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As world leaders gather in Belém, Brazil, for COP30, Canada’s position is being criticized as falling behind on its climate promises.
“Every year we postpone an energy transition,” Emily Hunter, Senior Program Manager at Environmental Defence, said. “This costs us, not just in terms of long-term dollars, but this costs us in terms of real impact of floods, of fires and in health impacts.”
Toronto, one of Canada’s largest carbon emitters, has made progress, but isn’t keeping up with its climate goals even though the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy has been cited as North America’s most “ambitious” project yet. The plan is to have a balanced amount of greenhouse gas emissions to the natural systems for removing CO2 in the city to reach full net zero.
Hunter says that while Toronto has made strides in certain areas, such as electrifying public buses and expanding its LRT network, the city’s largest emissions sectors are construction and transportation. The uptake of electric vehicles is insufficient, public transit needs significant improvement, and the city continues to rely on fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
A key concern is the city’s Integrated Regional Resource Plan (IRRP), finalized this past Halloween. Hunter notes the plan sidelines Toronto’s climate commitments, including the city’s motion to phase out the Portland Gas Plant, the downtown peaker station that contributes harmful emissions to nearby communities.
“We need an energy plan that moves forward to meet our own TransformTO net zero goals by 2040, and the path that we’re on right now, and in just accepting the current IRRP plan, will hugely set us backwards,” she said.
According to Hunter, Toronto will need to triple its decarbonization efforts in order to reach net zero by the target date. The current emissions reductions are only 1–2 per cent annually, whereas Toronto needs to be at 6–8 per cent cuts yearly.
Environmental Defence has brought together 26 different groups, spanning health, legal, academic, environmental, and community organizations, to pressure Toronto city councillors to vote against the current IRP motion. They want councillors to instead work directly with Toronto Hydro to create a new, more effective energy plan.
“This aligns with Toronto Hydro’s Climate Action Plan, which lays out a clear path to support the city’s net-zero by 2040 commitment,” said Brie Davis, a spokesperson for Toronto Hydro. “It also confirms that targeted investments in electricity infrastructure are urgent.”
Davis says the IRRP will help build a future-ready grid that can support electrification, integrate distributed energy resources, and deliver customer-focused climate solutions through a modernized system.
Dr. Deborah de Lange, a business expert who integrates sustainability and climate into industrial strategies and associate professor in global management studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, notes that Toronto has the technological capacity to transition to a renewable-based city, but political and financial barriers slow down its progress.
“What we know in general is that public-private partnerships around the world are hard to manage, and we see that in Toronto, we do have powerful developers here. We also may not have the competencies in our government,” she explained.
According to de Lange, Canada’s historical approach to COP negotiations has fluctuated, from blocking progress under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper to more compliance-oriented positions under later governments. Current policy trends, de Lange says, threaten to undermine Toronto’s ability to meet its Paris commitments.
“It makes it harder having had an about-face on climate policy instigated by the United States, the most powerful country in the world and the second biggest GHG emitter, after China. These have been very damaging changes, unnecessarily influencing Canada’s wrongheaded policy and investment choices while weakening the US economy, especially in respect of China’s growing strengths.”
Shifting political dynamics in the U.S., de Lange argues, have exposed the vulnerability of the Canadian government’s response to climate change. As a result, the weakening of climate policies makes the nation more complicit in the global climate disaster, creating an embarrassing situation when facing more advanced international peers.
“The other reality is that we’re faced with a geo-political landscape that’s becoming more threatening for Canada, and then we have governments that say ‘we have to invest in other things like defence’ and so money starts flowing in other directions,” she said.
The next five years will be decisive: scaling up clean energy, electrifying transportation, retrofitting buildings and pushing back against provincial and federal policies that slow progress.
The demand for electricity in Ontario is anticipated to grow by 75 per cent by 2050, as stated in a media release from the Ministry of Energy and Mines. This means the province will need to secure new projects and source new energy capacities. Over the next four years, Ontario will need approximately 7,500 megawatts of additional power to sustain the growing demand, according to another media release from 2024.
Ontario’s energy approval system consistently favours new gas projects, while solar, wind, and battery projects face pushback and have a harder time being enacted.
“There’s a real pushback against the energy transition we’re seeing, and a renaissance happening of gas and nuclear,” said Hunter. “I’d actually say, arguably, in the province, we’re heading in the wrong direction, whereas Toronto is in a precarious spot where we can make decisions right now that either makes us a climate leader in this space of backsliding on climate action, or we continue to do nothing.”
Reporter, OTR, F2025
Jenna Gitlin is a fourth-year journalism student and reporter for On the Record, Fall 2025
Otter.Ai was used to transcribe interviews
