfire smoke of nine-year-old Carter Vigh in 2023, prompting calls from his parents and the BC Lung Foundation for better air quality monitoring. CAPE, as a member of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, produced a report outlining the health risks of wildfire smoke.
The government of Canada has estimated that between 2013 and 2018, the annual medical costs associated with wildfire smoke nationally was “$410 million to $1.8 billion for short-term health effects [and] $4.3 billion to $19 billion for long-term health effects.” Although this national figure is not broken down by province, BC’s share is likely to be significant. - Infectious diseases and parasites are spreading in BC as a result of warming temperatures. As the BC Centre for Disease Control warns: “Changing temperature, precipitation patterns and other environmental factors are shifting where certain insects and animals live in B.C. and increasing their numbers. This makes it more likely that humans will be exposed to the diseases these insects and animals carry.”
- The costs of maintaining hospital and other medical infrastructure during climate emergencies (for example, transporting hospitalized patients during evacuations), as well as rebuilding infrastructure to address future disasters, is hugely expensive. For example, during the 2017 wildfires, BC’s Interior Health Authority had to close 19 hospitals, clinics and other sites, evacuating 880 patients and 700 staff, at a cost of almost $3 million.
CAPE’s Climate Change Toolkit for Health Professionals and the Climate Change and Health Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment, prepared by Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health, discuss these and other climate costs in greater detail.
These are “just” the costs from the global threat of climate change. The impacts to health and the healthcare system of extracting and burning fossil fuels at a local level are even greater: from physicians moving away from rural communities because of their concerns about the adverse effects of hydraulic fracturing on their families’ health, to the increased incidence of asthma in households that have gas stoves, to the one in seven premature deaths in Canada caused by fossil fuel pollution. As a CAPE publication notes:
Health Canada research shows that fossil-fuel air pollution is a leading cause of early death in Canada, and recent Harvard research found that fossil fuel air pollution in Canada leads to 34,000 premature deaths per year.
The fact is that even low levels of fossil fuel pollution have massive health consequences that too often are ignored.
Time to look seriously at fossil fuel polluters
If Attorney General Niki Sharma, who formerly worked for the environmental organization Stand.Earth, is serious about recovering health care costs from wrongdoers, then she absolutely should look closely at the role of fossil fuel companies in BC’s health costs. Fossil fuel companies have made massive profits selling products that they knew would cause climate change. Just like the tobacco industry, they have also engaged in misinformation and deception campaigns to keep consumers hooked on their products and to discourage governments from enacting laws that would save lives.
The harms from fossil fuel pollution are clear, and the health risks and impacts continue to climb. It’s time for action. It’s time for the provincial government to demand accountability and compensation from the oil and gas industry, so that citizens aren’t left continuing to bear the costs.