As fears rise around an oil price surge amid the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) is calling for a windfall profit tax to protect Albertan workers. On the fifth day after the U.S. and Israel a joint operation that killed more than 1,000 people, Canadians are starting to feel the financial impact of the conflict as gas prices rise across the country.
READ MORE: Carney shifts Canada’s position as Trump fails to justify war against Iran
Jim Stanford, an economist with the Centre for Future Work, made a post on X calling on Canadians to think of the increasing price burden on Canadians as a policy choice, not a natural byproduct of market forces.
“We’ve seen this movie before: Feb 2022, Russia invades Ukraine (a country that doesn’t produce oil), oil prices jump 65 per cent – biggest single cause of the resulting inflation spike (that peaked at 8% in June in Canada). That cost Canadians $200 billion over [the] next 3yrs ($12,000 per household),” Stanford wrote on the social media platform. “That war had no impact on real oil supply; the price spike was driven purely by financial speculation on futures markets. Oil profits set records, but the rest of us paid for it.”
In a report released in March 2025, Stanford found that the invasion of Ukraine did not affect oil supply significantly enough to be able to attribute the subsequent inflation crisis to a supply shock. Stanford’s report attributes the cost of living surge following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the financial market.
“This time will be worse,” Stanford wrote on X, “because there already are real supply disruptions (and more to come), amplified by profit-seeking financial betting. As always, futures markets will overshoot.”
Given the recent history of global conflicts creating profit captured by corporations, the AFL wants a windfall profit tax that could put money towards subsidies for Albertan taxpayers who will face inflation due to higher energy prices.
In Alberta, 81 per cent of their mineral resources are owned by the Alberta Crown.
“As the owners of the resource, Albertans should get the lion’s share of those profits,” said AFL president Gil McGowan. “And the way to do that is to introduce a windfall profits tax on top of the royalties that oil companies pay in exchange for the right to exploit publicly owned assets.”
An October 2025 report by the AFL found that the majority of profits from the 2022 price surge went abroad.
“Our report shows that the vast majority of the benefits from the oil sands’ harvest are being reaped not by Alberta workers or Alberta citizens — the real owners of the resource — but by foreign investors, mostly wealthy Americans,” said McGowan. “That was especially true during the last war-related period of elevated prices.”
The AFL highlighted in a post on their website that these kinds of measures to capture windfall profits for the public have been implemented in other jurisdictions. In 2022 to 2023, countries that took this step included the United Kingdom, the European Union, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands and more.
“We missed the opportunity to use a windfall profits tax to help even the scales at that time,” McGowan said. “Let’s not make the same mistake again.”
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