Shahwali Wali is convinced that in a decade’s time, he and his neighbours will have disappeared from The Junction.

Since 1995, Wali has owned Dupont Auto Repair on the corner of Dundas and Dupont Streets in west Toronto, at the heart of a cluster of independent auto shops scattered within a kilometre of one another. Many of these shops are run by first-generation immigrants: Wali moved to Canada from Afghanistan in 1984, first working at restaurants and in construction before buying his own garage. When I first visited Dupont Auto Repair on a bright April afternoon, Wali was attending to paperwork behind a wide, cluttered desk in the shop’s office. The air was warm, faintly smelling of metal, gasoline and old paper. From the adjoining garage, the ambient din of mechanical work broke occasionally when staff members dressed in grease-stained coveralls poked their head into the office with a question or an update. 

There was a time when Wali’s shop largely serviced taxis in need of repairs — he jointly ran a fleet of taxis and still does today, though in fewer numbers. Orange-and-turquoise Beck taxis were parked in various states of repair, their engine guts splayed open across his front lot. But as taxis became less ubiquitous and less profitable, he’s had to diversify his clientele. Having been in this industry for nearly three decades, Wali can recognize a threat to business when he sees it. And the rise of electric vehicles could spell trouble.

It’s not because traditional mechanics, familiar with the ins and outs of combustion engines, don’t know how to fix them, Wali says.

“Right now, with these electric cars, the dealers have the equipment, they have the parts. They want to get the business and also fix the cars,” he explains. In his experience, and that of other mechanics The Local and The Narwhal visited, electric vehicle dealers and manufacturers are charging independent mechanics more and taking longer to supply parts than they do with gas vehicles. This incentivizes customers to go straight to the dealer when they need repairs. 

“They’re taking business away from small brokers, because the parts are not available, and we don’t have the equipment [we need],” he says. “Anything they charge you, you have no choice.”

Many independent mechanics like Wali, who have weathered the ever-evolving automotive landscape — including innovations in technology and software, and increasing automation — are eager to service electric vehicles, as are colleges and universities, which are increasingly making the study of electric vehicles a mandatory part of their automotive curriculum. With the federal government’s highly ambitious deadlines for a national transition to zero-emissions vehicles, the automotive service industry must embrace electrification or perish.

But in both the regulatory and commercial arena, electric vehicle manufacturers and independent aftermarket (that is, repair and resale) businesses are wrestling over the “right to repair” principle — the right of consumers and independent shops to affordably access the tools or information needed to fix and prolong the life of an object after it’s purchased. In a sector of the automotive industry that is still relatively young and underregulated, mechanics fear being shut out by manufacturers and dealerships that see a lucrative opportunity to establish virtually exclusive access to electric vehicle repairs.

If manufacturers win the fight over government regulation of the industry, it’ll be consumers and smaller businesses paying the price. Whether these mom-and-pop garages find ways to adapt, or stick to servicing combustion engines exclusively or decide it’s not worth the cost and effort to stay in this difficult business, the outcome will reshape the automotive landscape of the city, affecting both their clients and the workforce holding up these independent shops.

When Wali first bought the site that became Dupont Auto Repair in 1995, it was a propane and gas station, where his customers and fleet of taxis filled up on cheap propane at the height of its popularity as a fuel source. But when propane fell out of favour, Wali and his brother shuttered the gas station portion of the shop to focus on auto repairs and taxis. Then, Uber came along and overnight, taxis plummeted in value. Electric vehicles present a more gradual change to the market: uptake by Canadians is slow, and the rate of electric vehicle manufacturing within the country is lower than the global average, outpaced by both major manufacturers like China and smaller countries like Slovakia.

But late last year, the federal government passed the Canadian Electric Vehicle Availability Standard, a set of new regulations that, among other things, decree that 100 per cent of the new cars sold in Canada by 2035 should be zero-emission vehicles. The goal aligns with targets in the U.K., European Union and 17 U.S. states.

Such a colossal transition is unlikely to happen, though, unless several factors align.

First, the rate of Canadian electric vehicle manufacturing needs to rise, as does consumer interest in electric vehicles, buoyed by federal and provincial purchase incentives. Last year, zero-emission vehicle purchases accounted for a record high of 10 per cent of all car buys nationwide. But sales threaten to plateau since the market has already captured most Canadian car buyers who have the means and the climate-driven motivation to go electric. Electric vehicles are expensive: a city report in 2022 noted that EV uptake has been mostly in high-income midtown Toronto communities like the York Mills-Don Valley area, and wealthy parts of Etobicoke. And despite touting electric vehicle manufacturing as the shining future of Ontario, Premier Doug Ford scrapped the province’s $14,000 per vehicle rebate when elected in 2018. 

Second, the infrastructure to charge electric vehicles needs to be more widely available, especially outside wealthy enclaves in major cities. Toronto currently has 1,700 public electric vehicle chargers available, and aims to have more than 10,000 in total by 2030. But investments by the federal government are lagging. 

Finally, an often-ignored piece of the puzzle: electric vehicles need to be easier and more affordable to repair. Once an electric vehicle has left the dealership, that’s the biggest question on the owner’s mind — how to keep it running, and avoid costly repairs. Engineers predict that in the coming years, improvements to electric vehicle technology could increase longevity significantly, but that lifespan is only made possible by good maintenance. It’s not common for electric vehicles to break down just a few years after coming off the assembly line, but it’s also not impossible.

Batteries are the biggest challenge; they are currently immensely difficult to repair or recycle. Occasionally, you’ll see a horror story in the media: a Mississauga man who waited a year for a battery replacement on his Nissan Leaf, all the while shelling out for gas in his courtesy rental car; a Vancouver man whose Hyundai Ioniq 5’s battery casing was scratched, voiding the warranty and leading to a $60,000 quote to replace the battery, $10,000 more than the purchase price of the car. Across the U.S. and U.K., as well, insurers are increasingly writing off electric vehicles for damage to batteries that are essentially deemed irreplaceable, regardless of the condition of the rest of the car. One U.K. insurance provider, John Lewis Financial Services, has ceased insuring electric vehicles because of the costs involved. 

The transition to zero-emissions vehicles has been marketed as one of the key solutions to the climate crisis, but this will only hold true if the means by which electric vehicles are manufactured and maintained are sustainable in the long term. Electric vehicle batteries are more emissions-intensive to produce than combustion engines because of the effort involved in mining rare earth minerals for the batteries (to say nothing of the health and human rights concerns associated with prolonged exposure to mining materials like cobalt and manganese, or how Canada’s critical minerals rush could clash with Indigenous Rights). Depending on the means by which you get your electricity — from hydro or fossil fuel sources like coal — it could take anywhere from six months to five years, respectively, to ‘break even’ on the greenhouse gas toll of your electric vehicle, according to Reuters. Without affordable and accessible means to repair malfunctioning, damaged or aging electric vehicles, the manufacturing emissions are hard to justify. How far back does it set our climate goals to write off fixable cars as unrecyclable scrap?

The industry is split between those who buy the manufacturer rationales for restricting access to parts and data, and those who don’t. James Chow owns Car House Auto Centre, a sleek, renovated auto shop on an industrial roadway off Yonge Street in Richmond Hill. The area is a hub for mechanics — I counted a dozen in a 100-metre radius. Chow is the second generation in his family to work in the industry. His parents, who immigrated from Hong Kong, opened an auto shop in Markham in 1996, after his father spent years as a Canadian Tire technician. With little business acumen and significant barriers — his mother only spoke Cantonese — they built up a clientele by word of mouth. 

Today, hip hop booms through the garage in Chow’s shop, where cars are packed into the work space, one raised five feet off the ground to reveal its underside. When I first spoke with Chow, he’d just returned from an annual auto conference in Nashville, buzzing about the right-to-repair movement unfolding in the U.S. Right now, electric vehicles make up about one in every 10 repairs in his shop. Most of Chow’s clients are repeat customers. This is intentional: he accepts new customers based on whether they’re likely to become long-term clients. 

And he knows how to spot an electric vehicle that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Since his shop is unaffiliated with Tesla, Chow explains, access to parts and diagnostic data is limited. Electric vehicle manufacturers often cite data privacy concerns as a reason not to share important vehicle data with third parties, including mechanics who need it to run diagnostic tests on failing cars. Tesla also charges him retail price for its parts, unlike the wholesale prices he gets from outfits like Honda or Hyundai, for example, where discounts or price cuts are built into the dealer’s business model with after-market shops. “And [Tesla] wouldn’t have a delivery service, so we’re paying to get it shipped to us. With other dealers, they would deliver to us, and we would get a 20 to 30 per cent discount on every part,” he says.

Sure, Teslas don’t require as much maintenance and owners save on gas. But for large parts and mechanical problems, a Tesla owner is often looking at paying double the price a standard combustion engine vehicle would. Paying $160 or more for tire repairs compared to $100 for standard vehicles, or $2,000 to $4,000 for brakes compared to around $1,500, can sting. And those higher costs don’t translate to greater earnings for mechanics — just pricier parts and, occasionally, more complex or intensive labour.

And it’s not just Tesla, Chow says. In recent years, some manufacturers have rushed to enter the electric vehicle market, resulting in imperfect manufacturing — he’s seeing more instances of breakdowns that just aren’t worth the labour and time it’d take to fix them, if they can be fixed at all. “When the margin is at zero, there’s really no incentive, right?” he says. 

Others see more sense in the early-market maneuvers dealers and manufacturers are making. “The parts are expensive, and [there’s risk of] damage installing it or programming it incorrectly,” says Mark Sherry, a trainer and curriculum developer for auto repair education, who has worked with Nissan, GM and Centennial College, among others. His argument echoes what auto manufacturers told the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a May 2021 inquiry into anticompetitive practices in the repair sector: they cited data security, the protection of intellectual property, quality of service and the potential for reputational damage should a third party hinder the operations of a vehicle, as reasons to restrict access to particular diagnostic tools, parts and data.

In response, the trade commission concluded that “although manufacturers have offered numerous explanations for their repair restrictions, the majority are not supported by the record.” But this opinion is not universally held: just two years later, a California judge threw out a class action lawsuit against Tesla that claimed the company was limiting competition by charging higher prices and causing longer wait times for third-party repairs. 

Sherry believes that auto technicians also bear some responsibility for being shut out of electric vehicles. “To be honest, the biggest problem is that most mechanics hate electrical, and they hate hydraulics … So there’s a lot of resistance to that from a technician standpoint,” he says. 

This is hotly debated. Many assume that the skills required to service an electric vehicle would be entirely different than the ones used for decades to service combustion engines — but that’s not the case, says Christopher Syme, a lifelong mechanic who used to run a shop in Toronto’s east end, and now teaches at Centennial College. “Cars have been adopting new technologies and evolving at an increasingly rapid speed since the early ’90s,” he says. “We work with high voltage, with alternating currents, with all of these systems that have gradually culminated in hybrid or electric vehicles … We’ve been forced to adapt and work on it for years and years and years.”

Any competent mechanic could, with the right tools and training, be able to make the switch, Syme says. While political rhetoric paints climate-friendly policies as “some kind of catastrophe for working-class people,” he adds, the much bigger threats are the general affordability issues plaguing independent Toronto businesses. “Even if it didn’t go electric, we would be facing a crisis in terms of justifying the cost of proprietary equipment and tools.”

The Local and The Narwhal spoke with instructors and leaders at some of Ontario’s biggest automotive technology programs: all of them said the most crucial skill needed for electric vehicle repairs is critical thinking, and fostering that skill early helps ensure no student is kept out of an evolving automotive field. The instructors admit it has become a slightly more complex arena for students to navigate. But they’re being trained accordingly: at Toronto’s Centennial College and Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, education and training on the basics of electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles have become a mandatory part of the curriculum for all incoming students. And students aspiring to build careers working on cars should be introduced to electric vehicles right from high school, argues Kevin Fam, a teacher in the Toronto District School Board’s Experiential Learning program. Fam used to work in management with hybrid manufacturers. Now, he’s pushing to update a 10-year-old auto shop curriculum to reflect the innovation in the sector, and get high school students into early placements with manufacturers. 

But the industry that these students will be entering, and the role independent auto repair shops will be allowed to play in it, is still uncertain. Right now, says Mark Sherry, the dearth of regulation means the electric vehicle sector is “a little bit like the Wild West.” But Canada takes many of its cues on automotive regulation from the U.S., and at the moment, south of the border, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is reviewing a repair bill that would mandate auto manufacturers to provide information relating to diagnostics, repair and services to the vehicle’s owner upon request. In Canada, a broader repair bill C-244, amending the Copyright Act, will allow Canadians to access their own data to diagnose and fix certain products, including vehicles.

This would be the first step towards the auto-specific right-to-repair legislation promised by the Liberals in the 2023 budget — the kind of protections that would stop independent and lifelong auto mechanics like Shahwali Wali and James Chow from being shut out of the industry.

Ultimately, mechanics also need to decide whether it’s worth the personal investment to adapt. In The Junction, Wali is thinking about retirement. Even if right-to-repair is enshrined in law, rising costs and changing clientele could mean he’s better off closing up shop, or leaving it to his brother. “I bought this place for cheap once. Now they want to build a condominium here,” Wali laughs resignedly. 

Meanwhile, in Richmond Hill, Chow is keeping an eye on conversations unfolding in the U.S. and Canada. Progress has been slow and tenuous, with dealers and manufacturers figuring out how they want the new age of electric vehicles to unfold, how they want to wield their power. At Chow’s shop, electric vehicle repairs are becoming more feasible, with more data from Tesla’s repair manual made accessible earlier this year. “We are starting to see options,” he says cautiously. When we spoke again in June, Chow’s shop was getting more referrals from Tesla and Michelin for electric vehicle repairs that don’t need dealer expertise. He’s seen a steady uptick in Teslas coming to the shop, sometimes multiple in a day. It could be just a coincidence, Chow says. Or if manufacturers align their goals with those of independent repair shops and their customers — by choice or through regulation — it could just be a glimpse into the future.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story is part of Toronto’s Climate Right Now, a collaboration with The Local about vulnerability and adaptation in Canada’s largest city.

On the hottest days of the summer, the residents of the St. James Town highrises gather in the lobbies of their buildings. They’re the only tolerable places when temperatures rise. In walkers and wheelchairs, the elderly seek out the coolest spots they can find under the air conditioning vents. Others perch on the few uncomfortable benches and chairs available in the lobby. Most days, there isn’t enough seating for everyone seeking momentary relief. And as night approaches, they’re obliged to return to apartments that won’t cool down for hours, not even after the sun has set. 

The highrises of St. James Town are in the northeast corner of Toronto’s downtown core, a community of low-income and racialized people that’s one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in the country. Most of the buildings were built in the 1960s, and many are not air conditioned. The result is hundreds of apartments unfit for the heat waves of the 21st century: stifling and humid, exacerbating one resident’s asthma, another’s heart condition, threatening to push already precarious health conditions over the edge. 

Lidia Ferreira’s responsibility on these days is to check on residents. She works with volunteer-led Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW), an organization that builds and trains networks of community volunteers to respond during extreme weather events. When temperatures rise, Ferreira and her team of volunteers — residents from each floor of a given building — go door-to-door, checking in on neighbours who might be isolated and susceptible to the impacts of heat on the body. For those without air conditioning, they recommend places to go: a local cooling centre, library, community centre or perhaps the nearest shaded park. Some of these tenants don’t have air conditioning; but in Ferreira’s observation, many of them do, but cannot afford the cost of turning it on. 

In the summer of 2019, Ferreira was training volunteers at 77 Howard St. as the region was struck by what a senior climatologist at Environment Canada described as “roasting,” “furnace-like” weather. “I was meeting all these seniors in the building,” Ferreira says, “and it was so sad to see. It was very hot weather, but they didn’t want to use the AC … [they were] so scared about the electricity bill.” 

Some residents, Ferreira admits worriedly, don’t have the mobility to go anywhere on their own, nor the will to leave their homes and go somewhere unfamiliar. Many of the tenants in the St. James Town highrises are immigrants, some of whom face language barriers and feel uncertain about their safety. “It’s very difficult for [these particular] people to connect,” Ferreira says. “They were just sitting in their apartment, with nowhere to go.” 

When a heat wave hits the city, it doesn’t impact everyone the same way. The residents of St. James Town are exposed and vulnerable to heat every way you look at it. They live in homes with limited or no access to air conditioning, and are at higher risk of the illnesses worst affected by extreme heat, like diabetes or heart disease. They have fewer parks and trees in their neighbourhood compared to wealthier, whiter communities. They’re more likely to work in hot conditions, like construction or manufacturing, or physically intensive roles that require them to be on their feet all day. 

And they’re not alone in their experiences. Across the city, low-income and racialized communities, including in inner-suburban areas like Scarborough, North York and parts of Etobicoke, are suffering disproportionately during heat waves. While you can’t control when a heat wave will strike, you can control how people experience it. The city has recently instituted policies designed to mitigate the risks of heat, but it is unclear if they can adequately meet the needs of Toronto’s most vulnerable communities. And while the work of people like Ferreira and her volunteers is vital, if Toronto is going to build any form of resilience to the climate crisis, and prevent needless suffering and death, it’ll need to do more than rely on the kindness of neighbours.  

Toronto’s urban heat islands are concentrated in low-income areas

Toronto is getting hotter. Even if we envision a future with lower carbon emissions, temperatures in the city are still going to rise. An April report from the University of Waterloo and the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation projected a dire future. Even in a low-carbon scenario — in which greenhouse gas emissions increase until 2050 and then rapidly decline, one of the four projected scenarios modelled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — Toronto will still experience more than three times as many very hot days (exceeding 30 C) by 2050 as it did in the latter half of the 20th century. In a high-carbon-emissions scenario — in which emissions continue to rise at current rates — the number of hot days could be more than four times that, with 55 days of the year projected to be 30 C or more.

In this scenario, the average length of a heat wave will more than double, going up to eight days. Crops will scorch. Leaves will dry up and fall off trees and bird eggs will cook. Energy grids will likely collapse under the pressure of millions of people blasting their air conditioners for a week straight, leading to blackouts. Emergency rooms will flood with patients experiencing not only heat exhaustion and illness, but higher rates of self-harm and suicide, which both go up during prolonged periods of heat. Hundreds of people will become ill and die. 

Toronto isn’t prepared for today’s heat events, let alone the calamitous future that awaits. At the end of last month, the city saw its first heat event of the season, with temperatures reaching more than 32 C on May 31, beating a nearly 80-year temperature record for that month.

Those temperatures are partly the result of the urban heat island effect, the phenomenon in which urban areas tend to be warmer than rural ones. There are a few major factors that determine how an urban area experiences heat. One is albedo: the ability to reflect sunlight off surfaces like streets and buildings. Dark, asphalt or concrete surfaces absorb sunlight, and thus heat up much quicker and more intensely than light-coloured or reflective surfaces during the summer. Most cities are built almost entirely out of materials with low albedo — think of your average road or highrise — which means during a heat wave they soak in and radiate heat for hours after the sun has set.  

Another major factor is the presence of urban vegetation and tree canopies, a natural coolant that provides shade and cools down its surroundings through the release of moisture. Tall urban buildings have proven to be both a blessing and curse: they provide cooling shade to the streets below throughout the day, a temperature difference of up to 25 C compared to unshaded areas, but they also retain heat during the day and release it at night, preventing adequate cool-down for its tenants. Add to that the cooling effects of a local water body, and the impact of wind patterns, and you have a city that distributes heat unequally. 

Across Canada, the deadly effects of heat waves hit marginalized communities the hardest

While heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense today, Toronto is no stranger to extreme temperatures. The city’s worst-ever heat wave was in July 1936. The weather system swept eastward after decimating the prairies, and for eight straight days Toronto suffered through temperatures in the mid-30s to 40s. Reports at the time described the city’s residents sleeping at the waterfront in the thousands, or in parks and backyards. By the end of the week, more than 200 people had died, mostly children and the elderly — largely from reactions to the heat, but others from drowning in the city’s creeks or in the lake while trying to find momentary relief. 

Since then, the nature of how a city responds to a heat wave has changed. Yes, many have gained easy access to air conditioning — but comfort and ease of access to public spaces have gone down. Today, when residents of a city suffer a heat wave, they often do it alone, sequestered to their homes. 

Fifty-nine years after the Toronto heat wave, three days of extreme heat devastated Chicago. On July 13, 1995, the temperature in the city rose to more than 50 C with humidity. Emergency operators received more than 16,000 calls that day, 60 per cent higher than their average call volume. A power outage on the north side of the city hit more than 49,000 homes, and lasted through the next day and into the weekend, and many of the city’s hospitals stopped taking new patients. People started to check in on their vulnerable or elderly loved ones in their homes, only to find them dead and decomposing in the heat. But the city did nothing: no additional ambulances and paramedics were called in from other cities. Mayor Richard M. Daley seemed to laugh off the crisis during a press conference, saying, “We all have our little problems, but let’s not blow it out of proportion.”

By the end of the heat wave, more than 700 people had died, most of whom were Black, elderly and living in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. Elderly Black people died at a rate 1.5 times higher than their white counterparts. The city had to bring in refrigerated trucks to store all the bodies waiting to go to the medical examiner’s office. 

Years later, when author Eric Klinenberg was interviewed for the release of his book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, he described the tragedy as a “particle accelerator for the city: it sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive.”

“Yes, the weather was extreme,” he said. “But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.”

Last June, it felt a little like the world was ending again, this time in B.C. The heat dome lasted a week, and on its worst day, June 29, temperatures in one small village reached nearly 50 C, an all-time record for Canada. Hundreds of people died in the province that day alone, and by the end of the week, the heat had led to more than 600 deaths. In Vancouver, lower income neighbourhoods that are home to racialized communities reported rates of emergency room visits two to three times that of wealthier, whiter neighbourhoods. The B.C. coroner’s recent report on the impacts of the heat dome didn’t break down deaths by race or ethnicity, but did find that nearly half of all the victims of the heat dome were living in socially and materially deprived areas. 

Climate adaptation measures in Toronto are sorely lacking, especially for the elderly, people with disabilities and those without homes

In Toronto, it’s not a question of whether such a disaster will strike, but when. This city, like all others, isn’t built equally for all residents, and that will dictate how the crisis unfolds. A 2017 study of urban tree cover from Toronto Metropolitan University found that higher income and whiter neighbourhoods had a far higher number of trees than lower income and racialized areas. Before that, research found that Toronto’s industrial and commercial areas — most commonly found in the inner suburbs — had higher ambient temperatures than parkland and the waterfront. And in 2016, research showed that parts of Toronto with less than five per cent tree cover had five times as many heat-related ambulance calls during extreme heat events as those with more than five per cent tree cover.

Heat affects the body in two ways. With the direct effects — heat exhaustion or heat stroke — a person’s core temperature goes up while their body struggles to self-regulate and cool down. If drawn out over multiple days and nights, muscles begin to cramp and break down, and organs shut down. When the effects are indirect, however, it’s much harder to demarcate where the impacts of heat begin and end. The most affected are young children, the elderly and people with chronic conditions — especially diabetes, asthma and heart or lung conditions. Research on Ontario hospitalization and death rates during heat waves found that hot weather led to a 30 per cent increase in hospitalizations for diabetes-related concerns, and raised rates of deaths relating to respiratory or heart issues by five per cent for every five-degree increase in daily temperature. 

For people with mental health conditions like schizophrenia, symptoms are worsened, sometimes to the point of requiring hospitalization or being fatal. Death rates among those accessing mental health services are higher during hot weather than for people who don’t, in part because a side effect of some psychiatric medication is a decreased ability to self-regulate one’s body temperature; rates of suicide also rise. 

“There’s one patient that always comes to mind when people ask me about the heat,” says Dr. Samantha Green. She’s seen these health crises play out during heat waves in her work as a family doctor in St. James Town, Regent Park and Moss Park, and in her capacity as a faculty lead in Climate Change and Health at the University of Toronto. 

“He’s older, in his 60s, has asthma. He has some kids who live out in the suburbs, and they’re really not very close. He didn’t have an air conditioner for a long time … [and] for several years in a row, every summer, I would worry that he would die alone in his hot apartment during an extreme heat alert — not having access to adequate cooling facilities, maybe with an asthma exacerbation. And no one would know.”

Green ultimately helped advocate for her patient to get the money he needed to get an air conditioner through the Ontario Disability Support Program, which provides funding if the applicant can provide a doctor’s note stating medical necessity. But that won’t address the living conditions of the thousands of seniors in similar circumstances who don’t have anyone to advocate for them. And it doesn’t begin to address the needs of people who are unhoused, who Green points out are more likely to have chronic conditions, or people who are exposed to heat in their working conditions, like factory or construction workers, people who work outdoors, or even healthcare professionals working in institutions that don’t have air conditioning.

If we’re not able to support people today, Green worries, we’re nowhere near ready to meet a future of rising temperatures and more frequent heat waves. “We’re just not prepared,” she says. “There’s also a very scary risk of experiencing a heat wave compounded by an electrical outage, with increased energy demands during a heat wave. The mortality that could result from such an event — I don’t even want to think about it.”

For Nick Puopolo, the sheer scale of the health risks dawned on him in 2020, when he visited his elderly mother at her long-term care home during a heat wave. His mother, Saveria, now 87 years old, has lived at Woodbridge Vista, a northwest Toronto long-term care home run by Sienna Senior Living, for about six years. On a visit two summers ago, Puopolo noticed that the thermostat in the hallway near the nurses’ station read 26 C. So he bought a portable thermostat and brought it to his mother’s room, where the screen confirmed his suspicions — it was even hotter in the residents’ rooms than in the hallways, which were already verging on unbearable. His mother’s room — where she spent almost all her time, bedridden and dealing with existing heart health concerns — was 28 C. The humidity was 47 per cent. 

He worried the heat would kill her and the other residents at the home. “I don’t know of anybody that’s living in these long-term care homes that don’t have [high-risk] medical conditions,” he says. “They’re laying there, they can’t really get up, they can’t ask for water … there’s not enough staff that continue to go into the room, sit with them, make sure they drink their water, put a cool towel on them.”

Many of the residents, Puopolo adds, don’t have family members who can regularly come in and check on them. Those who are bedridden can’t access the cooling rooms — communal spaces in long-term care homes that are required to have air conditioning. Last year, when the province announced that 100 per cent of long-term care homes have air conditioning, they were referring to these communal spaces — a piecemeal solution Puopolo feels the provincial government and long-term care companies came up with just to say they’d done something to address the issue. 

As of last year, 40 per cent of long-term care homes in Ontario were yet to implement air conditioning in residents’ rooms. The older homes cite the fact that they weren’t built with the structural capacity to have air conditioning in every room. Solving the problem requires retrofitting, something Puopolo advocated for two summers in a row before Sienna implemented a permanent solution in his mother’s home. However, Puopolo says, the long-term care company has ignored his calls to install air conditioning in their other homes, where many residents still suffer during heat waves. “You know, if there isn’t someone watching over them and embarrassing them, they won’t do anything,” he says. (Sienna told The Local their plan to install air conditioning in all residents’ rooms is underway, and state they’ve invested $600 million in the redevelopment initiative.)

‘We’re radically undercounting the impact of the climate crisis and extreme heat on people in Ontario’

It’s impossible to know exactly how many deaths in the province or the city are caused by extreme heat. That’s because people don’t necessarily die from heat; they die from health conditions exacerbated by it. In 2011, Toronto Public Health and Environment Canada estimated that heat leads to an average of 120 premature deaths in the city every year, a number that will only grow as the crisis worsens. More recent provincial estimates link a five-degree rise in the temperature with a 2.5 per cent increase in the death rate, or around four excess deaths a day. But those are estimates, not a precise answer, even though that feels like the most valuable tool we could have. 

Last year, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, Advocacy Centre for the Elderly and the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario came together to call on the province to better track premature deaths caused by heat, pointing to the differences between how Ontario tracks heat deaths compared to Quebec and B.C. When the 2018 heat wave hit Montreal, the city reported that at least 66 people had died as a result. Last year, the B.C. coroner’s office reported that 619 people died that summer from heat-related causes, more than a third of whom died in a single day during the heat dome. The Ontario coroner does investigate direct heat deaths, like from heat stroke for example — but that number is relatively minimal, with just three investigations reported in 2018. The much bigger issue — the impact of heat on existing chronic illnesses among vulnerable patients — went uncounted.  

Ontario’s chief coroner, Dr. Dirk Huyer, understands the desire to quantify the problem — but “there’s no scientific way for us to answer that question,” he says. When heat exacerbates the conditions that lead to a person’s death, he explains, it’s hard to say to what degree. “The autopsy won’t answer the question, the coroner’s office can’t specifically answer the question, the doctors can’t specifically answer the question … I think we would be unfairly providing information that may not be accurate.”

For a death to be investigated, it needs to be reported to the coroner’s office by the point of contact who determines the initial cause of death. If an elderly person with chronic illnesses dies of a heart attack in an Ontario long-term care home during a heat wave, for example, that would be considered a natural death, and not something to be reported for investigation. 

Montreal has a system in which they note when a person has died in hot conditions — and when that’s the case, they say it may have been a heat-related death. “They go broad, as opposed to us — we go more narrow on the reporting process,” Huyer says.

In the case of an extraordinary event like B.C.’s 2021 heat dome, Huyer explains, the Ontario coroner would begin an investigation. But during the growing number of “normal” heat waves in this province, the deaths of individuals indirectly affected by the heat remain uncounted. 

“Yes, counting is important — but we want to make sure there’s nothing to count, if we can,” Huyer says. “Everything should be focused on prevention.”

For advocates, however, the province’s tracking model is holding us back from knowing the scale of the crisis and acting accordingly. “We’re radically undercounting the impact of the climate crisis and extreme heat on people in Ontario,” says Jacqueline Wilson, a lawyer at the Canadian Environmental Law Association. “We’re not getting a clear picture right now.”

Access to air conditioning for low-income renters is crucial to resilience

As the climate crisis worsens, catastrophic events like the heat dome will become more common, and the need to know the scale of the damage will grow in equal measure. And if prevention is the priority, the city and the province need to start developing heat resiliency now. 

The first and most obvious solution is access to air conditioning, a resource that right now is only available to those who can afford it. Provide access to cooling where people are, rather than making the residents congregate outside their homes at cooling stations. Put air conditioners in long-term care homes, in community housing, make it accessible for low-income tenants. 

Toronto bylaws dictate that if a building has air conditioning, it needs to be on between June 2 and Sept. 14. But advocates argue for a maximum temperature, similar to the minimum temperature of 21 C in the winter, that would provide rights to tenants without existing air conditioners. At what point should it become the responsibility of landlords to provide air conditioning where there is none? 

The city says there are massive hurdles to implementing these kinds of changes. Mandating air conditioning would involve changes to the Ontario Building Code, a decision that can’t be made at the city level. And a mandatory maximum temperature in residences has been deemed largely unfeasible by Toronto Public Health given it would require extensive retrofitting to buildings without air conditioning (which come with potential rent increases) and the fact that the city’s energy grid may not be able to keep up with demand. 

This year, the city started a program to provide financing to owners to retrofit older buildings above three stories, with the mandate that the landlords cannot apply for rent increases for the improvements above the province’s guideline. That’s a crucial step in making sure the housing remains affordable to the current residents, but it’s also one of the drivers that might push landlords to pursue private funding that will allow them to raise rents. Leaving the responsibility of making improvements to landlords alone is dangerous — without firmer and more urgent policy mandating improvements in the worst-hit buildings and neighbourhoods, starting perhaps with Toronto’s own community housing stock, the city is leaving its vulnerable, low-income residents to suffer the heat indefinitely. 

Providing air conditioning, however, is just the first battle in a much longer war. 

“In Toronto, we are in a more urgent crisis than in other places,” says Umberto Berardi, the Canada Research Chair in Building Science and a leading researcher on Toronto’s urban heat island effect. 

“[We need] more resiliency in the sense of passive design and urban design that doesn’t really force our buildings to rely on air conditioning systems all the time. At the end of the day, air conditioning is yet another social dividing factor because of energy poverty.”

Most of the new buildings coming up in the city are designed with unnecessary amounts of glass, which trap massive quantities of heat. “You see this in the amount of hours we use air conditioning systems in Toronto,” Berardi says. “Climate change, heat waves and then glass: these three factors basically mean current buildings run air conditioning systems for four months [a year], whereas 40 years ago, there was probably no residential building [doing so].”

“It’s not just a matter of the environmental implication, it’s also a matter of the economic implications. People cannot necessarily afford all the costs that we are going to suffer moving forward.”

Passive cooling techniques can include cross-ventilation within apartments and across the building, using light colours in building materials so that buildings reflect sunlight rather than absorb it — think of the white walls of Santorini, Greece, Berardi says — or planting green roofs and significantly increasing tree cover, especially in those neighbourhoods deprived of it. These solutions are within reach, and will make a material difference to living conditions. 

In 2010, the city began implementing the Toronto Green Standard for new builds, which sets out both mandatory and voluntary guidelines to build energy-efficient structures that mitigate urban heat island effect. The standards are a move in the right direction: they require 50-75 per cent of the building’s hardscapes, including walkways and driveways, courtyards or surfaces, to be built with high-albedo materials that reflect sunlight and heat. They include mandates on green roofs and requirements about planting trees around new builds and in parking areas. 

“By introducing the Toronto Green Standard we have implemented among the most aggressive requirements for new construction,” said a spokesperson from the Mayor’s office, more broadly pointing to the city’s plan for tackling climate change, TransformTO.

“That’s a really good framework to use,” says Robin Buxton Potts, city councillor for Toronto Centre, where St. James Town is located. “But I think that we have also seen that kind of work has been significantly underfunded in the city of Toronto over the last couple of years … Escalating the funding and the timeline on the TransformTO plan is the best thing that we could do.”

“While we [institute long-term plans], we also need to look at the more comprehensive, immediate solutions,” she adds. “Having more cooling centres that are closer to people’s homes would definitely help … but those aren’t necessarily in the middle of highrise neighborhoods like St. James Town. So how can we better prioritize where some of those cooling centres go, and make them more accessible?”

The volunteers in St. James Town are wondering the same thing as they prepare for another hot summer. Lidia Ferreira sees the notices in the lobbies of the buildings recommending that on hot days residents visit community centres 30 minutes away on foot — advice that most of the people she checks in on can’t possibly follow. Instead, her team has taken to leading community walks for the highrise residents. What started as groups of seven or eight tenants, escaping the heat by walking through local parks, has now turned into groups of 15 or even 30. Residents of all ages and walks of life join in: mothers bringing their young children, older neighbours arriving alone, looking not only for relief from the heat but also connection and community. 

When the walks were first proposed, the lack of parks in St. James Town meant the nearest green space was the St. James cemetery, an idea some residents quickly turned down. Now they leave the neighbourhood entirely. The towers recede behind them, taking on the glaring sunlight and heat, as they walk to Rosedale, the leafy neighbourhood to the northeast filled with parks, sturdy old-growth trees and a ravine that skirts the Don River — a place that is beautiful, wealthy and cool. 

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This story is part of Carbon Cache, The Narwhal’s ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

Lawrence Martin can’t put a date on when he first heard community Elders call for conservation efforts in James Bay and Hudson Bay — but the interest goes as far back as he can remember. 

Martin is the marine region manager for a new conservation project spearheaded by the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents seven First Nations in the Hudson Bay Lowlands in northern Ontario. He says Elders have been encouraging an initiative like this for decades.

“They wanted to conserve the millions and millions of migratory birds that come up here. They see the seals, the belugas, the walruses, the polar bears roaming around. And as climate change happens, you see a lot of these animals coming inland.”

Northern Ontario’s James Bay and Hudson Bay — known in western Cree as Weeneebeg and Washaybeyoh — are 800-plus kilometres north of Toronto at their most southerly point, and unconnected to the rest of the province by road. The coastline and adjacent wetlands have long been understood as a globally significant site of migration and breeding for hundreds of bird species, and dozens of species at risk. The Mushkegowuk Council has resolutions on record from as early as the 1980s, calling for the creation of a Tribal Conservation Authority to manage this critical ecosystem.

In the last two years, it seems, the stars have aligned. 

In August, the Mushkegowuk Council signed a memorandum of understanding with Parks Canada to establish a National Marine Conservation Area in James Bay and southwestern Hudson Bay. At more than 90,000 square kilometres — an area roughly the size of Portugal — the conservation area would be the largest in Ontario and second largest in the country, after Nunavut’s Tallurutiup Imanga. 

The project is precedent-setting in Ontario. Not only has it been driven by Mushkegowuk community members and leadership from the very start, but community members and federal government representatives have come to the table with a mutual interest in establishing the conservation area. 

“When the government and Crown of the day created the Chapleau Game Preserve or Polar Bear Provincial Park, they didn’t come to us,” then-Grand Chief Jonathan Solomon said at the signing of the memorandum, referencing land designations made in central and northern Ontario in the 1920s and 1980s, respectively, with little or no consultation with local Indigenous nations. Chapleau Game Preserve, in particular, stripped local First Nations of their right to hunt, trap and fish in the area.

“This time, it’s different,” Solomon continued. “We will drive that process. We will determine the future of our waters, of the shores, of the bays.”

A carbon cache and a perfect storm for conservation

In 2019, the council reopened the discussion around conservation after hearing of the Grand Council of the Crees’ plans to create a protected area on the Quebec side of James Bay. It didn’t make sense to protect just one side of the bay, says Vern Cheechoo, director of lands and resources at the Mushkegowuk Council. “The current comes from the west coast of Hudson Bay, James Bay and then goes up the east side. So whatever happens on the west side could be felt on the east.” 

Establishing a marine conservation area on the west coast of James Bay would not only provide a protected habitat for vulnerable species, but give them greater opportunity to replenish wildlife populations that could go on to live elsewhere in the bay. The benefits would spread outwards, beyond the boundaries of the conservation area itself and into the adjacent rivers and wetlands — part of the world’s largest peatland complex, an underappreciated ecosystem composed of partially decomposed plant matter that builds up over centuries. 

Known to the Omushkego as ‘The Breathing Lands,’ the peatlands serve as a crucial carbon store — containing more than 35 billion tonnes of carbon, and sequestering an additional 6 million tonnes, equivalent to taking nearly 6.5 million cars off the road, each year.

The peatlands in the Hudson Bay Lowlands can contain up to five times as much carbon as the Amazon rainforest per square metre. And this ecosystem is directly impacted by any changes that take place in the bay. 

A perfect storm of political interest and will was beginning to form toward the end of 2019 among Mushkegowuk Council and, as it turned out, the federal government. 

“Timing is everything,” Martin says. “When the federal government started announcing 2025 and 2030 being target dates, that played right into what the chiefs and Elders have been talking about over the years.”

In late 2019, the federal government made a commitment to protect 25 per cent of Canada’s land and oceans by 2025, and another five per cent by 2030. By the following April, Solomon had sent a letter to then-minister of environment and climate change Jonathan Wilkinson, writing: “Through Nation to Nation dialogue the Mushkegowuk Council seeks to explore with the Crown how best to conserve one of the richest most productive ecosystems on the planet for the direct benefit of our communities, for Canada and for the globe.”

From there, the process was faster than Mushkegowuk Council members and their non-profit partners had anticipated. That August, the council passed a motion supporting the creation of an official National Marine Conservation Area, with rigorous protections against ocean dumping, oil, gas or mineral exploration and industrial development. 

A year on, continued meetings between the federal government, Omushkego leaders and non-profit environmental groups have led to the creation and signing of the memorandum of understanding, bringing the project to its next phase: a feasibility assessment. (While the study area does not include the islands within Hudson and James Bay that belong to Nunavut, consultations with the Government of Nunavut will also be a part of the process, Parks Canada told The Narwhal in an emailed statement.)

Now, a steering committee will be established to understand the impacts and benefits of creating the marine conservation area, consult with residents and stakeholders, and answer the numerous questions associated with a project of this scale. How do residents feel about the proposal and how best can the area be managed into the future? How does it fit into broader federal climate strategies and reconciliation? 

The project team is expanding to include community representatives from each First Nation involved: Attawapiskat, Taykwa Tagamou, Kashechewan, Fort Albany, Moose Cree, Chapleau Cree, Missanabie Cree, Peawanuck and Fort Severn. While in-person engagement with some communities is still difficult given the threats posed by COVID-19 — which has placed immense pressure on communities with fragile healthcare infrastructure — the team has continued remotely engaging with locals through social media, the council website and the volunteer Cree-language radio station, Wawatay Radio Network. 

“Historically, the bay has been neglected by a lot of governments,” says Anna Baggio, director of conservation planning for Wildlands League, a charitable organization working with Mushkegowuk Council on the project. “[So] it’s really important for the nations to assert themselves.” 

Protecting land and water as one around James Bay

The proposed boundaries of the marine protected area trace the shoreline from the southern tip of James Bay at the border of Ontario and Quebec, skirting past Polar Bear Provincial Park at its mouth, and north to the Manitoba border on Hudson Bay.

During the feasibility assessment, the proposed boundaries for the marine conservation area could be altered. This is where the Mushkegowuk Council faces one of its greatest challenges — or opportunities. The siloed Canadian approach to conservation gives the federal government jurisdiction over James Bay and Hudson Bay, and the Ontario government has jurisdiction over the adjacent peatlands. 

This worldview diverges significantly from that of the Omushkego organizers, for whom there is no division between the land and water: they’re part of the same system and thus need to be protected holistically. Waterways flow from the peatlands and rivers into the bay, and animals travel between the two freely. 

“The Elders talk about the otters — you don’t see the otter swimming up the river, but all of a sudden, they appear way inland, because there are water systems in the Muskeg, in the peatlands, that the otters use to get up into other parts of the area,” Martin says. 

The result is a landscape that can’t be divided, where what happens upstream impacts habitats, biodiversity and human life downstream, and vice-versa. Leaving the peatlands unprotected while conserving the bay leaves them open to the impacts of industry, risking wildlife and water — and vast stores of carbon. 

Hydro dams, mines threaten vast network of Hudson Bay peatlands 

The protection of James Bay and Hudson Bay is, in part, a means to prevent the worst potential impacts of development. While risk to the bays may not be immediately apparent, given neither commercial fishing nor mineral exploration take place here, historical and current proposals do threaten this vast, interconnected ecosystem.

In the 1960s and ’80s, concerns around access to freshwater permeated Canada and the U.S. A proposal was drawn up, first in the ’60s and reinvigorated in the ’80s, to dam James Bay at its mouth, effectively turning the bay into a lake whose freshwater could then be pumped south through canals and existing waterways to top up the Great Lakes. Research at the time found that the dam could effectively wipe out all marine life and “result in the destruction of all, or a substantial portion of, many North American migratory bird populations.” It would drastically and forever alter the lives of people who live on the shores of the bay.

The proposal lost steam and public favour after its 1980s resurgence, despite support from former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

But dam development along rivers within the peatlands is an ongoing concern, with fluctuating water levels posing the risk of increased riverbank thawing, erosion and the release of carbon stored in the permafrost. The devastating environmental and cultural impacts of the James Bay Project, a massive hydro dam system on the Quebec side of the border, led to the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement — the first land claims agreement signed between the province of Quebec, the federal government and Indigenous nations.

In the 2000s, as De Beers built up its Victor Mine about 90 kilometres west and upstream of Attawapiskat First Nation, residents of the region expressed concerns about the potential risk of fuel spills into James Bay through the introduction of both tanker transport and an on-site diesel generator at the diamond mine. The mine operated from 2008 to 2019, and this year DeBeers pleaded guilty to failing to disclose mercury monitoring data, a requirement of its permit. Environmental groups claim this led to undisclosed elevated mercury levels in the water pumped from the mine into the Attawapiskat River — this was not proven in court, and De Beers maintains that while the results weren’t reported, samples were taken and mercury levels were within the approved range. 

The Victor Mine is seated on the mineral-rich grounds of northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire. Here, the impacts of local industry development remain at the forefront of conversations about conservation. Earlier this year, Chiefs from the Mushkegowuk council called for a moratorium on mining exploration and related development, saying that protection plans for the peatlands need to be instituted first.

Local politicians, environmental groups and the Omushkegowuk Women’s Water Council followed up with a letter of support for the moratorium, also asking that the federal and provincial governments make access to clean water, shelter and health infrastructure for communities around the Ring of Fire a priority over mining. The First Nations have repeatedly emphasized, including to The Narwhal, that their position isn’t about being against development — it’s about assessing priorities and impacts, and weighing the costs of disrupting the peatlands’ massive carbon storage against the profits of resource extraction.

“How much mining is enough? How much is too much?” Cheechoo asks. “We’re calling on the provincial government, the Impact Assessment Agency [of Canada], to create a committee with First Nations as nations, like the Mushkegowuk nation, the Oji-Cree nation, together, to talk about the Ring of Fire. To be involved in that process, not just be used as another stakeholder. We’re the only ones that have the connection to the land — the companies don’t.”

There are several known potential impacts of mining on the environment: contamination of water bodies through tailings spills or toxic effluent, shifts in air quality when dust from the mines becomes airborne, displacement of wildlife through mine construction and operation, to name a few.

Further still, Mining Watch Canada co-ordinator Jamie Kneen explains that mercury stored in the northern Ontario peatlands could be activated when water is pumped out of a site, to dig down into the mine, and then it’s re-flooded, potentially releasing previously stored mercury into the water system. 

“The bottom line is, any mining is going to cause damage to ecosystems: it’s a question of how severe it is, and whether it is held to be justifiable,” Kneen says. 

Mining companies have sought to rationalize their exploration for minerals like cobalt and lithium in northern Ontario, as being in the name of the necessary energy transition because these minerals are key components of the batteries that power electric vehicles, for example. 

But Kneen and many others aren’t convinced: “One of the ironies actually is now coming to First Nations communities and leadership and asking them to make more sacrifices, for the sake of a larger society that has already taken as much as it can from them. Especially in the North, where climate change itself is already having a devastating impact.”

Support of Ontario government needed to expand boundaries of Meshkegowuk marine conservation area

Expanding the boundaries of the Mushkegowuk Marine Conservation Area to include part of the peatlands would involve bringing the provincial government to the table. At this stage, organizers aren’t certain exactly how far inland they’d want to propose extending the boundary; that’s something only time and extensive consultations will reveal. 

But it would be fair to feel daunted by the task: the current provincial government has been criticized throughout its tenure for prioritizing industry expansion over conservation. In 2020, Premier Doug Ford’s government overhauled the environmental assessment process in an attempt to speed up assessments to incentivize and retain business interests in the province. Environmental organizations argue the assessment process was already poorly regulated and had little oversight — conditions that will only worsen with these legislative changes. 

But the Mushkegowuk conservation project organizers feel resolute, perhaps even cautiously optimistic, especially given the interest expressed by the federal government. 

“The path ahead is huge,” Martin says. “But I’m a believer of sorts. … It’s not something that we’re going to be able to do on our own — this is where we need allies.” 

The Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

Updated Nov. 8, 2021, at 3:32 p.m. ET: This article was updated to correct a link. The source for the statement, “The peatlands in the Hudson Bay Lowlands can contain up to five times as much carbon as the Amazon rainforest per square metre,” is the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada.

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When Luisa Da Silva began her career as a geoscientist 14 years ago, she had no idea that she’d someday move from the oil and gas sector to advocating for fossil fuel workers to shift into renewable energy careers. Her journey reflects one of the core tenets of a movement that is promoting a responsible transition for oil and gas industry workers. 

“What it is that [we] were doing 10 years ago, or five years ago, or 15 years ago, doesn’t have to be what [we’re] doing tomorrow.”

Da Silva worked first in oil and gas, then in the mining and exploration industry, then in education and at an Ontario conservancy. 

It was the culmination of this journey that led her to become executive director of Iron & Earth — a non-profit organization that says it started in 2016 “around the lunchroom tables of the Canadian oilsands.”

She says oil and gas workers wanted a safe place to discuss their concerns about the decline of the fossil fuel industry, job security and the climate crisis — without putting their careers in jeopardy for engaging in difficult conversations. This is where Iron & Earth came in. The organization not only advocates and lobbies to promote a smart transition for fossil fuel workers, but it also provides training and guidance to help those eager to make the jump into renewables. 

“Iron & Earth really sits at the middle of the oil and gas industry and being concerned about climate change — we bring everybody to the table to have the discussion together,” Da Silva explains. 

In early August, Iron & Earth published its Prosperous Transition Plan, which consulted oil and gas workers on what a responsible transition should look like, and detailed the resulting recommendations for the federal government.

Da Silva also says the federal government has taken some positive steps by starting consultations on a proposed Just Transition Act, but notes it’s happening two years after a promise to introduce this legislation. She says she hopes the consultations lead to concrete action and were not just introduced as a pre-election exercise.

Da Silva sat down with The Narwhal to discuss what the federal government and fossil fuel industry need to do to facilitate a responsible transition. The following is a transcript of that conversation, edited for style and brevity.

What kinds of fears and concerns are oil and gas workers facing right now, in terms of the climate crisis and the fossil fuel industry? 

Fossil fuel workers are no different from anyone else: they just want to take care of the family, of the community, to put food on the table, a roof over their head, and they want to be proud of the work that they do.

[They] are concerned about having their wages reduced, losing their job, having their hours reduced. Be it from climate change, economic or other external factors, they can see the writing on the wall — the transition to net-zero is happening. [But] a lot of these people, they don’t know what else to do. Their biggest concern is that they’re going to get left behind. And they’re concerned about how they’re leaving the world.

How can the idea of ‘just transition’ address these concerns? 

In order to implement the net-zero economy, there’s already this enormous skilled workforce. We know that we can move into this transition that will provide stable jobs, reliable jobs, well-paid jobs, that won’t be subject to boom-and-bust cycles. Fossil fuel industry [workers] and Indigenous workers’ skills are needed in the net-zero economy.

[But] they need to have upskilling, so that they can move into the net-zero economy. They face economic barriers — it’s quite expensive to upskill to go into a new career. It comes down to being out of pocket: needing to invest money into retraining, and needing to invest time. Depending on where they’re at in their career, they might not be able to afford that. That’s part of why having a just transition is so very important. 

How do the interests of oil and gas workers looking to upskill relate to the interests of oil and gas companies themselves?

I do think that these oil and gas companies also want to see themselves thrive through a just transition. They want to come out the other side, knowing that they still have a place in the Canadian economy. And really what that speaks to is a refocusing and repositioning of these enterprises.

What it boils down to is, there are things that the oil and gas companies can pivot towards, that are less polluting, that are better for the environment, they still will have a place in the economy. Fundamentally, what exists currently there doesn’t have to be completely stripped away and overhauled. The key is that [renewable energy infrastructure] can be built upon what already exists. 

But the reality is, businesses will take their cue from what the federal government does. So the government needs to provide the funding for people to be able to go through training and upskill, so that Canada can move into the new economy, but it is on the businesses to ensure that they have jobs in net-zero technologies for these workers.

What should the federal government be doing to facilitate a responsible transition? 

First and foremost, we believe that the workforce needs to be upskilled. We believe it’s going to be about $10,000 per person to upskill the workforce. So we’re looking at about a cost of $10 billion over 10 years in order to upskill all the workers that are going to be needed in the net-zero economy.

In terms of retooling and upgrading facilities: if we retool and upgrade about 10,000 enterprises across Canada, across 10 years — so we’re pushing to 2030, really — that’s a federal investment of about $20 billion. [For example,] installing solar panels on existing infrastructure: in Alberta, there are around 178,000 abandoned or inactive drill wells, which occupies about 160,000 hectares of land. And so the idea behind [our project] RenuWell is let’s use this disturbed land to be putting these solar panels on to generate electricity. Retooling and repurposing is very much about looking at something that has been used for years or decades from a different perspective: how is it that it can be, now, manufacturing something else? 

Tax offsets and green strings — zero-emitting technologies, negative-emitting technologies that you’re investing into, bringing these technologies into your organization effectively — [are] about a $10 billion investment. And then finally, the nature-based solutions: these are projects that can address social challenges, and also build resilience into the economy. These projects range from forest protection to restoration initiatives, even into incorporating natural ecosystems into industrial operations. We think that that will be a cost of $22 billion to the country. 

Indigenous-led nature-based solutions projects, if done correctly, provide an opportunity to both advance reconciliation with Indigenous nations, and create and implement carbon-neutral or carbon-negative climate solutions. And many Indigenous nations in Canada are already interested in advancing nature-based solutions in their traditional territories. It is paramount that [these] projects on Indigenous land have the consent of and leadership from the people of those communities. 

What kind of obstacles have you faced already, or do you foresee, in trying to facilitate this adoption of a responsible transition? 

[With RenuWell,] we’re racing against time to keep that infrastructure there in terms of roads, and electricity running to the site to power the installation. We can’t be having red tape to cut through just to be able to do what we need to move towards net-zero and reach our climate targets. It has to be simpler, it has to come from the federal government.

We don’t really have the luxury of waiting to put a just transition into place, to pivot towards net-zero. Many of these steps can be achieved by 2030. The sooner we start putting these into place, the more widely accepted it will become, the more time businesses will have to innovate and create their own solutions that fall into these categories. And then effects will snowball and we’ll be able to reach 2050 in the net-zero economy.

On July 20 this year, the federal government announced an ‘engagement process’ to consult on how best to facilitate a just transition for workers. What are your thoughts on this announcement and process? 

I think the Canadian government is taking the right steps and using the right language in terms of moving the process of just transition along towards becoming a Just Transition Act. What we’re concerned about at Iron & Earth is that an advisory board can be ignored, and that they would just be advisory. 

Any delay in acting will only delay the process. We already see that the Just Transition Act was promised in 2019; we’re in 2021, and we’re starting the consultation. So we’re already two years behind. We really hope that this consultation process will, in the end, have concrete steps and actions towards creating policy, and that it’s not just being done as a pre-election exercise.

What do you think is the best way to pursue serious discussions about transitioning workers in a context of polarization, extreme political rhetoric and partisan attacks?

I believe the best way to have these talks is exactly what Iron & Earth has been doing for over five years — listening to everyone, through polls, surveys, interviews, events and consultations — from the concerns of the workers to the oil and gas companies. It’s the people on the ground who know what the reality is, rather than trying to guess from behind a political curtain. 

Climate change should be a non-partisan issue. The fate of the Canadian energy sector rests on how well we can transition, and the fate of our survival as humans’ rests on how quickly we can react to and enact stops to the runaway climate crisis unfolding before us. It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you sit on — climate change will still be climate change. Political tactics and games will only serve to label and divide people rather than uniting everyone together on what needs to be seen as the greatest threat to human existence. 

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Shereen Ashman has felt the healing effects of Ontario’s wilderness firsthand — in fact, she wonders if she would have survived the worst of the pandemic without them. Being in nature, to Ashman, is free therapy, “like coming back to yourself.” 

So when she and her longtime collaborator Kofi Hope began to discuss the possibilities for their next project, facilitating a connection with the great outdoors felt like a natural fit. 

Ashman is director of operations at the CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals, a non-profit organization dedicated to the social and economic development of young Black people, which she co-founded with Hope almost 10 years ago. Since then, Hope went on to co-found Monumental Projects, a consulting company focused on equitable recovery and COVID-19, with Zahra Ebrahim.

Now Ashman, Hope and Ebrahim have teamed up with Corex Creative — a Black-owned media company in Toronto — and a group of volunteers and funders to create All Out Canada, a project dedicated to making the outdoors more accessible to racialized communities. 

With content housed on Instagram and TikTok, All Out teaches audiences the fundamentals of getting outdoors, through safety series with infographics on how to spot poison ivy or remove a tick, or with posts like ‘Wooded walks within an hour of Toronto,’ and  ‘Free bike rentals in Toronto.’

The goal of these posts is to fill a knowledge gap: racialized communities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) have an interest in spending more time in the wilderness camping, fishing or boating, but may not know where to start.

All Out also aims to increase the visibility and inclusion of racialized people in the outdoors by featuring profiles and photographs of racialized outdoor adventurers, so they feel more comfortable getting out into new environments. It’s a two-pronged approach, tackling both the social perceptions of who belongs outdoors, and the material obstacles standing in the way of racialized communities getting there. 

Ashman and Hope spoke to The Narwhal about the barriers facing racialized communities trying to access nature, how they can be overcome and what systemic changes could be made to bridge the gap between urban centres and the wilderness. 

What are some of the cultural stereotypes and misconceptions we see in Ontario, and Canada more broadly, when it comes to who is ‘outdoorsy’ and who isn’t? 

Kofi Hope: There has been, historically, this idea that the “great Canadian outdoors” and the surrounding areas are predominantly white — that is, folks who have deep roots in this country, who have access to cottages, who are doing things like canoeing. And it’s a strange narrative we’ve created in Canada: Indigenous people have in many ways been written out of that narrative, even though these are the folks who showed settlers canoes, kayaks and snowshoes and all of these technologies.

[The campaign] shakes up a lot of these stereotypes. We can go into these spaces as people from racialized communities, on our own terms. Camping or going outside doesn’t need to be hamburgers and hot dogs, right? There’s nothing that stops people from having cultural foods that they’re used to, whether it’s dal or jerk chicken or catch that fish and spice it up with Caribbean spices, and cook it like you cook back home. People can go into these spaces and [practice] their culture unapologetically. But it might look different than what it looked like in the 1970s, ’80s or ’90s. 

Shereen Ashman: We’re trying to facilitate this idea of inclusion, to disrupt the dominant narrative that the outdoors is only for the white adventurer who is an expert. 

[There’s a] fear or concern, around safety and inclusion and belonging. People don’t want to mess up, people don’t want to negatively impact anybody else who’s trying to enjoy something. Sometimes instead of stepping out with that fear and trying to do it anyways, people pull back. 

What are some of the material barriers you’ve seen impact racialized communities trying to get out into the wild?

Shereen: If you’re thinking about economics: who has the time? The pandemic has shown that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) folk are largely represented in service roles. Who has access to the time off to be able to do this? Who has access to friends and family who have done this, who can be a guidepost? That’s a significant barrier. 

Kofi: The knowledge gap, I think that is one of the biggest ones. Just knowing what’s out there, and then knowing how to be safe and comfortable. When you rent a canoe, no one is there telling you the direction you face in it, or basic things on paddling. It’s just expected if you’re renting it, you should know. But that’s something we could communicate in, like, two TikTok videos, give people enough that they can get out there and do the basics. 

[And] access to transportation, which of course has to do with income. It’s just taken for granted in Canada, that if you’re trying to access these places, you’ve got access to a car. [And] the gear isn’t cheap. So many people I know said, “Yeah, we’d love to camp, but we don’t know if we’d like it. We don’t want to spend $500 in all of that equipment, to then go in and [feel]  like, ‘Oh, this sucks.’ ” Camping can be a super affordable holiday if you’ve got a tent, if you’ve got sleeping bags. But [it’s] that startup cost, right? So the gear costs, helping people figure out places that you can rent, or more affordable ways to do it — that’s stuff that [All Out is] increasingly looking at.

In an ideal world, what kind of infrastructural changes or improvements do you think would make the outdoors more accessible? 

Shereen: I would love to see the health-care system recognize the environment and recreational wilderness, or nature just in and of itself, as a form of healing. There’s a lot of academic research that looks at the healing properties of nature. But on a personal level, I can tell you for myself: at the height of the pandemic, when it was super stressful, I don’t know if I would have made it through this pandemic without access to nature and being in wilderness, specifically. 

How do we integrate [nature] into our health-care system in Canada? I’m not sure — but it would be lovely. [And] the next thing would be teaching our children from very early on, in our TDSB [Toronto District School Board] or Catholic District School Board, about recreational wilderness and how to utilize it for self-care and for healing. 

Kofi: The first is public transportation links to [and within] some of these places. Many U.S. parks have shuttles within them, so you can actually get to the starts of the different trails or the lakes, even if you don’t have a car. I’ve never really seen that in Canadian provincial parks. 

[Secondly,] rental services so you could rent gear and try it out, or people can share gear. Because that’s so much of the culture too, right? People who are campers have friends who are campers, like, “Oh, I’ll just borrow so-and-so’s tent or stove.” But if you don’t know anyone in your network who has any of that, who are you going to borrow from? 

What’s your response when a racialized person says they don’t want to go out into the wilderness because they don’t want to be the only racialized person there?

Kofi: That’s what the campaign is about: you’re not, anymore. Any place that’s within a day’s trip of Toronto that you go these days, you will see other [racialized] folks there. But I think many people find when they go on these trips, folks are way more welcoming than they expected. I’ve found nine times out of 10, people are pretty open, want to share these places that they live around, are excited to see new people there. 

Shereen: [The campaign is] an invitation to my BIPOC sisters and brothers to not shrink your life as a consequence of racism. Racism is a fact, but I’m inviting you to live a full life, which includes exploring these spaces.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.