Green Transition as Worker Assault: Greenwashing and Anti-Unionism in Canada’s Fossil Fuel Sector

In January 2025, Federated Co-operative Limited (FCL) publicly announced that it was cancelling plans to build a biofuel production facility in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. This long-heralded project was to be an expansion of FCL’s Co-op Refinery Complex (CRC) and integral to the company’s Energy Roadmap promises of a 40% cut to emissions by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Rising construction costs and the anticipated end to Canada’s carbon pricing regime were cited as reasons for dropping this initiative. Little was said at the time about how refinery workers represented by Unifor Local 594 had been pressured into accepting pension concessions to help make the “green” project financially viable, and to ensure the sustainability of Canada’s only co-operatively owned refinery complex. This decision represents the abandonment of the company’s “greenwashing” campaign, which the company used to maintain its social licence in Saskatchewan in what studies characterize as an “unjust transition” (Eaton et al., 2024). At a time of rapidly shifting regulations and commitments regarding greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and globally, we examine how oil and gas interests used environmental stewardship as part of a “job blackmail” against refinery workers in the heart of Canada’s oil and gas industry.