Inside the Climate Caucus

Municipal Affairs
5 hours ago
2 min read

Downtown Edmonton is already humming with the energy of the 2026 FCM Convention. Municipal leaders stepped out into the streets of Edmonton with a message that cuts through the usual policy language and procedural rhythm.

“Elbows up for climate.”

It’s part rallying cry, part warning, part invitation to do more—now. A national call for action on climate change, carried not from Parliament Hill, but from city halls, band councils, and regional offices across the country.

Behind it is the Climate Caucus—a non-partisan network that sits in the space where local democracy meets climate policy. Not flashy, not partisan, but persistent. Working with mayors, chiefs, councillors, and regional leaders, helping them turn climate ambition into actual policy, and policy into action.

Across Canada, their role is simple in concept, complicated in execution: make sure the people closest to communities—the ones who see the floods, the fires, the housing strain, the rising insurance costs—have the tools, the data, and the backing to respond.

Because climate change doesn’t arrive as theory at the municipal level. It arrives as washed-out roads. As overheated schools. As strained budgets. And it lands, first and hardest, on local governments already stretched thin.

Today, that message is carried by voices like Zoe Grams, who describes a simple premise: that supporting local leaders is one of the fastest ways to deliver real climate progress, because they are already in the work of keeping people safe, housed, and connected.

And it is echoed by Merlin Blackwall, speaking from the perspective of a smaller community—Clearwater, British Columbia—where climate isn’t abstract either. It’s forests, water systems, emergency preparedness, and the constant calculation of risk.

What emerges is not a single speech, but a shared insistence: that affordability, health, and safety are not separate from climate policy—they are the measure of it.

The question is no longer whether municipalities have a role in climate action, but what can municipalities do to preserve our amazing landscape.

This is Municipal Affairs.

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