As construction of the Woodfibre LNG project gets underway in Squamish, B.C., locals are worried about potential air pollution and health impacts from flaring — the process of burning off excess gas, mostly in the form of methane.  START – Apple News Only Block Add content to the Apple News only block. You can add things like headings, paragraphs, images, galleries and audio clips. The content added here will not be visable on the website article

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Woodfibre has estimated flaring will occur during about three per cent of the plant’s operations, or on about 11 days per year. Tracy Saxby, co-founder of the local environmental group My Sea to Sky, says that’s too many. 

“That exceeds the definition of a high amount of flaring, based on this new research that shows that being exposed to flaring at fossil fuel facilities for more than 10 days a year can have significant impacts for human health,” Saxby told The Narwhal. She said chronic exposure to flaring can increase rates of asthma, heart disease, lung disease, premature death and mortality.

Tracey Saxby, co-founder of the local environmental group My Sea to Sky, says the growing body of research about the health impacts of LNG facilities is concerning. Photo: Jennifer Gauthier / The Narwhal

After hearing Squamish-area residents’ Woodfibre-related worries, University of Victoria researcher Laura Minet decided to launch the first Canadian study on the potential health impacts of flaring from the Woodfibre liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility. 

Minet agreed studies indicate oil and gas development can impact the health of local communities, but said it’s difficult to draw comparisons with LNG export facilities “because it’s [a] different context.” 

“I think it’s all a question of magnitude and how much flaring is happening,” she said. “What we can for sure say is … there are very high chances that it’s going to have impacts on the health of the community.”

But according to Minet, an assistant professor in civil engineering, her attempts to get modelling data for Woodfibre flaring have hit a wall.

In October 2023, Minet filed a freedom of information request with the B.C. Ministry of Environment and the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office, hoping to get access to details about how Woodfibre LNG modelled the potential impacts of any flaring for its environmental assessment. 

Two significant concerns are Woodfibre’s proximity to residential areas in Squamish, with a population of 24,000, and local geography. Howe Sound is a long, narrow ocean inlet. Its steep sides, formed by glaciers, make the inlet susceptible to inversions, where a layer of warm air traps cooler air in the space below.

“That means that if there’s excess air pollution, air pollution could be also trapped close to the ground under certain meteorological conditions,” such as during heat waves, Minet, who heads the university’s clean air lab, said in an interview.

Minet requested a copy of emission dispersion modelling files referenced in a 2015 memo from Golder Associates, the consulting firm that compiled Woodfibre’s environmental impact assessment submissions. In the memo, a Golder employee promises to provide the files to the Ministry of Environment on an external hard drive.

“The response I got from them was that they couldn’t find a hard drive and they couldn’t actually find any proof that they had received it from Golder Associates,” Minet said. 

The steep sides of Howe Sound make the inlet susceptible to atmospheric inversions, where a layer of warm air traps cooler air in the space below. Photo: Jennifer Gauthier / The Narwhal

The Narwhal also filed a freedom of information request seeking the modelling files referenced in the Golder memo. In response, the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office said the files were publicly posted on its website. But after reviewing the data cited by the office, Minet disagreed.

“These memos are responses to [questions] asked by the Ministry of Environment on the modelling done by Golder Associates, and provide some information on the modelling assumptions, but they are not modelling files.”

Woodfibre LNG is majority owned by Indonesian billionaire Sukanto Tanoto’s Pacific Energy Corporation. The gas export project is under construction on the site of an old pulp and paper mill on the shore of Howe Sound. It’s one of three approved LNG projects in B.C. including the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C., which will be Canada’s first LNG facility to ship compressed gas overseas. Four other LNG projects are proposed in the province.

5 projects you need to know about as B.C.’s oil and gas sector heats up

In an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal, Woodfibre spokesperson Sean Beardow did not directly answer a question about the amount of flaring that will take place. “There will be flaring associated with initial start up and we’re exploring different avenues on how to reduce it as much as possible,” he said.

Woodfibre aims to minimize flaring by redirecting gas that evaporates from LNG storage tanks to the liquefaction facility instead of flaring it, according to Beardow. He said Woodfibre LNG — unlike the larger LNG Canada project — will use electric compressors, which can help reduce flaring because they require maintenance less frequently than gas-powered compressors and don’t need to flare gas when restarting after maintenance.

When Woodfibre LNG plans to flare gas, it is required to notify the District of Squamish, Squamish Nation, Musqueam Indian Band and Tsleil-Waututh Nation at least 24 hours in advance, Beardow said. In the event of unplanned flaring, the company is required to advise local governments within 24 hours of the start of flaring if the quantity of gas exceeds a specific volume — 10,000 cubic metres per event — or flaring occurs for more than four hours in a row.

Beardow did not directly answer a question about the impact flaring may have on air quality and human health, saying only that B.C. has “a world-class regulatory framework that protects both the environment and human health alike.”

“Woodfibre LNG trusts in the province’s regulatory system and will operate within its established limits in all aspects of its operations, including flaring,” Beardow added in an email.

Environmental assessments often rely on vague and optimistic flaring estimates provided by project proponents: Minet

The missing modelling files aren’t the only data issues observed by Minet and her team. Tim Takaro, a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Health Sciences who is involved in the Woodfibre LNG study, said there are “many, many problems” with flaring estimates for the project. 

“One of the big obvious ones is that the largest release period is during the startup — generally one to two years, sometimes longer — and during maintenance. But in the environmental assessment, they leave out that they start their calculations during the running phase where the emissions are the lowest.”

The Narwhal asked the B.C. environment ministry if ​​flaring during the plant’s startup was included in Woodfibre’s environmental assessment, but did not receive a direct answer. Instead, the ministry cited a supplemental report that states “flaring will occur under controlled conditions during introduction of hydrocarbons” while the plant is starting up and systems are tested. Woodfibre anticipates flaring will occur less than three per cent of the time, the report says.

Woodfibre also estimates the project’s start-up and system testing will last one month and involve “intermittent flaring periods lasting up to three or four days at any one time,” according to the supplemental report.

In Kitimat, residents have been advised the LNG Canada gas liquefaction facility could be flaring continuously for up to three months as the facility tests equipment in preparation to launch its first shipments to Asia next year.

The LNG Canada facility has been flaring gas as it prepares to begin shipping compressed gas overseas next year. Photo: Marty Clemens / The Narwhal

Minet said potential human health impacts of flaring haven’t been extensively researched, partly due to the relatively small number of LNG export facilities — which cool and compress natural gas for easier transport — around the world. Currently, about 40 plants are operating worldwide and about half of them have opened in the past 15 years.

The Woodfibre study, which involves a team of scientists from University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, University of Toronto and Texas A&M University, as well as officials from Vancouver Coastal Health and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, will add to a growing body of research about the burgeoning industry.

“My hope is to be able to provide information on what is happening around the world at LNG export facilities,” Minet said. “This information could be a good basis for future environmental impact assessments. We can rely partly on what the proponents are saying and how much flaring is going to occur in those facilities, but it’s good to compare this with what has been observed at other facilities and also build worst-case scenarios.” 

Most environmental impact assessment documents compiled by LNG proponents are “based on best case scenarios,” according to Minet. 

“They never model a case when they’re going to have to flare a lot because there are maintenance issues or because the facility has to close for a certain period of time,” she said, adding estimates about flaring frequency are often quite vague.

“Looking at environmental impact assessments from other LNG export facilities around the world, the information that’s communicated to the public is always very generic — ‘We’re expecting to flare a bit, but not too much’ — and we have no idea what this is based on.” 

“There’s been a lot of flaring happening at some energy export facilities in the U.S. and notably in Australia — and some reports of journalists saying that the communities around them have been affected and have reported potential health issues associated with this excess flaring,” Minet said.

Government agencies, including B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, use estimates provided by project proponents when deciding whether to approve projects like Woodfibre LNG. 

The Town of Squamish, home to about 24,000 people, is located just a few kilometres away from the site of Woodfibre LNG. Photo: Jennifer Gauthier / The Narwhal

In the U.S., Saxby pointed out, some liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities have underestimated the frequency and duration of flaring. “Those frontline communities disproportionately shoulder the burden of pollution and there are significant health risks.”

She said if flaring is underestimated, “it means that the local air quality impacts and the associated health impacts are also being underestimated — and that’s a really big problem.” 

B.C. government can’t locate files mentioned in Woodfibre LNG environmental assessment 

The Narwhal’s freedom of information request for the emissions modelling files was closed by the government, which said there were “no records.” Minet is still waiting for her request to be fulfilled.

“They said, ‘We have other files that we can provide you, other documents,’ which I assume would be the emails between Golder and the [ministry] just to understand the assumptions. But we’re a year later, and I haven’t received them yet.”

The environment ministry has not responded to questions The Narwhal emailed in August, asking if the hard drive and modelling files have been located and if any efforts have been made to obtain them.

When The Narwhal asked Woodfibre about the files, Beardow directed us to the assessment office website.

Saxby is deeply concerned that Woodfibre LNG may have received its environmental assessment certificate without providing the data on which its estimates about flaring and potential health impacts are based.

“From our perspective, that completely invalidates Woodfibre LNG’s environmental assessment certificate,” she said. “There’s a lot of concerns about this project and the fact that it hasn’t been properly assessed … Everybody that lives in the community and in Howe Sound are being put at risk. Our health is being put at risk.”

Takaro shares Saxby’s concern that Woodfibre LNG’s environmental assessment certificate may have been issued despite a lack of modelling data about flaring from the project.

“How is it possible that a company … can operate in a space that protects them from scrutiny of people who know about the health effects of those emissions?”

Minet hopes study findings will help challenge environmental impact assessment standards

Without the modelling for Woodfibre’s flaring emissions, Minet and her colleagues have turned to other data sources to assess in the study.

“What we’re doing now is reviewing data that is publicly available on all LNG export facilities that are open around the world already, [and] that includes looking at satellite data,” she said. 

Understanding how often other LNG plants are flaring and how local conditions, like weather and geography, influence the dispersal of those emissions will enable Minet’s team to assemble a range of projections for flaring at Woodfibre, from best-case to worst-case scenarios.

The fight to make Woodfibre LNG a ballot box issue this B.C. election

Once the study is published, Minet hopes it will be a resource for the other LNG projects making their way through the environmental assessment process. Those include the Ksi Lisims LNG project, which would be the province’s second-largest LNG export project if approved. The proposed projects could collectively produce 30 million tonnes of LNG per year on top of about 19 million tonnes per year from Woodfibre, LNG Canada and Cedar LNG.

“My hope is to question those environmental impact assessments … and see if we could better define them to include more worst-case scenarios, to have a better picture of what could happen to the community, rather than relying on best-case scenarios.”

Woodfibre LNG was approved by the B.C. government in 2015 and the Squamish Nation in 2018. The company expects to ship about 2.1 million tonnes of LNG overseas each year, starting in 2027.

Updated Dec. 2, 2024, at TK:TK p.m. MT. This story has been updated to remove a reference to Howe Sound being the world’s most southerly fjord.Updated Dec. 2, 2024, at 9:40 a.m. PT. This story has been updated to remove a reference to Howe Sound being the world’s most southerly fjord.

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On the morning of the 2024 U.S. election — and a day after Canada released new details of its proposed oil and gas emissions cap — Enbridge Gas President Michele Harradence made a rare public address to tell investors and policymakers that Canada has “a tangle of regulatory knots” that need to be loosened. 

Harradence was before the crowd in downtown Toronto to celebrate Enbridge’s transition from a company operating 12 gas streetlamps in downtown Toronto, some 176 years ago, to becoming North America’s largest natural gas utility, serving seven million homes. 

The energy giant has spent the last year fighting battles in Ontario to maintain methane-heavy natural gas as the main source of heating at a time when municipalities are trying to shift from fossil fuels to reduce emissions. One of those battles took place at the Ontario Energy Board, which ruled last December that Enbridge stop passing the cost of connecting new homes to natural gas onto homeowners. That landmark decision was overruled by the Doug Ford government in February after senior officials consulted with Enbridge and weighed the impacts on the company’s bottom line, according to reporting by The Narwhal. 

All of this has led to questions about Enbridge’s influence on energy policy in Ontario. Harradence’s speech at Toronto’s Empire Club, a nonprofit that hosts talks by politicians and industry leaders on current topics, was a warning call to governments to “simplify the regulatory burden on the energy sector” or risk losing energy investments to the United States. 

“Energy investors look at Canada and they see a tangle of regulatory knots, an unwelcoming tax climate and tepid, fragmented incentives that cannot compete with those that are on offer next door,” Harradence told the crowd. “We need to simplify the regulatory burden on the energy sector. The goal should be clear, well-designed regulatory frameworks that offer certainty to investors and regulatory processes that get us to a yes or no in a reasonable time frame.”   

Enbridge Gas President Michele Harradence (right of centre) repeatedly touted Premier Doug Ford (centre) and Energy Minister Stephen Lecce’s (right) approaches to energy policies but urged them to reduce regulatory complexity. Photo: Doug Ford / X

Harradence singled out the federal government’s Bill C-59, a new federal bill that includes provisions designed to restrict misleading advertising about emissions-reduction and sustainability efforts — also known as greenwashing — with possible penalties. Last June, Enbridge became the subject of a Competition Bureau complaint alleging it was falsely marketing natural gas as “clean energy” and “low carbon” to Ontario homeowners along its pipeline expansion route. In one ad, the company says “natural gas is cleaner than other fuels and can help reduce your home’s carbon footprint.” But the methane in natural gas is a strong heat-trapping compound that accounts for a third of Ontario’s emissions. 

Harradence didn’t address the specifics of Enbridge’s fight against such complaints, but said Bill C-59 “introduces extraordinary penalties against businesses for making environmental claims as measured by an inadequate, undefined standard,” she said. “Quite simply it muddies the water and that uncertainty chases away investment.” 

She shared similar sentiments about the federal government’s oil and gas emissions cap, which is expected to be finalized next year as the first legislative attempt to limit the sector’s rising carbon emissions. Harradence said Enbridge is “incredibly responsible … the most responsible in the world.” 

5 takeaways from Canada’s draft rules for an oil and gas emissions cap

“So the idea of having more rules, more regulatory complexity, I just don’t think it’s necessary,” she said. “We’re already demonstrating how responsible operators we are.” Enbridge, like most Canadian energy firms, discloses the emissions it produces in day-to-day operations, but does not report the emissions created when its products are used. One shareholder group has proposed the company start accounting for these end-user emissions, which it estimates make up about 80 per cent of oil and gas companies’ overall emissions, but Enbridge urged staff to vote against it.

Harradence emphasized that the Ontario government also had work to do to reduce “regulatory complexity.” While she repeatedly touted recent energy announcements by Premier Doug Ford and Energy Minister Stephen Lecce to take an “all-of-the-above” approach to meet skyrocketing energy demand (75 per cent increase in the next 25 years), she also sent a word of caution. 

“The reality is, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to track energy investments to Ontario,” she said. “That’s due at least in part to a regulatory environment that’s clearly out of step with the government’s goals on economic development and housing affordability.” (The Ontario Energy Board, which is the provincial regulator, said installing new gas infrastructure will cost homeowners more in the long run, in its now overruled decision to apply that installation cost to Enbridge.)

Throughout her remarks, Harradence maintained the importance of natural gas without mentioning its undue impact on the environment. 

“We need all energy resources to fuel the economy, to keep costs down and to reach net zero. More nuclear and more oil, more renewables, more carbon capture, more efficiency, more innovation and more natural gas,” she said. 

“If we want to get serious investment in Canada, we need to start with energy, investing in reliable, resilient, cost effective energy, and that includes natural gas.”

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.

Across Ontario, there are municipalities that want natural gas and don’t have it. Others have it, but crave a future less dependent on fossil fuels. 

The common denominator is Enbridge, an energy behemoth that wants to keep both kinds of Ontario municipalities on its balance sheet. 

But their relationship is increasingly complicated.

For more than 70 years, the $50-billion Calgary-based private company has held a monopoly on natural gas distribution in Ontario. Enbridge delivers the methane-heavy fuel — one of Ontario’s cheapest and last remaining fossil fuel-based sources of energy — through its network of pipelines that crisscross the province, heating three-quarters of homes. 

But the onset of the climate emergency — and the need to move away from fossil fuels — has posed an existential threat to Enbridge, the likes of which it has never experienced. Just as mobile phones replaced the landline, cheap energy from wind, water and sun threaten to replace natural gas and other fossil fuels that create greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbate global heating. 

“Enbridge is fighting for its survival,” Jay Shepherd, an energy lawyer, said in an interview. “They’re in this sort of death spiral. The people in Enbridge understand that Enbridge is not going to look the way it looks today 10 or 20 years from now.” 

The company is doing everything possible to delay the inevitable, Shepherd said. This includes small investments in cleaner energy sources that are still being developed and evaluated, like hydrogen and “renewable” natural gas, which is methane captured from organic waste. But it mostly means doubling down on natural gas infrastructure at the local level. 

Enbridge has long tried to influence towns and cities to use natural gas, and has been publicly asking councils across Ontario to support its expansion plans. Photo: Carrie Davis / The Narwhal / The Local

Since the beginning of the year, Enbridge Gas, the company’s natural gas subsidiary, has been publicly asking local councils across Ontario — in Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Kingston, Guelph, Whitby, Niagara Region, Grey Highlands, Durham, Severn, Prince Edward County and dozens more — to support its natural gas expansion plans for the rest of this decade. That’s the same decade within which many of these municipalities have committed to achieving significant climate action. Enbridge has long tried to influence towns and cities to stay on or expand their use of natural gas, but its latest efforts seem like a full-scale defence of a fossil-dependent business model, even as both sentiments and technologies shift elsewhere. 

To understand this latest approach and the recent history of Enbridge’s influence, The Narwhal and The Local reviewed several hundred pages of documents filed at the Ontario Energy Board, and letters sent to local councils. Over the last three months, we also spoke to 22 people who work in and with Ontario’s energy sector. That includes five former Enbridge employees and multiple municipal staff, local councillors, energy officials and lawyers. Almost all requested confidentiality, citing fear of professional retribution as their ongoing work includes continued engagement with Enbridge. Because of this, we have used single pseudonyms throughout this story for those who asked not to be named publicly. The Narwhal and The Local have verified each person’s identity and position.

Collectively, their first hand accounts and analysis illustrate the lengths Enbridge has gone to in order to boost natural gas. The company has financially supported municipalities in developing energy plans and sponsored events such as town halls and council meetings to discuss them with the public. It has given municipalities money to help research new energy solutions, and paid for studies and marketing material that stress the importance of natural gas. And, according to sources, the company has directly intervened in apparent attempts to silence and stymie opposition from municipal staff and environmental experts across Ontario. 

The Ontario Energy Board tried to prevent Enbridge from charging customers for new connections to natural gas, but was overruled by the Doug Ford government. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

In one example found in filings at the Ontario Energy Board, Enbridge Gas tried to discredit criticisms made by officials at City of Ottawa — which has an energy transition plan that requires it to move away from natural gas to achieve net zero — about the company’s lack of meaningful municipal engagement on an aging pipeline. In detailed arguments, the company said the city’s submissions were “incomplete or inaccurate” and “strategically filed” to impact Enbridge’s expansion plans. Enbridge Gas told the board it had “actively participated, in good faith, on a number of fronts” with the City of Ottawa to “further progress on energy and climate change issues.” (The board sided with the city and denied the project.)

In a statement to The Narwhal and The Local, Enbridge spokesperson Leanne McNaughton added the company “work[s] closely” with over 312 Ontario municipalities, “prioritizing their energy needs and collaborating to advance their climate-action goals.” 

“Our unwavering commitment to these stakeholders is demonstrated through various activities such as sharing crucial information, conducting impactful meetings to discuss projects and presenting at municipal councils,” McNaughton wrote. 

On the surface, much of what sources described to The Narwhal and The Local falls within the realm of lobbying — a regular practice in Canada’s political system that sees business, special-interest and advocacy organizations attempt to solicit or sway policies and practices. But often, private interests are in deep tension with the public interest. In Enbridge’s case, the question is whether pursuing profits from the continued use of fossil fuels aligns with domestic and international pledges to limit global warming and mitigate the worst impacts of the climate emergency. 

“They’re a big company; big companies have power,” Shepherd said. And in his opinion, “They’re fighting a losing battle. But it may well be true that they can stave it off for a little while by being very effective as lobbyists.” 

“But in the end, individual people — your kids, my kids, the next generation — are going to make choices and these choices are not going to be fossil fuels,” he said. Enbridge, Shepherd said, is “just buying time.” 

And its clock has started ticking a lot faster of late — a countdown bringing Enbridge’s relationship with municipalities to the fore. 

“I think Enbridge is scared,” Henry, a staff member at an urban Ontario municipality, said in an interview. “Enbridge refers to the Ontario gas distribution business as their ATM. Right now, everybody is on gas, but soon people will start going off it. That’ll start to bite [Enbridge] because all of a sudden what’s profitable will no longer be.” 

“And whether we like it or not, we’re all going to feel Enbridge’s pain at least for a little while.” 

Ontario municipalities caught between energy regulator, energy company and energy minister

In Ontario, all energy companies are obligated to work with both municipalities and the Ontario Energy Board to deliver electricity and heat to residents. The board is an independent regulator mandated to ensure the natural gas and electricity industries are operating in a way that is financially responsible and in the public interest.Enbridge has to secure agreements with a city or town before building new natural gas infrastructure. Such accords span decades and give Enbridge leave to construct and maintain pipelines, and share its costs with municipalities and residents alike. 

“Enbridge is good at giving money here and there to keep relationships sweeter,” Henry said in an interview. “Anything under $100,000 here or there is chump change for them, with big benefits: it gets them goodwill and stops municipalities from being pointy-headed.” 

One way Enbridge secures these agreements is by sending a specialized team to municipalities to engage in discussions about, and negotiate and advocate for, natural gas. This team falls under Enbridge’s conservation department, but its job is to ensure the expansion of natural gas. “These Enbridge employees are strongly incented to get results,” William, a former municipal energy official, said in an interview. 

In 2020, Enbridge formed a specialized team that engages municipalities in discussions about natural gas and advocates for its continued use and expansion. Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

According to business plans filed at the Ontario Energy Board in 2021, Enbridge set up this team in 2020 with an administrative budget of $1.66 million “in an effort to further support” a growing number of municipalities that were creating or implementing climate change and energy plans. Enbridge told the board that almost a quarter of the province’s 444 municipalities were “seeking the kind of leadership and financial support from Enbridge Gas that would lead to broader and deeper partnerships to lower energy costs and reduce energy use and [greenhouse gas] emissions.” 

To build these relationships, Enbridge began delivering information sessions on how to create plans that would achieve climate targets. It helped municipalities collect data and test new technology. And the company provided funding for local governments to “offset” the costs of creating and implementing climate and energy plans. 

“Recognizing the essential role of municipalities in shaping and advancing climate action, Enbridge Gas has established a dedicated team of specialists to support these initiatives,” McNaughton said in an email to The Narwhal and The Local when asked about the team. “We are committed to emission reduction action.”

Over the next few years, the company expanded the team in size and budget. In 2022, the company posted a job for a “senior advisor, municipal energy solutions,” who would need to “advocate for the continued use of natural gas and its role as a low carbon option in the development of municipal energy plans” — even though the use of the methane-heavy fuel contributes significantly to global heating. The advisor would also have to “communicate internally key threats identified through interactions with municipalities and assist in developing solutions to offset these threats.”

“Once you get a community tied into an agreement, they could never leave,” William said. 

“It became a de facto process that muted any municipal fights over the need for natural gas,” George, a former Enbridge employee, said in an interview. In fact, the only way a community can exit such an agreement is if the Ontario Energy Board, an independent regulator, allows it. 

To date, the board has not done so. 

Last year, the southwestern Ontario municipality of Leamington was denied when it asked the board not to renew its agreement with Enbridge for another 20 years. Documents show the municipality said it was “being forced” by Enbridge to enter a new agreement it “objects” to, which required Leamington to bear a significant portion of the cost of relocating gas systems, particularly when needed to maintain municipal drains. Enbridge, which has been the sole gas supplier for Leamington since 1889, countered that if the relocation costs weren’t split upfront, the company would have to pass them on to consumers. Because of this, the board decided the agreement had to be renewed “in the public interest.” Leamington lost an attempt to appeal in March. 

For Enbridge, these long-term agreements are important because the company only makes money when buildings are connected to its infrastructure. And it makes money whether or not gas is used. “If they have a connection that is only used during a blackout once every 10 years but sees the user pay monthly costs for that connection … well, the value of that is still high,” Phillip, an energy utility official, said in an interview. “The value becomes diminished when you start to tell people there is an alternative and they don’t need natural gas infrastructure. If you’re not expanding in the utility world, you’re dying.” 

That’s the blow the Ontario Energy Board delivered to Enbridge last fall. 

In October 2022, the board took on what would become one of the largest and most consequential cases in its 64-year history: a review of Enbridge Gas’s plans up to 2030 in light of the energy transition needed to curb climate impacts. To ensure fairness and fiscal responsibility, energy companies submit business plans to the board for review every few years.

In Enbridge’s case, the board spoke to nearly three dozen stakeholders and reviewed thousands of pages about Enbridge’s plans to generate more than $16 billion in revenue, much of which would be made from continuing to charge Ontario homeowners for new connections to natural gas.

Enbridge’s plans to generate more than $16 billion in revenue by 2030 rely on continuing to charge Ontario homeowners for new connections to natural gas. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

As part of its review, the board questioned whether or not natural gas should be the assumed future of energy in Ontario — and decided otherwise. In a stunning decision released last December, two out of three commissioners on the review panel said the company could no longer charge Ontario homeowners for new natural gas connections. The board argued that since climate commitments would render gas pipelines useless, it was unfair to charge customers for infrastructure with an expiry date. The board said these costs would have to be paid upfront by developers or Enbridge itself.

The decision shook the entire industry. A mere 15 hours after its release, the Doug Ford government vowed to overrule the independent Ontario Energy Board with legislation that would allow Enbridge to charge customers for new hookups for 40 more years. The province also pledged to weaken the board’s oversight power. Legislation cementing both moves passed last month. 

By Enbridge’s estimate, the board’s decision could have wiped out $300 million of revenue this year and billions of dollars over the next five years — an impact government staff weighed heavily in internal discussions. 

It could also have effectively ended the era of natural gas in Ontario. 

Enbridge Gas responds to regulator ruling with missives to municipalities

George, the former Enbridge employee, said the Ontario Energy Board “went for the jugular” with its decision to shift the cost of natural gas hookups off of consumers — and the company responded in kind. 

“Enbridge has been lobbying for itself for forever. Of course, as a business, it wants to keep it going,” George said. “The board’s decision meant Enbridge now had to fight for its life.”

Weeks after the decision, Enbridge Gas began sending city councils across Ontario letters asking that they support the Ford government’s legislation — a move one rural deputy mayor called “a blanket public relations effort.” 

“We just have differences in views of what our city’s energy transition looks like,” a City of Toronto official said regarding its discussions with Enbridge about natural gas. Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal / The Local

“Enbridge Gas consistently provides municipalities across Ontario with detailed updates on several items that may impact energy services provided to their communities,” company spokesperson McNaughton said in an email. These updates included information about Enbridge’s board submissions and the government’s legislation to overrule the board, she said, “recognizing the impact of these developments on the future of Ontario’s economic development, competitiveness and emissions reduction goals.” 

The Narwhal and The Local reviewed a dozen of Enbridge’s letters to municipalities, which were publicly posted as part of city council agendas. Each followed a template, slightly amended to reference local energy challenges and plans. Each was also tailored to include Enbridge’s local investments, which support energy expansions but also “greenhouses, grain dryers, industrial parks and any new businesses or housing developments seeking access to natural gas,” according to one letter sent to several municipalities.  

“Enbridge is effectively using municipalities as pawns,” Kent Elson, an energy lawyer who represents advocacy group Environmental Defence at the Ontario Energy Board, said in an interview. “They are using municipalities to impact policy and using municipal residents to grow their system … And they’re in hyperdrive because they’re scared for their life.”

Enbridge sent a version of this letter to several city councils, asking mayors and local politicians to help ensure the continued expansion of natural gas in their communities. Illustration: Fatima Syed / The Narwhal / The Local8

In its letters to rural municipalities, which often have an insufficient energy supply and limited energy expertise on staff, Enbridge reiterated each community’s need for natural gas. In April, Enbridge wrote to Grey Highlands, for example, and promised to deliver an expanded gas pipeline in return for the council’s support before the board. According to Geoff Shea, West Grey councillor, “the letter had this tone of aggression, which I thought was inappropriate.” 

“It didn’t seem level-headed or responsible,” he said in an interview.  

“Traditionally, having natural gas come to your town means your community is being taken more seriously by the powers-to-be because it’s a thing grown-up towns have,” Shea said. “But [in the letter], they made it seem like we were lucky to be getting natural gas. They were acting with a sense of entitlement.” 

In its letter to Toronto city council, Enbridge argued the board’s December 2023 decision would increase the cost of housing and put aspects of the city’s climate plan “at risk” — even though the same plan demands the city rapidly move its buildings away from natural gas. 

“It was the first instance I’ve seen where a utility has weighed in, in that nature,” James Nowlan, the City of Toronto’s executive director of environment and climate change since 2022, said in an interview. “But it did not influence our work or our assessment of [the Ford government’s legislation overruling the energy board] or our advice to council.” 

In a letter to the City of Toronto, Enbridge argued that natural gas infrastructure is crucial for the city to meet its climate and development goals. Illustration: Fatima Syed / The Narwhal / The Local

“We have a difference of general opinion with Enbridge,” Nowlan said. He explained that the city does work closely with Enbridge, which sits on Toronto’s climate advisory group and provides natural gas to many residents. But the city is also heavily focused on moving away from natural gas, something mandated for new buildings in Toronto’s net-zero strategy, called TransformTO.

“We have expressed all this to Enbridge,” Nowlan said. “They understand the city’s position. We just have differences in views of what our city’s energy transition looks like.”

Several municipal sources who spoke to The Narwhal and The Local noted the same disconnect. Enbridge’s message to municipalities after the Ontario Energy Board tried to prevent new connection charges was a wide-ranging, pointed insistence that natural gas is still great and still needed. 

A flyer sent by Enbridge Gas to Ontario residents about an Ontario Energy Board decision that would prevent Enbridge from charging customers, instead of developers, for new natural gas hookups. Source: Enbridge Gas

“The stakes are high,” Maline Giridhar, vice-president of regulatory and business development at Enbridge Gas, wrote in the letter to municipalities. “It is critical to realize that the affordability of a system that ensures Ontarians have the heat they require, and that businesses have the energy they need is in jeopardy by the [Ontario Energy Board’s] decision.” 

Giridhar reminded municipalities how cheap and useful natural gas is — “it provides twice the energy of electricity at a quarter of the cost on an annual basis” — without mentioning its harms. She wrote the company is “committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” without offering details on how. She also said the loss of revenue from the board’s decision “will lead to difficult investment choices” — which seemed like a reminder of the financial support municipalities receive from Enbridge for energy planning and other community-based support. The Narwhal and The Local asked an Enbridge spokesperson what it meant by “difficult investment choices” but did not receive a response.  

“Constraining access to natural gas through a reduction in capital will significantly limit the future development of essential energy infrastructure vital to Ontario’s economy, from which all Ontarians benefit,” Giridhar wrote in the letter. “As local leaders across the province, your voice matters, and we encourage you to take action.” 

Ontario municipalities are split over the future of natural gas for residents but agree that it will stay in the interim. Photo: Carrie Davis / The Narwhal / The Local

Lawyer Shepherd reiterates several times that, unlike most Ontario energy utilities, the energy giant is a private company. “We should not expect Enbridge to act in the public interest. That’s not what they do,” he said. “They act in the interests of their shareholders. And if they need to be a bully to do that, they will absolutely be a bully.” 

Several local officials who spoke to The Narwhal and The Local confidentially were quick to note that Enbridge’s lobbying — aggressive and influential as it might be — does not eliminate municipalities’ agency to make decisions about the future of energy in their community. A new report released this month shows that between 2013 and 2022, Ontario saw the largest increase among provinces of residents paying for natural gas expansion. But there may be a shift happening. Many cities and towns, starting with Hamilton in February, have passed resolutions supporting the Ontario Energy Board’s decision and opposing the provincial government’s move against it. On the other hand, several big rural municipalities still seeking natural gas have voted the opposite. Underlining this split is a universal concern about providing affordable electricity to Ontarians, particularly for home heating, while also considering the climate, cost and energy concerns of future generations. 

The letters have cast a slight chill on local energy planning, sources say. Where there was once a lot of chatter about moving away from natural gas in Ontario, there are now whispers. Insiders say Enbridge’s power maintains a stronghold — for now, anyway. 

“Our voice does matter,” said one rural deputy mayor. “But it’s hard to be heard when the voice at the other side of the table is an energy giant worth billions of dollars.” 

“We can’t not talk to them,” the deputy mayor added. “It’s more challenging than saying ‘thank you, next.’ We have to maintain an ongoing relationship and discussion because, for better or worse, Enbridge is going to be here for a long time even if their role is the distribution of something we’re trying to eliminate from our cities as fast as possible.” 

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.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when Paul Fisher was growing up, the rural community of Snow Hill in Sampson County, North Carolina, was a welcoming, predominantly Black, working-class area. Fisher played baseball and joined a Boy Scouts troop, fished in local streams and hunted for rabbits and squirrels in the woods.

“Everybody knew everybody, and it was nice,” says Fisher, now 75. 

Most of his neighbours owned modest plots of farmland. His family, too, had a farm, where they grew cotton, tobacco, peanuts, wheat and oats, and kept a garden. 

After high school, like many of his peers, Fisher left Snow Hill in search of work. By 1975, when he came back home to settle with a young family in tow, a landfill had opened up in the community. Residents put up with it at first, since no one really knew what its impact might be, Fisher says. 

But when it expanded into a regional landfill in the early 1990s, he and other community members became concerned. 

Over the next decades, the landfill grew, undergoing ownership changes. Then, in 2018, a merger brought the landfill under the ownership of Canadian waste management giant GFL Environmental Inc. 

The Sampson County landfill looms behind Paul Fisher, who has been speaking out against it for years. Photo: Andrew Craft / The Local / The Narwhal

Headquartered in Vaughan, Ont., GFL is a major player in the North American waste management sector, offering services from collecting waste and running landfills to operating oil refineries and responding to hazardous spills. Starting in southern Ontario in 2007, it has aggressively expanded since. It now employs more than 20,000 people and operates in much of the U.S. and across Canada, including in about 40 cities and communities in Ontario.

A February notice of intent to sue the company from the non-profit Southern Environmental Law Center alleges that since GFL acquired the Sampson County landfill, the volume of waste that the landfill accepts has surged. A lawyer representing GFL did not reply to The Local and The Narwhal’s requests for a response to the notice of intent to sue. None of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s allegations have been proven in court.

What was once a 15-acre operation is now one of the largest landfills in the state, covering roughly 1,000 acres (about 400 hectares), and it is expected to swell to 41.6 million tons (37.7 million tonnes) of trash by 2043, the letter alleges. And those living in its vicinity are paying the price. Snow Hill is no longer the idyllic rural community of Fisher’s memories. 

The stench, he says, is “outrageous.” Turkey vultures, or buzzards, hover around the neighbourhood, leaving their feathers and droppings wherever they roost. On occasion, Fisher says he’s had to shoot his gun in the air to deter them from landing on his neighbour’s roof, where they tear off the shingles. And Snow Hill is no longer the close-knit community it once was. 

Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal / The Local

The Southern Environmental Law Center’s letter depicts a once-vibrant community that has now become spiritless and polluted. Residents deal with contaminated well water, truck traffic, trash blowing onto their property and pervading odours, the letter says. “Described as a ‘clammy miasma,’ and a ‘greasy, oily’ smell ‘like decaying flesh,’ the odour from the landfill wakes people up at night, stops adults from gardening and children from playing outside and ruins social events like cookouts and church gatherings,” it alleges.  

Roughly 1,100 kilometres away, in Northville Township, Michigan, David Drinan and Leslie Evans are dealing with similar issues, living downwind of the Arbor Hills landfill, a site acquired by GFL in 2020. They, too, describe being beset by constant odours, noise and traffic congestion from trucks hauling waste, as well as contamination of the area’s only cold-water trout stream. Their citizens’ group, The Conservancy Initiative, is fighting GFL’s plans to open a new landfill adjacent to its existing one. 

Meanwhile, across the Canada-U.S. border to the east, residents near GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont., say they’re fed up with the fetor that suddenly became so pervasive and vile last year they couldn’t open their windows or spend time outdoors for most of the summer. 

Even though the smell died down over the cold winter months, it had returned intermittently early this spring. 

“Still, you can feel it,” says homeowner Nelson Faria — a sickening pong that lingers in the back of your throat. 

Local residents say the odour coming from GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton became unbearable last spring. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

The firsthand experiences of the people who live near waste operations owned by GFL and its subsidiaries stand in stark contrast to the company’s eco-friendly image. Green, specifically the vivid shade associated with freshly sprouting leaves and used in the company’s logo, is the colour that makes GFL’s garbage trucks instantly recognizable. It’s also literally in the name, Green For Life. 

“GFL’s vision is to be green for life. It’s as simple as that,” Patrick Dovigi, the company’s smiling chief executive said in a 2022 video, produced for a business campaign on sustainability called Vision 2045.

GFL refers to its employees as “Team Green.” It boasts of various environmental awards from industry groups like the National Waste and Recycling Association. The company publishes sustainability reports that document its efforts to capture landfill gas to produce renewable natural gas, its use of alternative fuel vehicles in its fleet and the expansion of its recycling and material recovery operations. It also donates close to $1.5 million annually to local charities. “GFL is committed to supporting and giving back to the communities we work in and serve,” it said in its 2022 sustainability report. With that environmentally conscious brand image, the GTA company has become a heavyweight in the industry. It reported revenues of more than $7.5 billion in 2023. (To put it in perspective, that’s roughly the annual gross domestic product of Barbados.) And the company was among a group of waste haulers dubbed “market darlings” in a Globe and Mail headline this February, after GFL stock climbed more than 30 per cent within three months. 

Recent news that GFL is now eyeing buyout offers has brought fresh scrutiny to the company’s financials. Arguably less attention has been paid to its environmental track record. As GFL has grown over the years, so too has its list of environmental violations, out of compliance warnings and complaints from the public and citizens’ groups. A 2021 Ontario auditor general’s report said the provincial Environment Ministry had identified GFL as a “repeat offender” that “regularly contravenes the acts, regulations and legal documents overseen by the ministry.” It was the only waste management firm on the report’s list of most frequently reported spillers of hazardous substances in the province. To get the full scope of GFL’s environmental infractions in Ontario, I requested documents on all incidents of its non-compliance recorded by the province’s Environment Ministry, through freedom of information legislation. The ministry’s access and privacy office informed me this was too big of a request — one that could take years to complete. Over and over, residents living near GFL’s facilities who spoke with me characterized the company as a bad neighbour that seems to have little regard for their community’s air, water and land. The risk of fires, the potential release of toxic chemicals into the environment, methane emissions — all are common concerns when living next to a landfill.

While reporting on this story, I sent multiple emails to the company, delivered a list of questions to GFL’s office in Toronto and left phone messages seeking an interview with its chief executive — or anyone, for that matter — who could speak on GFL’s behalf about its environmental track record. The only response I received was from a GFL manager in Alberta, who said if I had reached out to the company’s CEO then he would be in touch if he was interested in providing commentary.

The fact that GFL’s impact on the environment hasn’t hampered its growth reveals a lack of regulatory oversight and enforcement over the industry in which the company has flourished — an industry that, by its very nature, is anything but green. Waste management companies can only thrive when there’s plenty of filth, rubbish and sludge to manage. The more of it people generate — to be picked up, transported, sorted, buried, burned, composted and, to some extent, recycled — the more money there is to be made.

GFL founder Patrick Dovigi: a former hockey player who realized there was money to be made in garbage

GFL’s history is inseparable from that of its founder and chief executive, Patrick Dovigi. (Dovigi did not respond to multiple interview requests.) In photos, he appears dark-haired, clean-cut, with a former athlete’s build that has softened with time. His path to becoming a garbage magnate is the kind of story that newspapers and magazines find irresistible, and has been retold by multiple media outlets over the years.

A relative of NHL stars Phil and Tony Esposito, Dovigi grew up playing hockey in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. In his teens he played in the Ontario Hockey League and was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers. After leaving professional hockey, he studied business at what’s now Toronto Metropolitan University. There are conflicting reports about the specifics of what happened next. According to a story in Canadian Business, Dovigi got a job at a small investment bank called Standard Mercantile. But in most accounts, including in stories in The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, Dovigi went to work for Brovi Investments, a company owned by businessman Romeo DiBattista. It was a job that involved, among other things, serving on the board of a broadcast venture led by KISS star Gene Simmons before it went bankrupt.

A 2015 report in The Globe’s Report on Business magazine said Dovigi was eventually ousted after a rift with the DiBattista family. Before his stint ended, however, Dovigi was assigned to clean up a troubled trash operation in which his employer had invested. That early foray into the waste management industry apparently sparked a realization in the young man that there was money — and lots of it — to be made in garbage.    

In 2007, Dovigi created Green For Life, using seed money from investors to buy up smaller waste operations. 

What we found at three Canadian GFL locations

GFL emerged from relative obscurity in 2011 when it won a contract with the City of Toronto to collect residential garbage on the west side of the city. Its bid for the seven-year agreement was $17.5 million per year, around $2.5 million less than the next lowest-bidding competitor, according to the Toronto Star. The contract got off to a rough start, amid criticism over the city’s decision to privatize trash collection under the late Mayor Rob Ford, early complaints of spotty service and a temporary downgrade by the province of GFL’s safety rating. While privatization reportedly saved the city more than $11 million in the first year, the savings were less apparent in the long term. A report from the city in 2021 found waste collection on the east side of Toronto, which is done in-house by municipal workers, cost roughly the same as contracted collection on the west.

Winning that 2011 contract was “a TSN Turning Point for GFL,” Dovigi told Report on Business — in other words, it was a game-changing moment for the company. 

Since then, GFL’s growth has been meteoric. According to its most recent annual report, the company has completed more than 260 acquisitions since 2007. 

GFL founder and CEO Patrick Dovigi (second from left) rings a ceremonial bell  celebrating the company’s public listing on the New York Stock Exchange on March 4, 2020. It debuted on the stock exchange with a market valuation of US$6.1 billion. Today, it is valued at US$13.9 billion. Photo: Richard Drew / Associated Press

This June, The Globe and Mail reported GFL had hired a financial adviser to examine two buyout offers. One offer is for its full business and a second is for its environmental services division, which includes managing industrial liquid waste. A source told the newspaper that discussions were in the preliminary stages and may not lead to a transaction. Michael Hoffman, a managing director at the wealth management and investment banking firm Stifel, told BNN Bloomberg that there are “a lot of interested parties” looking to purchase GFL, and that at a recent conference, Dovigi had acknowledged a buyout is something he would contemplate. Nevertheless, Hoffman expressed he was skeptical the company, which is currently listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange, would accept a deal to take it completely private.   

Dealing in waste has made Dovigi a very wealthy man. This May, The Globe reported GFL paid him more than $68 million in 2023, prompting two proxy adviser firms to recommend that shareholders oppose the company’s executive compensation. That pay package included a $2.1 million salary, a $7.8 million bonus, and $36.4 million in “share-based awards,” according to a management information circular from the company. In its 2022 article, Canadian Business put his estimated net worth at $1 billion. That kind of wealth has afforded him an elite lifestyle — with the ability to own a private island, a yacht, multi-million dollar homes and, presumably, the ability to live far away from anyone’s trash. 

Methane, seeping chemicals, stink and fire: even modern landfills are far from benign

Many of the people who live near GFL sites are not as fortunate. Despite our collective efforts to compost and recycle, landfills are still where the bulk of the 36 million tonnes of solid waste Canada generates each year winds up. No longer the open-pit garbage dumps of the past, the modern landfill typically has a liner system meant to prevent leachate (sometimes disgustingly described as garbage juice) from contaminating the soil and groundwater. They have systems to capture the gas created from decomposing waste, much of which is methane, a greenhouse gas that has much greater global warming potential, or ability to trap heat in the atmosphere, than carbon dioxide. Instead of great, haphazard heaps of it, trash is generally compacted systematically then covered with dirt or other material at the end of each day to keep odours and pests at bay. At the end of its lifespan, a modern landfill is closed, buried and turned into a grassy field. 

But the impact of landfills on the environment is still far from benign. Even the highest-quality lining can tear, allowing chemicals to seep into the ground. Coverings may minimize but not eliminate the stink. And gas-collecting systems don’t always capture 100 per cent of emissions. Despite ultimately being covered up by a grassy meadow, the mess still lurks below the surface. 

One big risk is fire, with the potential for flammable rubbish to come into contact with discarded batteries, or for chemical reactions to create sparks. The content of air pollution caused by these fires can vary widely, depending on what kind of waste a facility accepts, but can include small particulate matter, heavy metals and compounds like dioxins and furans that are linked to cancers, liver problems and other health problems. 

A simple Google search revealed news reports of at least 14 fires and one explosion that occurred at various GFL sites across Canada and the U.S. between 2020 and 2023 — that’s a rate of almost one every other month. These include an August 2022 blaze at a GFL recycling facility in Edmonton that reportedly lasted 20 hours before firefighters extinguished it, and a five-alarm blaze at a GFL recycling facility in B.C. in June 2021. B.C.’s Environment Ministry later issued GFL a non-compliance advisory letter for not reporting the spill of water that went into the ground when extinguishing it. 

Fires aren’t uncommon in the waste business. Nevertheless, waste expert Calvin Lakhan, a research scientist and director of the Circular Innovation Hub at York University, muttered “Wow,” when I mentioned how many fires at GFL facilities I found in my basic Google search. “That is a concerning amount,” he says.  

Beyond the fires, there are numerous incidents when GFL has failed to comply with environmental laws and regulations. 

In B.C.’s online Natural Resource Compliance and Enforcement Database, there are 25 records in which the company was found out-of-compliance in that province since 2018. Some of these are for issues like accepting waste materials that aren’t listed on its manifest. But others suggest a less hypothetical risk to the surrounding ecosystem. For example, in a March 2022 letter to the company, B.C.’s Environment Ministry noted that effluent  discharged at a GFL facility into a ditch network that fed into Abbotsford’s Lonzo Creek contained multiple chemicals, including ammonia, arsenic and iron, at levels that were well above water quality guidelines. In an email to The Local and The Narwhal, a ministry spokesperson said exceeding the guidelines doesn’t imply unacceptable risks exist. Rather, “the potential for adverse effects may be increased” and additional investigation may be needed.

As recently as April 3 of this year, another letter from the ministry stated the Abbotsford site was still out of compliance, and warned it could carry a fine of up to $1 million or up to six months in prison. (Such punishment is unlikely, though; contrary to that April letter, the ministry spokesperson’s email said the facility had been improved since 2022, and it appeared the issue had been resolved.)

In its 2021 report on hazardous spills, the office of the auditor general of Ontario said GFL was one of the “most frequent spillers” in that province. GFL is the only waste management company on the report’s list of 30 most frequent spillers, with 78 reported spills between 2016 and 2020. The auditor general’s office also pointed to GFL as an example of how Ontario’s Environment Ministry allows companies to continue operating and growing despite repeat offenses. Specifically in the township of North Stormont, southeast of Ottawa, the report stated, the ministry found GFL was contaminating surface water by repeatedly discharging treated leachate “at concentrations resulting in 10 per cent fish mortality.” The ministry also found GFL falsely reported test results showing zero per cent fish mortality, the report said. Despite violating its environmental approval, the auditor general’s office stated, the ministry granted new approvals to the company, including for the expansion of the very landfill where this issue was occurring.

Separately, GFL is listed on the federal environmental offenders registry, a public database of corporate convictions. The registry shows GFL pleaded guilty in 2018 to selling the chemical tetrachloroethylene to Ontario dry cleaners that lacked sufficient containment measures required by law. GFL was fined $300,000 for violating federal environmental regulations. 

Sampson County, North Carolina, is a predominantly Black, working-class community. A GFL site there is allegedly linked to the pollution of the community’s drinking wells, ground and surface water. Photo: Andrew Craft / The Local / The Narwhal

Environmental racism plays a part in where landfills are located

To those familiar with how waste management companies operate, these kinds of issues are not unusual in the sector. GFL’s competitors, including industry giant WM, formerly known as Waste Management, and Republic Services have also been tied to environmental problems, such as odour complaints, leachate issues and air-quality violations.  

“When you look through their track record, lawsuits, when you look through the complaints, when you look at how they treat their customers and all of this stuff, these companies are often very similar,” says Mary Finley-Brook, associate professor of geography, environment and sustainability at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Finley-Brook believes that over time, as more environmental problems, like methane emissions and PFAS pollution, burble to the surface, we’ll discover that the industry has been able to get away with a lot. “There is not a huge amount of transparency and accountability,” she says. Understaffed regulators rely on companies’ self-reporting, says Finley-Brook. Inspections are infrequent, and harms to the environment are really only ever detected after the fact, when damage is already done.

Finley-Brook added that environmental racism or environmental colonialism is a persistent issue. The reality is that our convenience-loving society uses highly toxic materials and simply disposes of them in places where land is cheapest, often in communities of colour, of low wealth or of sparse population. Landfills and other waste facilities are often pitched to these communities as an opportunity for them to generate income, mainly from tax revenues or sometimes from other fees, like tipping fees, which are charges for disposing waste in a landfill. But companies often don’t pay the full cost, leaving communities on the hook for the costs of fires or other environmental damage. “People and communities are not valued equally,” says Finley-Brook. When a city needs some place to dump its waste, the thinking goes, what’s the big deal if an outlying community of only a few thousand people faces some odour problems?

Canada just pledged to tackle environmental racism. What does that mean?

It’s not just a matter of where all that waste goes, but what it comprises. In Ontario, Peter Hargreave, a long-time waste policy advisor and president of the consultancy Policy Integrity Inc., says there are fairly rigid requirements for waste management in the residential sector, where companies need to report the material they collect and process. But, he says, fewer requirements exist when it comes to managing commercial, institutional and industrial materials, which make up roughly 60 to 70 per cent of all non-hazardous waste.  

The use of cheap materials and the cost involved in sorting them mean a lot of waste gets mixed in together and isn’t properly processed, recycled or otherwise diverted from landfills. 

“There are incentives to make the wrong decisions because of the policies and economics that are in place right now,” Hargreave said.“I don’t think it’s a GFL issue. I think it’s a waste sector issue.”

But as GFL continues to grow, buying up competitors and expanding its services across the continent, the sheer number of spills, fires and records of non-compliance is hard to ignore.  

Lakhan, the research scientist at York, suggests the company’s aggressive growth may play a role in its environmental track record.

“They’ve kind of been known as focusing on expansion, but not necessarily on quality, if that makes sense,” Lakhan says. “GFL is known as kind of — I don’t want to characterize it as a bad player, but they’re known for playing fast and loose with the rules.”

Kathie Farraway stands outside GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

On a brisk afternoon in March, a small group of protestors gathered on the shoulder of Highway 20, at the entrance of GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton. Passing motorists waved and honked as the protestors held up signs that read: “Gag For Life,” “Breathing Shouldn’t Hurt” and “Clean Air Is a Right, Not a Fight.”

Kathie Farraway has been living in this community, surrounded by open fields, for about 25 years. She didn’t even know she was living within hundreds of metres of a landfill until it suddenly started reeking last spring. Farraway says it got so bad, it made her vomit. Her neighbours complained of increased asthma attacks, sore throats and migraines.

The Stoney Creek landfill, which GFL acquired in 2022, is only meant to accept non-hazardous industrial waste, like excavation materials and by-products from steel production. It doesn’t take in garbage, according to its website, “so there are no garbage-related odours.” To be fair, that isn’t untrue; locals say the smell is more of a chemical-like mix of sulphur, gas and cat spray than the rotting-food odour of household garbage. 

In an online community meeting late this April, company officials told residents they still didn’t have a “cogent explanation” for what happened last spring, but said that the problem was being taken care of and the number of odour complaints it had received from the community had declined. Construction of a new cell for containing more waste was now underway, they said, and though they were confident they had set up proper measures, they said active landfills generate intermittent odours as part of normal operations. During the Victoria Day weekend, when temperatures climbed into the high 20s, some residents reported the stench had returned. 

In a subsequent online community meeting in May, company officials said the landfill was not the cause of the latest stink and emphasized there is no risk of exposure to toxic substances from the landfill.

Scenes from GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont. Photos: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

Resident Nelson Faria, however, says his main worry is what will happen years down the road; it’s only then that they’ll find out whether there are any long-term health consequences to whatever they’ve been breathing. “Forget about, you know, the value of your home,” says Faria, a father of three. “It’s your health that is the most concerning thing that we should be confronting.” 

For members of The Conservancy Initiative near GFL’s Arbor Hills landfill in Michigan, it’s not just the health of residents that’s a concern, but the health of the ecosystem, too. Through documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, the citizens’ group discovered that a stormwater pond at the landfill was being discharged into a spring-fed, cold-water trout stream called Johnson Creek. The documents revealed samples from that pond contained high levels of a type of synthetic, persistent chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. There are thousands of PFAS, which do not break down easily or quickly and are regarded as potentially hazardous to human health. According to Health Canada, they may affect the immune and nervous systems, the liver, kidney and thyroid, and the reproductive system. Despite the finding, no corrective action was taken, The Conservancy Initiative said.

Members of the group, including David Drinan and Leslie Evans, have since periodically collected samples of their own from Johnson Creek, and have had them tested, revealing that the contamination continues.

“It bothers me a lot, because … it’s a great, pristine, water source,” Drinan says. “And I guess I’ll be honest, it annoys me a little bit they’re a Canadian corporation.”

Besides the fact that the landfill is Canadian-owned, close to 25 per cent of the municipal and commercial waste it accepted in 2022 and about 14 per cent in 2023 was actually generated in Canada, according to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. (Michigan’s governor has recently proposed increasing tipping fees to discourage imported waste from being disposed of in the state.) Ontario landfills are expected to fill up within nine years. Even though major Canadian cities quit sending their waste across the border in 2010, industrial and commercial businesses in Ontario continue to do so, since it’s cheaper to dispose of it in the U.S. 

“They bring their trash over from Canada and they’re polluting our resources and nothing’s being done,” Drinan says.  

Meanwhile, in Paul Fisher’s neighbourhood in North Carolina, the community is eyeing legal action.

Maia Hutt, lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, has visited the area multiple times. Her client, the non-profit Environmental Justice Community Action Network, is advocating on behalf of the local community. 

The intensity of the odour from the Sampson County landfill, located less than a mile from Fisher’s house, depends on which way the wind blows. But it’s noticeable even on “good days,” Hutt says.

More insidious is the pollution of the community’s drinking wells, ground and surface water — including Bearskin Swamp, one of the streams where Fisher used to go hunting and fishing — that is alleged to be linked to the GFL site. In their notice of intent to sue GFL, Hutt and her colleagues pointed out that tests by North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality found high levels of PFAS in the groundwater at the landfill, in the surface waters around the landfill and in private well water that residents drink and use for bathing and cleaning. The letter alleged that the landfill has accepted PFAS-laden waste from the DuPont chemical company and its spinoff Chemours for years. (DuPont and Chemours are notorious in the state for releasing PFAS into the environment.) 

Though the landfill had been accepting waste from DuPont before GFL acquired it, the letter alleges: “GFL’s handling, storage, treatment and disposal of PFAS-laden sludge and other solid waste has contaminated Bearskin Swamp and residential drinking water wells with toxic PFAS pollution.”

Fisher says many of his neighbours are sick. Some have breathing problems, many rely on kidney dialysis and some have different types of cancer. The Environmental Justice Community Action Network has also heard anecdotal stories from the community about their concerns about chronic illnesses. It’s unknown whether their illnesses are tied to the landfill.

Fundamentally, Hutt says, her clients want clean water — to be able to drink from their wells, and to fish and enjoy Bearskin Swamp again.

“And so, what would be required in order to do that is a full-scale clean-up,” Hutt says. If the contamination were found to be linked to the landfill, she says, “GFL would need to take some accountability and fully investigate and remediate.” 

In a later email, Hutt said she and her team were keeping an eye on GFL’s potential buyout. Regardless of whether GFL is acquired, “we will continue to seek justice for our clients,” she said. Hutt added that if GFL was responsible for the contamination, they would not be able to avoid accountability through a buyout.

“Forget about, you know, the value of your home,” says a father of three who lives near GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont. “It’s your health that is the most concerning thing that we should be confronting.” Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

Despite non-compliance and environmental violations, Ontario lets GFL operate — and expand

GFL seems to be well aware that if pressed to clean up its operations, the associated costs could put a dent in its bottom line.

Among its “risks factors,” it stated in its 2022 annual report that it may be liable for damage or the release of pollutants. At times in the past, it said, having to respond to enforcement actions and certain litigation increased its costs and required it to “make significant capital investments” to upgrade its facilities. The company added if it failed to receive various approvals or permits, it could also face hurdles to establishing new or expanding existing facilities.

So far, though, consequences to the company appear to have been relatively mild. 

Despite its log of GFL’s non-compliance, B.C.’s Ministry of Environment said by email that it has not issued the company any administrative penalties, explaining “the company has taken those steps to comply with our requirements.”

In Ontario, an Environment Ministry spokesperson directed me to the government’s website for information on convictions for the past five years. I found only two records involving GFL there. One was a $343,000 fine in March 2023 for nine environmental violations, occurring from 2018 to 2020, at sites in Toronto and Dorchester, in Ontario’s Middlesex County. The other was a $130,000 fine this May for violations occurring between April 2020 and November 2021 at its Unwin Avenue waste transfer facility near Toronto’s Cherry Beach. These fines are nominal, compared with GFL’s revenues.

Since the auditor general’s report documenting GFL’s repeat offenses was published in 2021, the ministry said it has granted GFL 49 approvals allowing it to continue or expand its operations. A company’s past history of non-compliance doesn’t result in an automatic denial of its application for approval, the ministry said. Rather, an appointed ministry director makes “site-specific decisions” for each application after a detailed review. In response to questions specifically about the auditor general’s report that GFL had given false test results on fish mortality, the ministry said that the company had confirmed the error was the result of clerical oversight and had rectified the issue. GFL has now become so big, and the sector has become so consolidated, that to some extent we’re all at its mercy. Lakhan, the researcher and scientist at York University, pointed out GFL’s growth has been financed by debt, an issue that has raised questions in the past about the company’s financial position. GFL reported total long-term debt of $8.8 billion for the year ended December 2023. Until recently, S&P Global Ratings gave it a credit rating of BB-, or “junk” status. That was upgraded to B+ this April.

Since the start of 2020, GFL has lost $2.2 billion, The Globe reported, noting it has lately become vulnerable to buyout offers amid investors’ worries about its debt load.

All of this matters for our waste management system because GFL is Ontario’s largest service provider, Lakhan says. “So if they face any economic constraints that threatened the operations of their business, the direct impact is that our waste-handling system begins to fail.”

Landfills are big business because of how much waste we make

The last time Torontonians were forced to confront the sheer magnitude of the waste they produce was during the 2009 municipal workers’ strike, when mountains of garbage accumulated in temporary drop-off sites throughout the city, attracting pests and causing an eye-watering stink. It was, perhaps, the closest Toronto got to sampling what Paul Fisher and his neighbours in Sampson County, N.C., report living with on a daily basis. 

It’s tempting to turn to recycling as the solution to our waste problem. (GFL, too, has indicated it is looking to grow its recycling business.) But the reality is that recycling isn’t as sustainable or effective as most of us would like to think. A lot of newer packaging materials, such as lightweight plastics, can’t be sorted at conventional recycling facilities, Lakhan explained, which drives up the overall costs. While almost all Canadian households actively recycle, about 70 per cent of the solid waste we generate, including recyclable materials and food waste, end up in landfills anyway. And the savings in carbon emissions aren’t nearly as much as people would expect. 

When it comes to encouraging GFL and other waste management companies to cause less pollution, rigorous oversight may be one place to start. Speaking specifically about Ontario, NDP MPP Sandy Shaw, the province’s official opposition environment critic, says when the government shows it doesn’t care about the environment, it sets the tone for everyone else.

“Why would a company comply when the government just basically is turning aside and saying, ‘Well, we’re not really serious about you having to comply?’ ” Shaw says. “Why would a company go the extra mile [when] it costs them money?”

There’s a facet of our waste problem, though, that goes even deeper than the need for stricter regulations and stronger enforcement. It’s the fact we’re producing far too much of it. 

The landfills owned by GFL are built to be fed. Every garbage day, a caravan of vivid green GFL trucks make their way across the city, hauling away our empty take-out containers and chip bags, our broken mugs and dryer lint. Once out of our hands, it becomes someone else’s problem. And no matter how green the method of managing it, the environmental impact will be felt someplace else, in the air, the ground or in the water. 

GFL’s business is to take our waste and deal with the mess elsewhere. With a burst of green marketing, a company slogan or a sustainability pledge, it can convince us that we can keep creating mountains of garbage, yet still be green for life. And business, so far, shows no sign of slowing. 

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Ontario’s garbage is making headlines again as a small farming town tries to ward off a large construction company’s efforts to revive and expand a dormant landfill site. 

Residents of Dresden, a town of 2,401 people in southwestern Ontario, are staunchly opposed to a proposal that would reopen the landfill — right on the edge of town — and increase its size by dozens of football fields. The town’s city council has written of its opposition to the provincial environment minister, and its mayor told the London Free Press he has texted Premier Doug Ford. 

Dresden isn’t the only small town resisting dump expansion and this is not a new story. For decades now, as large Ontario cities ran out of spaces for waste in their own backyards, they sent garbage to small rural towns and Indigenous communities. Some is shipped across the border to Michigan or New York State. 

Here’s the problem: Ontario is rapidly running out of landfill space. According to Waste to Resource Ontario, an industry lobby group that tracks available capacity with a live countdown, the province’s landfills will be full in nine years, perhaps even sooner. 

The provincial government doesn’t have a strategy to address this. It hasn’t for many decades — and its inaction has only made things worse.

“Governments only ever propose Band-Aid solutions. They just kick the can down the road,” Calvin Lakhan, co-creator of the “Waste Wiki” project at York University’s faculty of environment and urban change, said. 

“But our fundamental problem is we generate too much waste,” Lakhan, who calls himself a “garbage doctor,” told The Narwhal. “We’re on the precipice of a transformational shift on how we manage waste and we are not ready for what it means to run out of landfill space.” 

Waste is something that nobody wants to think about, but it impacts our daily lives, and it has to go somewhere. Where it goes matters because improperly disposed waste can harm soil, water, air and health: biodegradable waste in landfills release significant amounts of methane, while chemicals can leach from all sorts of everyday products. 

If nobody wants our garbage, what do we do with it? Here’s what you need to know about Ontario’s waste problem. 

Ontario’s big cities have long sent their garbage to rural areas and Indigenous communities. Now, small towns and cities including Dresden, Collingwood, London and Ingersoll are pushing back against proposals to introduce or expand landfill sites. Photo: Frank Gunn / The Canadian Press

Who produces too much garbage in Ontario? 

Everyone — especially outside their homes.

The amount of waste generated in the province has been increasing over the last two decades and is among the highest levels of waste generated per person in the world. According to a 2023 Association of Municipalities of Ontario report, the province produced seven per cent more waste in 2022 than it did in 2017. 

At least two-thirds of it, maybe more, is created by industrial, commercial and institutional sources like restaurants, factories, hotels, offices, retail stores, schools, universities, hospitals and construction projects. 

“We’re generating more waste than we can manage,” Peter Hargreave, a long-time waste policy advisor, told The Narwhal. Hargreave worked in the Ontario government until 2010 and now runs a consultancy, Policy Integrity. “We’re reaching a point where decisions need to be made about potentially sourcing new capacity … and we desperately need ways to manage the problem in our own backyard.”

Does Ontario still send garbage to the United States? 

Yup. 

“The largest source of waste imports into Michigan continues to be from Canada at 14.88 per cent of all waste disposed in Michigan landfills,” a March report by the state’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy reads. While major Ontario municipalities stopped shipping waste stateside in 2010, industrial and commercial businesses in the province keep sending trash across the border.  

The reason for this is economics. Garbage disposal costs are so cheap in Michigan and New York that it’s worth it for Ontario’s companies and large institutions to pay for long-distance trucking. The province exports nearly a third of its trash across the border. 

“We really haven’t approved a lot of new landfill sites in Ontario because we’ve slowly become dependent on this option,” Hargreave said. “But if the border were to close, there really isn’t any place in Ontario that can take in all our garbage.” 

Grumblings have grown in U.S. states about being Canada’s trash chute. During her 2018 campaign, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer pledged to end all imports of out-of-state waste, with an explicit goal of “stopping Canadian trash,” by increasing disposal fees. Despite being re-elected in 2022, Whitmer hasn’t delivered. Her office did not respond to questions from The Narwhal. 

What has the Ontario government done to address the garbage problem?

Very little. 

In fact, some experts say politicians have worsened the problem by politicizing garbage instead of rooting their policy approach in science. 

Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals made waste management the responsibility of individual cities and towns. The province held regulatory control through the Ministry of Environment but municipalities were largely left to deal with waste on their own. This resulted in “a hodgepodge of pick-up and recycling and green bin regimes across the province with no meaningful guidance on what should be done,” Peter Bulionis, a retired mechanical engineer who worked in waste management for many years, told The Narwhal.

The Ford government made that worse. In 2020, the government passed Bill 197, or the Covid-19 Economic Recovery Act, omnibus legislation that added a new provision to the Environmental Assessment Act empowering municipalities to veto landfills. Experts told The Narwhal opening new landfills is now “impossible.” As seen in towns and cities like Dresden, Collingwood, London and Ingersoll, no one in Ontario wants to take anyone else’s trash. 

“I’d like to see us embark on an intelligent strategy for landfill in the province, which doesn’t exist right now,” Bulionis said. “It should be long-term, it should be sustainable. It’s just that politicians aren’t interested in this subject.” 

What could the government do to avoid Ontario’s looming landfill shortage? 

First, go back to basics. “ ‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ is not just a catchy title. It’s the order in which we should do things,” Lakhan said. But the government has failed to properly encourage or push people and businesses to cut waste. At most, it pushes confusing blue box recycling programs onto residents. It certainly hasn’t implemented strong regulations to reduce waste from the biggest producers: industry, commercial business and institutions. 

According to a 2021 auditor general report, almost 1.6 million establishments are not properly regulated. While individual Ontarians and families recycle about 50 per cent of their waste, the non-residential sector only diverted 15 per cent of its waste in 2018, the most recent year data was available. 

And “the Ministry [of Environment] had not taken concrete actions” to fix this, the auditor general reported, citing a long list of failures ranging from weak reporting and audits to falling far behind its own targets. Industries, institutions and businesses are not required to separate organic waste to be composted rather than going to landfill. The same report found Ontario introduced a strategy to reduce organic waste by 2024 then did little to put it in motion, before pausing it to allow businesses to recover from the pandemic.

Non-residential establishments also don’t have to separate recyclables. As well, Ontario’s list of materials that this sector must recycle is woefully behind the times: it has not been updated in over 25 years and excludes now-common materials, such as coffee cups, compostable packaging and most plastics.

“Our systems are not designed for the material we most throw away. It physically cannot recycle these materials. No matter how much money you throw at it, we just can’t,” Lakhan said. He thinks the government’s focus should be disincentivizing companies to overuse unrecyclable packaging and limiting what people can throw away. 

“We don’t have the tools to address the problem and policymakers are grossly underprepared for this.”

Both of Ontario’s garbage incinerators, including this one in Durham Region, are at capacity and looking to expand. Photo: JHVEPhoto / Shutterstock

Will more landfill space solve the problem? 

Maybe, but only for a little while. 

According to Waste to Resource Ontario, the province has approved seven landfill expansions since 2016. But as the population increases and the Ford government seeks to build more homes, waste will also increase. Landfill space will continue to be scarce. And many private incinerators and dumps are nearing their annual limits already.

As a result, Ontario’s two waste incinerators — one in Courtice and the other in Brampton — are looking to increase capacity. The Brampton proposal is especially notable as it seeks to grow to process more than four times its current waste levels. 

“In a modern economy, incinerators are just a mechanism for society to be lazy and burn it all away,” Lakhan said. “We really need to be thinking about waste reduction instead of looking for a get-out-of-jail-free card.” 

Meanwhile, a new or even expanded landfill could take up to 10 years to set up. By then, we’ll already be out of time. That’s why experts are focused on sustainable solutions: reducing waste rather than finding ways to bury or destroy it. 

“It is going to become a panic situation,” Bulionis said. “We’re generating garbage at a horrendous rate and it’s not going away. Recycling and repurposing isn’t going to do it. If we don’t reduce, we’re going to be constipated and choking on our garbage. It is horrible. It’s stupid. And four years from now, if Doug Ford is still premier he’ll say get it out of my sight and dictate a location.”“What’ll happen will be a political decision. It will not be based on science.” 

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In 2018, Ontario unveiled an ambitious plan to drastically reduce food waste by 2025. The province’s framework was full of smart ideas, from rescuing surplus food to enhancing waste data collection. But two months after the plan was introduced, the Liberals were ousted and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives took power. Efforts stalled. 

Now, nearly six years later, experts say the provincial government has not done enough to achieve its own targets. “They have done very little since and, if anything, appear to be backtracking,” Peter Hargreave, president of the environment consultancy Policy Integrity, said.

Over 60 per cent of the province’s food waste still ends up in landfills. This growing pile of decomposing food has serious environmental consequences: it contributes to six per cent of Ontario’s methane emissions, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years. 

But efforts in Ontario to stop food from ending up in landfills are patchy at best. Cities that can afford the multimillion-dollar start-up costs of green bin programs are leading the way, while businesses lag behind. Meanwhile, the amount of waste being thrown out is steadily rising alongside record levels of population growth, jumping six per cent between 2017 and 2022.

During its five-year reign, efforts by the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to reduce food waste have amounted to a single $5-million donation toward food-rescue organizations during the pandemic, according to the province’s own progress report. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Experts say it’s too late for the province to achieve the targets set out in 2018. But food waste can be significantly — and quickly — reduced if governments, businesses and people get on board. Here’s how to get there. 

Where green bin programs exist, they’ve been overwhelmingly successful. Ottawa launched its green bin program in 2010. Photo: Green Bin Ottawa / Flickr

1. Green bin programs are working. Invest more in them.

Ontario towns and cities diverted 1.2 million tonnes of organic waste from landfills in 2021, nearly triple the amount diverted in 2002. Most organic waste is food, but it can also include other biodegradable products like yard waste, paper towels or unfinished wood. Processing can transform it into renewable energy, compost or fertilizer.

Where green bin programs exist, they’ve been overwhelmingly successful. The Regional Municipality of York — which represents 1.2 million people in nine municipalities — diverts 97 per cent of its organic waste, processing almost 10 per cent of the province’s total diverted organic waste in 2021. 

The problem is green bin programs are only feasible when costs are spread out over a large tax base. That leaves small municipalities at a disadvantage. “Cost is a huge deal,” Huda Oda, the waste, recycling and climate change manager at the Municipality of Chatham-Kent, said. Though her jurisdiction spans an area four times the size of the city of Toronto, it holds only 3.6 per cent of the comparable tax base. 

In the city of London, $15 million has been invested into launching a green bin program in 2024, after years of delays. “We hoped to implement it sooner but the budget wasn’t available,” Jay Stanford, director of environment, fleet and solid waste at the city, said. Once up and running, it will set the city back $4 million a year.

Green bins work. But not all municipalities can afford to run programs as expenses soar and budgets tighten. Ontario hasn’t provided funding to help, either. Meanwhile, Quebec committed to investing $1.2 billion into organic waste reduction by 2030, with the provincial government also helping establish local compost collection services and processing facilities.

2. Stop letting businesses and organizations off the hook. 

Emily Alfred, a waste campaigner for the Toronto Environmental Alliance, thinks food waste is too often described as a consumer-driven problem. It’s an attitude that lets businesses — which contribute to almost 45 per cent of Ontario’s organic waste — avoid accountability, she says. Culprits include food processors, retail stores, schools, hospitals, restaurants and hotels.

Business sends 50 per cent more food waste to landfills than consumers but is subject to virtually no oversight when it comes to what’s thrown out and where it goes. “The sector is completely unregulated,” Alfred said. 

In 2018, the province’s guideline set out food waste reduction targets of 50 or 70 per cent for businesses, depending on their size and subsector. But a 2023 report by Ontario’s auditor general found the province has not yet informed businesses about the targets, or offered guidance on how to measure and track food waste.

The lack of direction from the government makes compliance difficult and enforcement impossible. Of the establishments that try to divert food waste to composting facilities, the auditor found 22 per cent of it still ends up in a landfill anyway. 

In 2023, Ontario implemented a new digital system to track the journey of recyclables — including glass, plastics and paper — from the point of collection to processing. The new protocols also include standardized audits. That way, the province can hold businesses accountable for the waste they generate. It’s a model that could be rolled out for organic waste.

Hargreave says businesses represent the biggest opportunity under the province’s plan. Right now, it’s more convenient and cheaper to throw out food — after all, these establishments manage their own waste, at their own cost, through private vendors. “Everything is pointing toward making a decision to send waste to landfill,” he said.

The City of Hamilton introduced building codes in 2021 that require new multi-unit buildings to have separate waste chutes for garbage, recycling and organics. Photo: Carlos Osorio / The Narwhal

3. Reduce food waste contamination in multi-unit dwellings

Multi-unit residential buildings present a similar opportunity to reduce food waste, Alfred said. These dwellings represent more than 27 per cent of Ontario households and send much more food to landfills than detached homes: a 2020 report from the University of Ottawa, for example, found that only 17 per cent of food waste in multi-unit residential buildings is kept out of landfill, compared to 44 per cent of waste from single-family homes. 

The failure to simplify organics collection in these buildings is part of the reason why southern Ontario residents still throw out an average of 43 kilograms of food every year, despite many having access to green bins.

There is no standard from the province for food waste sorting and collection in multi-unit residences. Some buildings offer green bins, often tucked away in basements or parking lots. Others don’t. Confusing waste-sorting systems can exacerbate contamination rates: if one person puts the wrong thing in a green bin, all the contents get sent to a landfill.

To combat this, the City of Hamilton introduced building codes in 2021 that require new multi-unit buildings to have separate waste chutes for garbage, recycling and organics. “That’s one of the big things we’re advocating for,” Alfred said. Simplifying waste separation increases participation, according to recent research from the University of British Columbia.

4. Penalize avoidable food waste

Most people agree less wasted food makes everyone better off, but incentives are needed to actually adjust behaviour, according to Tammara Soma, an assistant professor at the school of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University.

Soma pointed to France, which brought in fines for grocers that throw out edible food — tied to a percentage of revenue — under a 2016 food waste ban. As of 2019, more than 2,700 supermarkets were diverting 46,000 tonnes of food a year away from landfills and to places like food banks. Nationally, food waste in France has decreased by 10 per cent since the ban.

Closer to home, Vancouver banned food waste from landfills in 2015 by applying a 50 per cent surcharge to waste with excessive food scraps. The region now has one of the highest waste diversion rates in the country. 

In 2018, Ontario announced a similar ban would be put in place by 2022. But nothing came of that promise. In September 2023, the auditor general found the province has not moved forward with its commitment to phase out organic waste from landfills, citing the impacts of the pandemic. 

Financial penalties on disposal can raise revenue for food waste-related projects, according to Hargreave. In Quebec, earnings from a landfill charge go towards improving organics collection and processing. The fee is paid by weight, so small businesses only face a slight increase in their yearly costs.  

France, Vancouver and Quebec all impose financial penalties for improper disposal of food waste by people or businesses. Photo: Kevin Van Paassen / The Globe and Mail

5. Educate the population. No, really do it this time. 

Putting the onus on consumers isn’t where this conversation should end. But it can’t be ignored that more than half of organic waste in Ontario still comes from households. It’s tempting to believe that if people knew the true costs of food waste, they’d throw out less. But that’s not always the case. Over decades, awareness campaigns have had varying degrees of success. 

In the United Kingdom, a public awareness campaign called Love Food Hate Waste has been largely credited for driving an 18-per-cent reduction in household food waste between 2007 and 2018. The campaign was especially effective at a time of falling wages and rising food prices following the global financial crisis, focusing on new habits that could limit food waste and save money.  

Those efforts were complicated from 2013 to 2015, when wages started to outpace inflation. In those three years, food waste jumped 4.4 per cent. 

But that’s no reason to stop raising the alarm. Julie Hordowick, program manager for waste strategy in York Region, said people need to be reminded they are part of the solution. Education efforts have been central to York’s waste management strategy for over a decade, but residents still underestimate how much food they toss out. “It’s like any behavioural change,” she said. “It takes a long time and consistent messaging.”​

Michael von Massow, a professor of food, agricultural and resource economics at the University of Guelph, said helping people understand their consumption habits is key to reducing food waste. 

For example, Ontario Hydro, one of the province’s largest energy providers, compares residents’ energy usage over several months, also showing how they measure up to their neighbours. A 2009 study found these small changes to pricing breakdowns had a demonstrable conservation effect for residential users. 

The solution to Ontario’s food waste problem is not one, but a series of solutions that build incrementally on each other, he said. Food waste is often a personal dilemma that requires personalized solutions. “People don’t think about what they throw out,” von Massow said. But, when people understand their actions, “they’re more likely to do something about it.” 

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Invisible to the naked eye, undetectable by smell and 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for its short-term warming impact on the climate, methane is explosive, toxic and can make helicopters fall out of the sky. It’s like something out of a superhero movie — or a bad dream.

About half of Canada’s reported methane emissions are produced by the oil and gas industry, both from regular operations and leaks. But much of the climate damage caused by the sector’s methane pollution goes undetected due to weak regulations.

As the country’s westernmost province prepares for a boom in the gas sector, with LNG Canada and the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline set to start operations mid-decade, B.C. is planning to increase oversight.

During the international climate conference in Egypt last November, Canada proposed a new regulatory framework on methane aimed at driving “as many individual sources as possible toward zero emissions” and expanding its scope to eliminate any exemptions the sector was benefitting from.

Ari Pottens, Canadian campaign manager with the U.S.-based Environmental Defense Fund, said the federal framework is promising and sets a benchmark for B.C. regulations. The province will have to follow the federal regulations or sign what’s called an equivalency agreement with the federal government, he explained. The closer the respective regulations are to each other, the easier they are to enforce.

“We think that any provincial regs should match the ambition found in this proposed framework,” he said in an interview. “It’s close to some of the best practices that we’ve seen in the U.S.”

The federal proposal includes increasing inspections of facilities, including wells that aren’t in operation, and requiring all operators to have a plan for how they’re going to deal with fugitive emissions, or leaks.

In 2021, B.C. committed to cut methane emissions by 75 per cent below 2014 levels by 2030 and nearly eliminate them by 2035. To tackle the challenge, the B.C. Energy Regulator (formerly known as the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission) is currently asking for feedback to inform the process. 

“Right now, in B.C. you only have to do a comprehensive inspection of facilities three times a year, but the new federal regulations are much more stringent,” Pottens said. “One of the things that would make sense would be to increase the level of [B.C.’s] inspection requirements, so that it more closely mirrors what the federal government has proposed.”

What you don’t know won’t kill you — or will it?

One of the biggest challenges facing the sector is the “rapid detection and elimination of fugitive emissions,” the B.C. Energy Regulator told The Narwhal.

Remember, methane is invisible. And the majority of gas extraction and transport in B.C. takes place in the province’s northeast, a sparsely populated and remote region.  

In 2021, Matthew Johnson and David Tyner, researchers with the Energy and Emissions Research Lab at Carleton University in Ottawa, found that B.C. oil and gas facilities were emitting up to 2.2 times more methane than federal estimates.

“Over the time since we’ve started to deal with methane, our ability to detect and measure it has vastly improved,” Tom Green, senior climate policy advisor with the David Suzuki Foundation, told The Narwhal in an interview. But much of the province’s accounting of methane emissions still relies on assumptions, rather than actual measurement and Green said implementing “large scale independent monitoring” would ensure B.C. has an accurate picture of the problem.

Methane regularly leaks from oil and gas equipment, unseen and unrecorded. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Pottens said industry compliance is a major issue. 

A 2022 report by St. Francis University researchers on behalf of the Methane Emissions Research Collaborative noted only 60 per cent of operators completed leak detection and repair surveys in 2020. And when operators did complete the surveys and found problems, many took longer than 30 days to plug the holes.

“If you have a leak, 40 per cent of the time it’s not being repaired in the correct way or in a timely manner,” Pottens said. “Tightening up the regulations to try to strengthen compliance when there needs to be a repair, when a leak is found, seems like a no-brainer.”

Satellite technology could be a game-changer. The Carleton study showed there was a big gap between detection methods on the ground and flyover surveys. But regular aerial surveys in northeast B.C. are expensive and impractical. Satellites not only drop a pin on major industrial sources of fugitive emissions, they can also determine the rate of the leak, prioritizing the biggest polluters and keeping emissions accounting accurate. 

“In order to understand and quantify B.C.’s industrial emissions, B.C. is using a range of tools, including aerial detection, land-based detection and surveys and satellites,” the regulator’s spokesperson said. “The province, through the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, has a contract in place to detect methane emissions by satellite at oil and gas facilities, coal mines and landfills.”

The ministry confirmed its contract is with Montreal-based GHGSat, which already has six methane-detecting satellites orbiting the planet. MethaneSat, a collaboration between the Environmental Defense Fund and the New Zealand Space Agency, aims to launch its first later this year.

“British Columbia continues to lead the country in methane emissions reduction and we are on track to exceed the targets we set in 2018 to reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2025,” Josie Osborne, Minister of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation, told The Narwhal in an emailed statement. Osborne’s ministry said the province is working with experts, industry, non-profits and environmental groups to make sure emissions aren’t being missed in the accounting. 

In May 2022, GHGSat sent three methane-detecting satellites into Earth’s orbit. The Montreal-based company has a contract with the B.C. government to provide data on emissions from oil and gas facilities, coal mines and landfills. Photo: Space X / Flickr

‘A classic boom and bust’

Regulations alone may not be enough to catch and curb emissions as more projects come online. The province has delayed a decision about whether it will green-light Cedar LNG, a majority Haisla-owned project proposed for Kitimat, B.C. The government was supposed to make a decision by the end of 2022 but has said it is taking extra time to “thoroughly review” the project. B.C. already gave the thumbs up to Woodfibre LNG in Squamish, B.C. in 2015. The province also approved three other gas pipelines in the north: Prince Rupert Gas Transmission, owned by TC Energy, the same company behind Coastal GasLink, and two Enbridge projects, Westcoast Connector and Pacific Trails.

“The province really needs to be doing everything as fast as possible to reduce methane emissions, while also abandoning its plans to expand fracking and gas transportation that leads to these methane emissions,” Peter McCartney, climate campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, said in an interview.

The B.C. regulator said regulatory changes will apply to liquefaction facilities, including LNG Canada, pipelines and all upstream facilities. 

But McCartney worries the math won’t add up as new wells are drilled and projects come online. 

“There’s sort of a twofold piece on it,” he said. “Yes, patch the holes, fix the pumps and incomplete combustion at flare stacks — all these various ways that they’re looking at reducing methane emissions. But if they’re only pulling more of this stuff out of the ground, more of it is going to end up in the atmosphere all along the supply chain.”

The B.C. government approved four gas pipelines for northern B.C., all of which would transport gas from shale formations in the northeast to liquefaction facilities on the Pacific coast. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

Public appetite for new LNG projects is declining, according to a recent Clean Energy Canada survey. The study, conducted in February, found a majority of British Columbians would rather see the provincial government direct its investments and support to clean energy projects.

Green said that new and stricter regulations are important and B.C. should be doing everything it can to get emissions down as quickly as possible but the province also needs to think longer term and pivot towards clean energy opportunities in partnership with Indigenous nations. 

“We’re going through a classic boom and bust,” he said. “I get that people are benefiting from all the jobs that are up in the northeast of the province and in Kitimat, building LNG Canada — those are real well-paying jobs. But we’ve got to also think of the long run and start that transition, or start a rational build-out of what the economy of the future is.” 

Cutting methane emissions is inexpensive and has big benefits for climate 

Domestic responsibility for methane is part of an international effort. According to the Global Methane Assessment, a 2021 report published by Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the United Nations Environment Programme, cutting global emissions by 45 per cent would save the planet from around 0.3 C of warming by the 2040s and annually prevent “255,000 premature deaths, 775,000 asthma-related hospital visits, 73 billion hours of lost labour from extreme heat and 26 million tonnes of crop losses globally.”

Green calls methane a “low-hanging fruit” partly because industry has a baked-in incentive to prevent leaks.

“By capturing that methane and putting it in the pipe, they do get to sell it,” he explained, referring to International Energy Agency analysis that shows 40 per cent of emissions can be cut using existing technologies at no net cost to companies. 

Green added there are additional economic benefits associated with reducing the frequency of costly climate disasters. “It’s a moral case as well,” he said. “Companies shouldn’t be using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for a climate accelerant.”

According to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, “methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming.” 

“There is just no excuse,” Birol said in a February press release. “The Nord Stream pipeline explosion last year released a huge amount of methane into the atmosphere. But normal oil and gas operations around the world release the same amount of methane as the Nord Stream explosion every single day.”

“Fossil fuel producers need to step up and policy makers need to step in — and both must do so quickly.”

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (left), said there is no excuse for fossil fuel companies to continue allowing methane emissions to enter the atmosphere. Photo: Dean Calma / IAEA / Flickr

B.C. appears to be getting a head start by launching its regulatory review. The federal government has not yet published new standards, but the province is gathering technical feedback to make sure it’s ready to identify all of the sources of emissions and ensure they are covered by regulatory changes. The provincial regulator said on top of existing technologies, new ones are under development.  

“Some examples include vapour recovery units, enclosed combustors, electrification, instrument air systems and continuous methane emissions monitors,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. Anything that gets the job done is on the table. For example, the spokesperson said the regulator could establish “an emission threshold” or it could require operators to use things like optical gas imaging cameras in monitoring.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers didn’t directly answer whether it was participating in the provincial review but said it supports a “flexible, results-oriented and streamlined approach to reducing emissions.”

“We look forward to working with the British Columbia Energy Regulator to identify opportunities to further reduce industry’s methane emissions while creating an investment environment that supports the continued development of Canada’s oil and natural gas resources,” Jay Averill, a spokesperson with the industry group, wrote in an email to The Narwhal.

Once it has received submissions, the regulator will produce a plan for more public involvement. A spokesperson with the provincial agency told The Narwhal engagement is focused on “technical details” and anticipates the process will continue throughout 2023.

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For more than a decade, successive B.C. governments have thrown their hats behind an industry hellbent on getting gas out of the ground and across the Pacific to Asian markets.  

LNG Canada, a liquefaction and export facility under construction in Kitimat, is poised to be the first project to do so. As the facility inches closer towards a goal of firing up operations in 2025, its partner companies are eyeing investment for an approved expansion, which would double the amount of gas processed at the plant. 

The plan is to power that second phase by burning gas — at least at first. The export project is approved to use its own gas to run massive compressors that cool the fossil fuel to -162 C, reducing its volume for shipping. The moment it flips the switch to start operations of its first phase, running at half its potential capacity, it will become B.C.’s single largest emitter of carbon pollution. 

Phase two, which could come online as early as 2030, would send B.C. emissions skyrocketing. Running at full capacity, the operation would produce around 13 megatonnes of emissions annually, more than 20 per cent of B.C.’s total emissions in 2020. 

“We are in a climate emergency. We cannot afford to expand fossil fuel infrastructure and miss key emissions targets,” Sonia Furstenau, leader of the B.C. Greens, said in a statement. “LNG phase one already made it practically impossible to meet our CleanBC goals. LNG phase two makes it a pipe dream.”

CleanBC is the province’s plan to lower emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050.

As LNG Canada tries to entice investors, its project partners are looking into ways to rely more on electricity instead of gas. 

Teresa Waddington, vice president of corporate relations with LNG Canada, told The Narwhal it has a team dedicated to exploring options, which could include redesigning expansion plans to eventually replace the gas turbines with electric motors.

While electrification would reduce emissions from the LNG export facility, it wouldn’t eliminate them. And powering the project would divert energy away from other sectors, Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, explained in an interview.

“If they were going to try to reduce their emissions using electricity, and they did that upstream, along the pipeline and at the plant, they would need about two Site Cs worth of electricity,” Smith said, noting demand for hydro is only going to increase as B.C. shifts to reduce carbon pollution in line with its climate plan. 

“We’re going to have to make choices,” she said. “We’ve also heard from the B.C. government that new industry needs to fit within the CleanBC plan. The B.C. government needs to be clear: What does it mean by those words?”

‘Time for a reset’: phase 2 at odds with climate science

When B.C. gave LNG Canada a green light in 2015, its approval was for both phases — with or without electrification. The province’s climate plan was unveiled three years later, setting ambitious targets. The current goal is to reduce emissions to 40 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030, scaling up to 80 per cent by 2050. It also set a sectoral target of 33 to 38 per cent reductions by 2030. All of these goals are relevant to LNG Canada, which has an estimated lifespan of 40 years.   

B.C.’s Ministry of Environmental and Climate Change Strategy confirmed future LNG projects have to align with B.C.’s climate commitments — but stopped short of explaining how phase two fits into that equation. 

“At this time, LNG Canada’s phase two project has not reached a final investment decision,” a ministry spokesperson wrote in an email. “Construction on phase one of the project is ongoing and is not expected to be complete until 2025.”

As B.C.’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, George Heyman is responsible for reconciling provincial climate targets with future LNG projects, including the proposed expansion of LNG Canada. Photo: Province of British Columbia / Flickr

Tom Green, senior climate policy advisor with the David Suzuki Foundation, said B.C. needs to rethink its position on the project.

“It’s time for a reset,” he told The Narwhal. “Climate science is telling us that each additional tonne of carbon in the atmosphere is a tonne we can very ill afford.” 

Green said it’s disappointing to hear the original plans to power the second phase with gas are going ahead, despite CleanBC targets.

“Meanwhile, we have had the experience of how bad climate change is affecting British Columbians,” he said, noting the 2021 heat dome, in which 619 people died. “If you look at the social cost of carbon … we’re impoverishing ourselves with each tonne of LNG that we export.”

Smith said the province’s climate targets only accounted for LNG Canada’s initial operations and Woodfibre LNG, another proposed export facility. 

It’s unclear why B.C. didn’t factor the expansion into its climate strategy, but Green suggests it might be because there’s no way to reconcile the vast increase in emissions with provincial reductions goals.

“British Columbia hasn’t revised its legislative targets, probably in part because it knows it’s in such a pickle because of its commitment to the LNG industry,” he said.

LNG Canada executives say government support needed for electrification  

Jason Klein, LNG Canada’s CEO, said the company is taking a phased approach to using electricity because transmission lines haven’t been built.

“We can’t do an immediate and wholesale electrification of the plant and the pipeline,” he told Reuters earlier this month. “If the power was there today it would be a pretty straightforward decision.”

Waddington said any changes to the current plan are contingent on government support. Acknowledging federal and provincial emissions reduction targets, she noted electrification would need both governments to be on board to “help facilitate the power and transmission necessary to make it a viable option.”

“The overall competitiveness of our project does not rest on emissions reductions alone.”

Teresa Waddington, LNG Canada

Green worries governments will be coerced into further subsidizing the project, which has already received billions in financial support through a suite of tax breaks and incentives.    

“I think the big risk here is that B.C. and Canada are going to continue with public financing and concessions, not insisting that LNG Canada phase two or future projects use electric drive and be the lowest possible emissions,” he said. “Instead, they’re going to allow them to undermine our climate targets and then we’re going to end up with stranded assets and worsen the climate emergency. None of it makes much sense.”

In 2018, the B.C. government set out a fiscal framework that paved the way for major fossil fuel companies to invest in the LNG Canada project. Photo: Province of British Columbia / Flickr

The connection between Site C and LNG Canada

It appears the province is already putting the wheels in motion to supply more power to the project. 

On Jan. 19, BC Hydro CEO Chris O’Riley said the Crown corporation is starting the process to increase transmission capacity to Terrace, B.C., less than an hour north of Kitimat.

“This is a really important infrastructure initiative for us,” he told attendees at the B.C. Natural Resources Forum in Prince George. O’Riley didn’t specifically name LNG Canada in the announcement, but he noted industrial demand for hydro is increasing.

“While we currently have enough transmission capacity to serve the existing and committed load in the north coast, and we’ve got room to spare, we do have an unprecedented queue of potential customers that have applied for service and these are mines and LNG projects, port facilities and the like.”

B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy confirmed in an email that LNG Canada is one of those potential customers.

“BC Hydro is aware of the proponent’s request for a connection to the electricity grid to run operations for the proposed second phase of the project,” a ministry spokesperson wrote. “BC Hydro is assessing multiple scenarios for economic growth in northern B.C.”

The Site C dam, under construction in B.C.’s Peace region, is the most expensive dam in Canadian history. Critics draw a direct connection between the project and the heavily subsidized LNG industry. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Smith said the financial burden shouldn’t be on taxpayers, noting fossil fuel companies have deep enough pockets to pay for the hydro infrastructure.  

“They’re not a sector that needs a subsidy,” she said. “They’re a sector that’s making significant profits right now and they should be investing their profits into carbon reduction strategies.”

Like most oil and gas companies operating in Canada, Shell, LNG Canada’s biggest shareholder, earned record profits in 2022, posting a $9.49 billion profit in its third quarter, more than double what it took in the year before.

Global markets, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, set the stage for all this profit and are fuelling a renewed push to get gas out of the ground and to buyers overseas.

Waddington said the LNG Canada project “represents a tremendous opportunity for our country to contribute a reliable supply of low-carbon LNG to the world at a seminal moment for global energy security.” 

Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was in Ottawa for talks about trade and the current energy crisis. According to reporting by The Globe and Mail, Kishida’s cabinet secretary for public affairs said LNG Canada will replace the gas Japan imports from Russia. Japanese company Mitsubishi, an automotive manufacturer that also controls more than half of that country’s gas imports, has a 15 per cent stake in LNG Canada.

But whether countries like Japan will need B.C. gas by the time the second phase comes online is up for debate. According to the International Energy Agency’s latest report, demand for natural gas is expected to taper over the coming decade as countries implement more aggressive climate strategies.

What the International Energy Agency’s path to net-zero means for Canada’s oil and gas industry

‘We need to choose’

Even if LNG Canada can switch to electric motors to power its phase two compressors, that doesn’t mean the project won’t contribute to the climate crisis. 

After the gas is shipped overseas, it has to be warmed up, put back into pipelines, shipped to buyers and burned to produce energy. And in B.C., emissions produced during liquefaction only account for some of the greenhouse gases that end up in the atmosphere. To get the gas from sources in the northeast, it first has to be fracked out of shale deposits and transported through the contentious Coastal GasLink pipeline. 

“The fossil fuels get burned at the destination and there’s methane emissions all along the chain,” Green said.

The contentious Coastal GasLink pipeline will span 670 kilometres and cross more than 700 watercourses, connecting gas sources in the northeast to the LNG Canada liquefaction and export facility in Kitimat. Photo: Gidimt’en Checkpoint

Methane has a warming potential of around 85 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said it’s imperative to cut methane emissions by a third before 2030 to keep global warming from reaching catastrophic levels.  

“It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 C,” Jim Skea, co-chair of the panel, said last year. “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”

B.C.’s environment ministry said in a statement to The Narwhal it has set aggressive targets to address methane emissions. 

“The CleanBC Roadmap includes a range of actions to ensure the oil and gas sector meets its sectoral emissions target, including mandating a 75 per cent reduction in methane emissions from the sector by 2030, and nearly eliminating it by 2035, as well as significant supports for electrification of the sector.”

Research shows getting tough on methane could reduce warming by 0.3 C

Supplying electricity to meet the energy-intensive demands of gas liquefaction comes with a slew of environmental implications.

For example, hydroelectric reservoirs also emit methane. And as vast areas are flooded to create those reservoirs, such as those slated to be submerged by Site C, existing natural carbon storage locked in forests and wetlands is lost.  

BC Hydro maintains it can meet the demands of LNG Canada.

“LNG Canada’s power needs can be met with BC Hydro’s existing electricity generation, and this can be done with or without Site C,” Mora Scott, spokesperson with the Crown corporation, told The Narwhal. 

Smith said she suspects that doesn’t take into account the projected demands of an increasingly electrified society, nor the full scope of the project. 

“We need to choose what we want that electricity to go to and I would suggest that we want to be powering industries that are going to be growing,” she said. “All evidence is that the LNG sector is one that will be declining in 2040 and 2050, whereas things like mining for metals and minerals for battery production, these are industries that will be growing.”

Green said investing in the fossil fuel industry is increasingly a losing proposition.

“Every barrel of oil you extract, every 1,000 cubic meters of gas you extract, once it’s burned, you’ve got to go and do it again,” he said. “When you put up a solar farm or a wind farm and set up the grid and put in place the storage, that’s an asset that keeps generating energy.”

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When the Alberta government announced a sweeping suspension of environmental rules to almost all companies in the province’s oil and gas industry in the spring of 2020, it claimed it would continue “all” critical monitoring activities needed to protect public health, the environment and to prepare for emergencies.

But a recent report from a provincial watchdog indicates those claims were inaccurate. The report, released by the Alberta Energy Regulator, reveals how the temporary rule suspensions, meant to offer companies coronavirus relief, wound up disrupting the province’s fight against climate change.

The regulator posted the report online in early 2022, but it has not provided any in-depth commentary or analysis about the full extent of any environmental damage caused by the temporary rule changes. The Alberta government implemented these changes after lobbying from the oil and gas industry.

The year 2020 was the first time the regulator required that companies report data to the provincial information portal outlining how they survey their equipment for methane leaks, and which repairs they made.

“This year was also unique, as there were temporary requirement relaxations because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the regulator wrote in its report.

8 things you need to know as Alberta suspends even more environmental monitoring of oil and gas industry

These changes led to “data gaps” in the regulator’s tracking of how much methane actually escaped from leaky equipment, the report said. As a result, the amount of methane leaking from oil and gas operations was “under-reported in 2020,” the regulator said.

The assessment contrasts with a May 2020 statement released by the office of then-Alberta environment minister Jason Nixon, which said the rule changes were meant to strike a balance between ensuring public safety and the safety of workers.

“In all cases, monitoring activities required to assure immediate public health protection of the environment, and emergency response and preparedness will continue,” Nixon’s office told Global News at the time.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a powerful pollutant that, like black carbon and refrigerants, is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a short period.

Provincial officials later restored most of its rules for industry by the summer of 2020, however, Alberta lost information tracking methane pollution in the interim. Without this information, the government could not ensure oil and gas companies were meeting targets to reduce pollution that is contributing to the climate crisis.

There have been questions & concerns about the temporary suspensions of some low-risk monitoring. The temporary suspensions will continue to remain in place as we work with the government to understand their next steps. Read our latest update https://t.co/8M8bgCqdHW#ABenergy pic.twitter.com/JLtIVjuZkd

— Alberta Energy Regulator (@AER_news) June 16, 2020

Restrictions due to COVID-19 were also the reason the regulator experienced “significant delays” in its inspection regime for oil and gas sites, it said in the report.

The regulator’s statements provide a fresh example of how lobbying from the oil and gas industry is threatening Canada’s efforts to slash greenhouse gas pollution.

How oil lobbyists persuaded Alberta to weaken rules for dirty facilities

The provincial methane pollution regulations — adopted by Alberta in 2018 — were also weakened in response to lobbying by oil giant, Canadian Natural Resources Limited. As revealed in a recent investigation by The Narwhal, the company persuaded then-energy minister Marg McCuaig-Boyd in former premier Rachel Notley’s NDP government to intervene in a process led by the provincial regulator that was pushing for tougher and more enforceable regulations to target more of Alberta’s dirtiest facilities.

The regulator’s latest report on industry performance also reveals that it has found dozens of violations of the methane pollution rules by a range of companies.

Kenney’s office did not immediately respond to a request from The Narwhal for comment. Alberta Environment and Parks has also not responded to questions from The Narwhal about the provincial climate rules.

The regulator suspended some requirements to monitor leaks from aging or failing equipment with proper technology, instead allowing less advanced equipment. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Behind closed doors with industry

The 2020 rule changes were adopted following discussions behind closed doors with industry executives, without any public consultation, according to a report by Global News. A number of the industry requests were similar to those pursued by lobbyists prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The regulator later restored the rules but representatives from Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta criticized the government for making decisions with industry in private and failing to consult First Nations, whose rights and ways of life would be affected by those policies.

Oil and gas producers are breaking Alberta’s methane rules

The opposition Alberta NDP had also demanded that the government restore the rules, and later questioned whether some relief requested was actually related to public health measures.

The regulator insisted, at the time, that its rule changes would allow industry to be able to follow public health orders without stepping out of line with its requirements.

In one case, the regulator suspended requirements for companies to monitor methane leaks from aging or failing equipment. These kinds of leaks represented about an eighth of all emissions that oil and gas operators reported to the provincial online information portal in 2020, according to the report, or about 70.1 million cubic metres of methane gas.

Under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UCP government has suspended environmental monitoring for Alberta’s oil and gas industry, effectively risking the health of Albertans and our economy.#ableg #abecon #cdnhealth pic.twitter.com/ojwvF247Jg

— Alberta NDP (@albertaNDP) May 21, 2020

This change meant the regulator did not enforce rules requiring companies to conduct detailed monitoring with proper technology that can detect both large and small leaks. Instead it allowed companies to monitor for leaks with less advanced equipment, a spokesperson for the regulator told The Narwhal in a written response to questions.

Alberta’s regulations make it clear that these types of screenings are “less comprehensive” than the technical surveys.

Another change loosened requirements related to compressors, which are used to ensure the movement of gas through pipes and which contain seals that can wear out and leak methane.

These changes were made as a result of the “extenuating circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing restrictions,” the spokesperson wrote in the email. The regulator said it allowed for the screening option because this procedure is typically done by company employees “who are already attending the sites.”

The regulator admitted the use of more advanced equipment to test for methane leaks “would have resulted in more concise readings” but argued the alternative “still allowed industry to identify and repair some leaks.”

Major reductions in methane emissions can be achieved with known technologies and tried & tested policies.If all countries implemented these proven policies, it would cut global methane emissions from oil & gas operations in half.Learn more https://t.co/RC5dIsmu5u pic.twitter.com/R6GrOPYExM

— International Energy Agency (@IEA) June 13, 2022

International Energy Agency says leaked methane gas could power Europe

The International Energy Agency has said about four million tonnes of methane leaked from end-use equipment last year worldwide. This “wasteful leakage,” it concluded, is “all the more striking” given that, if companies captured all the methane leaking from their equipment, it would equal “all the gas used in Europe’s power sector.”

Alberta says it is “on track” to meet its methane reduction target of 45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025. Most of that reduction occurred between 2014 and 2020, however, before the province’s methane rules came into effect, and the regulator has pointed to government grants and programs, like the province’s emissions trading regime, as reasons why methane levels are lower.

That means that with tougher rules and stricter enforcement, it might have been possible to exceed the target and stop even more methane from escaping into the atmosphere. The federal government, which has endorsed Alberta’s plan as “equivalent” to its own standards, has now embraced a steeper methane reduction target, but the province hasn’t said whether it supports a tougher approach.

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Alberta’s energy watchdog has reported dozens of violations as it takes on regulating the oil and gas industry’s methane pollution.

Companies that emit methane, a greenhouse gas furthering the climate crisis, have missed deadlines to submit data and blown inspections carried out by the Alberta Energy Regulator, it outlined in a report published this year, the first of its kind.

The report is from January 2022, but details about myriad obstacles the regulator encountered in trying to enforce its rules were not mentioned in the provincial government’s press release about it at the time.

Instead, the government chose to highlight its progress toward meeting its methane emissions reduction target — despite the regulator admitting that these reductions had mostly occurred prior to the province’s new methane rules coming into effect in 2020.

Alberta Energy Regulator aiming for ‘education’ of oil and gas industry

The provincial regulator is required to produce this report annually as a result of an October 2020 agreement with the federal government to accept Alberta’s methane rules as “equivalent” to Canada’s national methane pollution standards.

Under the agreement, Alberta must compile data on the facilities subject to the rules, as well as information like the permits it issued, the activities it took to check compliance, the enforcement measures it carried out and the overall effectiveness of its rules.

The regulator’s approach to ensuring compliance with the rules involves a component it calls “education,” which means raising awareness of the requirements placed on oil and gas companies, and encouraging them to voluntarily meet their obligations before having to resort to enforcement.

Inspectors trained by the regulator carried out 266 methane inspections in Alberta in 2020 and found 32 ‘unsatisfactory outcomes.’ Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

In February 2021, the regulator sent out 450 notices, what it called “report cards,” to all oil and gas operators that were active in 2019 — the first mandatory reporting year under the provincial rules. “Operators” is a term defined in provincial law that means either the person who actually operates an oil and gas facility or project, or the person who has been approved to oversee them.

Out of the 450 notices, 120 of them “noted missing reports, insufficient reporting or suspected inaccurate reporting,” the report stated. The regulator considered these notices to be part of its education of industry, hoping that operators take the hint and make fixes voluntarily.

How oil lobbyists persuaded Alberta to weaken rules for dirty facilities

The regulator also sent 43 notices to operators who missed the first annual methane emissions report deadline of June 1, 2020, the report indicated. It then sent 12 letters that followed up on operators who were not addressing the original notices.

The report said the regulator was considering “further enforcement actions,” but a spokesperson told The Narwhal that in this case, “escalation was not required” as the companies involved addressed the issue.

Inspectors trained by the regulator carried out 266 methane inspections in Alberta in 2020, the report indicated, meeting with operators at oil and gas facilities and reviewing the requirements that apply to their operations. The regulator said it prioritized giving an “educational inspection” as their first methane inspection.

Thank you Minister @JasonNixonAB for all your work on a equivalency agreement on methane regulations with the federal government. A made in Alberta program is important for the success of the energy industry, and reduces any unnecessary duplication and red tape. pic.twitter.com/cEGxyVkcpx

— Hon. Sonya Savage, KC (@sonyasavage) May 12, 2020

Out of these 266 inspections, 32 “were considered to have unsatisfactory outcomes, meaning the inspection resulted in required follow-up work for the duty holders,” the report stated. It said two facilities were suspended due to the methane inspections. The regulator’s spokesperson said these sites have since returned to active status.

Restrictions around the COVID-19 pandemic limited the regulator’s ability to send officials on site or into indoor environments, it wrote, and independent inspections didn’t start until Aug. 11 that year.

The federal environment department told The Narwhal that it continues to work closely with Alberta and will consider pulling out of the methane equivalency agreement if it identifies a “serious increase in violations.”

Alberta Energy Regulator staff already concerned about enforceability of new rules

The revelations in the report build on earlier fears within the regulator about whether it would be able to enforce its own methane rules. Some staffers warned in leaked correspondence, obtained by The Narwhal, that intense fossil fuel industry lobbying had weakened the rules as applied to some of the dirtiest facilities.

Oil and gas company Canadian Natural Resources Limited and the fossil fuel industry group Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers led some of these lobbying efforts, eventually getting changes they requested in the final rules adopted in December 2018.

The issue is particularly critical at a time when Canada is trying to meet its climate goals and slash its greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting methane from the oil and gas sector is the most cost-effective way of lowering carbon pollution, according to the International Energy Agency.

The cost of implementing methane-cutting measures is less than the market value of the gas that is captured, says the International Energy Agency. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The agency’s February 2022 methane analysis found that the recent high prices for natural gas mean there is now “no net cost” to implement almost all of the options to cut methane from fossil fuel operations worldwide. These options include detecting and repairing equipment leaks, retrofitting facilities with emissions control devices and upgrading aging components, according to the agency.

The cost of implementing these measures is “less than the market value of the additional gas that is captured,” it wrote, meaning at today’s retail gas prices, companies can profit off capturing and selling methane.

“Such a strong alignment of cost, reputational and environmental considerations should push the oil and gas sector to lead the way with methane emissions reductions,” the organization wrote.

The federal government has offered up to $10 billion in subsidies for oil and gas companies that lobbied for taxpayer money to pay for carbon capture and storage projects — a technology that has not yet been deployed across the industry on a massive scale.

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It’s a wet and windy morning in Winnipeg and Garrett LeBlanc’s main concern is dodging the foul-smelling juice spraying out from the dozens of green bins he’ll tip during the day. 

He zips his raincoat up high and secures a 290-litre bin to the hydraulic arm on the side of his ride for the day — a compact garbage-collection truck — then pushes a button to start the lift. He keeps his eyes trained on the slow rise of the bin, then on the green bags of discarded watermelon rinds, meat scraps and kitchen leftovers that tumble into the bed of the truck. The breeze hooks a thin trail of “rot splatter” and sends it whizzing toward LeBlanc. He dodges. He gives the bin a shake at the peak of the lift, a quick up-down motion with the buttons, before lowering it back to the pavement. 

LeBlanc then lines the bin with a new, compostable bag before wheeling the green tub back into place among this particular condominium’s other garbage and recycling bins. 

It’s a process he’ll repeat dozens of times over the course of the day on his collection route for the social enterprise Compost Winnipeg.

“There’s parts of the job that aren’t glamorous and not for everyone,” he says, back in the cab of the truck. “But composting, I’ve always done that at home, and being able to tangibly pick up and see everything that’s being diverted from the dump feels pretty meaningful.”

Brady Road landfill is Manitoba’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions

Compost Winnipeg came into being in 2016, when the Green Action Centre — a Manitoba non-profit focused on environmental education and green-living programs — was looking for a way to generate a little extra revenue. The City of Winnipeg had just shot down a compost-collection service of its own, and the Green Action Centre saw an opportunity to bring in some new funds while filling a gap in city services. 

Over the last six years the social enterprise has led the way in Winnipeg’s uphill battle with organic waste diversion: the team has collected more than three million kilograms of organic waste from commercial and residential clients, and transformed that waste into nutrient-rich soil food called humus, used to prolong the life and health of the Prairie Green Landfill just outside Winnipeg’s city limits. Though that might seem like a lot, Winnipeggers sent more than one billion kilos of waste to the city’s Brady Road landfill over the same time period — and between 40 and 60 per cent of that is organic waste. 

Garrett LeBlanc, compost courier with Compost Winnipeg, prepares to dump the load of compost at Prairie Green Landfill, where it gets composted, in Winnipeg on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

Susan Antler, executive director of the Toronto-based Compost Council of Canada, says  it’s time to redefine how people think about their food and yard scraps.

“It’s not waste — and that’s a big paradigm shift,” she says. “It is a valuable resource that has to be put to good use. Burying it in a landfill is just irresponsible now.”

Here’s why: to decompose quickly, organic matter needs a fair bit of oxygen. When it’s tied up in garbage bags and packed down in the dump, that oxygen is limited and the decomposition process can get interrupted. All that slowly rotting food releases methane — a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The Brady Road landfill is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in Manitoba. 

By contrast, composting — be it in a backyard bin or in long, industrial-scale piles called windrows — helps move the natural decomposition process along quickly, creating a nutrient-rich supplement critical to soil health while eliminating methane emissions.

About 25 per cent of earth’s biodiversity lives in the soil, Antler adds. Instead of thinking about compost as a choice between a garbage bin or a green bin, she encourages people to think about the green bin as a way to transform “waste” into essential food for the ecosystems underfoot.

At the Prairie Green Landfill, where Compost Winnipeg offloads organics at the end of the day, the humus is formed in windrows and used for landfill remediation. Each layer of garbage is covered by a layer of soil and humus, which can trap some of the carbon emissions from the trash and help keep the site as clean as possible.

Winnipeg is the largest city in Canada without municipal compost collection

Spotting a green bin or a compost collection truck can come as a surprise in Winnipeg, the largest city in Canada without a municipal collection program.

Coun. Brian Mayes, chair of the city’s waste and water standing committee, remembers the civic administration first looking into organics collection in 2011. Back then, Winnipeg was pushing to divert 50 per cent or more of its solid waste from the landfill by 2020, and council proposed an organic-waste pilot program that would start in 2014 and be ready for full-scale expansion by 2017.

The program never took off. Mayor Brian Bowman, who was elected in fall 2014, couldn’t risk compromising his campaign promise of a 2.3 per cent property-tax hike by running a costly new service, and residents who were already composting in their backyards began writing to their councillors to oppose an increase in their tax bills. Compost was dead in the water.

“I had a woman at a seniors home say, ‘I started composting during the war,’ basically, ‘I’m a good guy, I’ve been doing this my whole life, why would you charge people like me,’” recalls Mayes (St. Vital).

“‘To make this system work,’ is the awkward answer. I think it is a program that has benefits for everybody; it’ll help with our diversion rate, and I think it’s worth doing.”

Winnipeg’s waste diversion rate has hovered at about 33 per cent for almost a decade.But with organics making up between 40 and 60 per cent of landfill waste, the city is starting to take a second look at compost collection.

Garrett LeBlanc, compost courier with Compost Winnipeg, wheels a bin over to the truck while on his route in Winnipeg on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

In 2020, Mayes helped Winnipeg launch a two-year pilot program to test the feasibility of a citywide collection program. Approximately 4,000 residents from five neighbourhoods were outfitted with a green collection bin, a kitchen compost tub and a supply of compostable bags — free of charge — that October. The food waste collected from those homes is processed with regular seasonal yard waste (collected on a bi-weekly basis from all Winnipeg residences between April and November, totalling about 30 million kilos a year) at Brady Road.

So far, the pilot has been a sweeping success. After a month of weekly collection, the city surveyed participants and found 99 per cent of respondents were keen to see the program expanded across the city.

“I think it’s time now, people are more interested,” says Mayes. “In 2011, almost no one raised this at the door; now people say we’re way behind on this issue.”

Meet your local Compost Winnipeg courier

LeBlanc is one of a half-dozen Compost Winnipeg couriers. Every morning, from Monday to Thursday, he packs a bag with weather-appropriate clothes and enough food to last a long day on the road. This particular morning he’s in charge of the early shift. He biked to work before dawn, inspected the truck and hit the road before 6 a.m. to empty a bevy of bins filled up by the city’s hospitals. The morning route is primarily commercial clients — the hospitals, Canada Goose, Starbucks and IKEA, among others — but his afternoons vary with stops at condos, apartment blocks, businesses and residential properties.

Over the course of the day he’ll either tackle a couple dozen of the full-size bins, sometimes weighing up to 115 kilos (250 lbs), or nearly 100 of the smaller, 23-litre residential bins, manually hoisting each seven-kilo (15 lbs) bucket over the back of a pickup truck. 

Garrett LeBlanc, compost courier with Compost Winnipeg, poses for a portrait while on his route in Winnipeg on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

Along the route, he stops to chat with curious residents, or smile and wave at familiar faces. At one stop, a woman collecting mail asks LeBlanc if he has a business card to share. He directs her to the organization’s website. These opportunities for word-of-mouth advertising and education happen pretty often, he says. Kids think of him as a bit of “a superhero,” he says, and retirees often stop him to ask questions about the unfamiliar green bins.

“I try to educate by just talking to people as much as possible,” he says. “People are quite approachable and thankful, and for people who don’t know that we are a service, they’re usually really shocked that it’s happening and they want to get involved somehow.”

Three-quarters of Canada’s metropolitan areas have municipal food waste collection

At the compost council, Susan Antler says, Winnipeg still “has a ways to go” with its organics collection. Three-quarters of Canada’s census metropolitan areas already have municipal food waste collection up and running, and those regions tend to report much higher rates of composting and waste diversion, Statistics Canada data shows. In Edmonton, for example, waste diversion jumped 12 percentage points after curbside compost collection was launched last year. In Vancouver, a citywide ban on putting organics in the garbage has contributed to a waste-diversion rate of more than 60 per cent.

But Antler notes Winnipeg is not unique in its slow approach to compost. When a landfill is readily accessible, as is the case in Winnipeg, it’s hard to break that momentum, she says. Even cities with rigorous residential compost collection still lack a system to collect organics from businesses — even though roughly two-thirds of a city’s waste is generated by the commercial sector.

The solution, she says, is incentivizing organic waste diversion, either by charging residents and businesses more for collecting it or by putting in place regulations that prevent it from getting to the landfill. But for now, some municipalities find the cost of maintaining an existing landfill less daunting than the startup cost of new infrastructure for organics recycling.

Prairie Green Landfill, where the Compost Winnipeg food waste will get composted, in Winnipeg on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

When Winnipeg’s pilot program wraps up in the fall, city staff will prepare a report, and council will vote on whether to expand the program. If it’s approved, councillors will have to debate how often to collect compost (they could choose to reduce garbage collection to every two weeks and collect compost on the alternate week), whether they will collect food waste year round or on a seasonal basis and whether an indoor or outdoor processing facility will better serve the city’s needs. All those factors will help determine how much the compost system will cost the average resident — and how quickly a program could be launched. Even with the most aggressive timeline, Mayes expects green bins won’t be at everyone’s doors until 2025 or 2026.

‘It doesn’t cease to exist just because you bury it’

Every Tuesday, Laura Gow takes a 23-litre compost pail out from under her sink, and drops it off by a shed outside her Grant Avenue apartment building. By the end of the day, Compost Winnipeg will have emptied her pail and replaced the green compostable bag for the week. Gow is one of Compost Winnipeg’s longest-standing clients; she signed up for collection in 2017 after moving out of her childhood home.

“We had a backyard composter at my parents’ house, but you don’t have that in an apartment, and I really hate throwing away stuff like vegetable waste,” she says.

“First of all, it takes up a lot of room in the garbage. Second of all, you just feel guilty.”

Gow isn’t a gardener and she doesn’t remember ever using the finished compost at her parent’s house, but she says she was struck by the extra waste in her trash after she moved into the city. Nowadays, she composts simply because it puts that waste to better use than the landfills.

“When you think about the fact that every toothbrush you’ve ever used still exists — it’s gross,” she says. “Food waste wouldn’t last that long, but still, maybe it can be useful as compost.”

Karrie Blackburn, sales and customer service lead of Compost Winnipeg, poses for a portrait at their headquarters in Winnipeg on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

Back at Compost Winnipeg headquarters, sales and customer-service lead Karrie Blackburn says she’s now used to dispelling the common myths about composting.

“I think a lot of the misconceptions are very fear-based, almost like a knee-jerk reaction,” she explains.

For residents concerned about paying extra taxes for compost collection, Blackburn notes that new landfills will eventually cost tax dollars, too (though the Brady Road landfill still has about 100 years of life left in it, Mayes says.) Existing landfills that have already been covered (Winnipeg’s Westview Park — Garbage Hill, as it is more commonly called — comes to mind) also need ongoing, and costly, remediation.

“It doesn’t cease to exist just because you bury it,” she says.

For residents worried the green bins might smell, Blackburn says those stinky materials are already in the garbage, and compost bins can be emptied just as frequently as the trash is. The same goes for pests: if you don’t have bugs in your garbage as it is, they’re not likely to show up in the compost pail, either. In the summertime, when things get a little smellier and fruit flies get a little more common, compostable bags can be kept in the freezer, where they’re less likely to cause any ick.

Compost Winnipeg has received some grant funding from the city as it works to provide an interim option for Winnipeggers looking to recycle organics. It currently operates a seven-truck fleet and makes about 300 commercial and more than 850 residential stops each week, collecting between 80,000 and 90,000 kilos of organic waste every month.

Residential clients pay $35 a month and are provided with free compost bags and a black, 23-litre pail. Commercial clients pay about $134 monthly for a 290-litre bin. Some of that revenue covers the program’s operational costs, and the rest is funnelled into programming at the Green Action Centre. Compost Winnipeg is always accepting new clients.

The Compost Winnipeg headquarters in Winnipeg on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

The group’s main focus is running a smooth collection service, but Blackburn is also in charge of securing contracts for special events, such as Winnipeg Pride, and running site tours and orientation for commercial clients just starting to compost. Now, as the push for citywide compost collection starts to gain momentum in Winnipeg, Blackburn is hoping to amp up the educational component of her job by organizing letter-writing campaigns and other actions to help reinforce the desire for the service.

“Just because you have the privilege of a backyard to compost doesn’t mean your neighbour should be deprived of a service that could help the whole problem,” she says, adding she’s focused on helping Winnipeggers who want to see collection across the city get a voice at city hall.

Thanks to the group’s strong relationship with the city, Blackburn expects Compost Winnipeg will have a role to play in collection regardless of when the city starts a program of its own. So far, she says, the city has not indicated plans to pick up from businesses, so Compost Winnipeg will focus its efforts there.

As a driver and compost collector, LeBlanc hopes the logistics of his job will get a little easier as the city gets used to green bins. Instead of collecting pails from doorsteps, or wheeling heavy bins sometimes entire blocks to tip them into the truck, he envisions a curbside collection system much like what already exists for garbage and recycling.

In the meantime, though, he’s happy to make the extra effort for clients, and keep educating Winnipeggers along the way. As a longtime composter, his biggest piece of advice for anyone looking to start composting at home is to be willing to make the extra effort themselves. Buying a backyard compost bin, taking scraps to a local community garden, joining a collection service or even just joining forces with someone else who composts can all help divert organic waste

“That extra step doesn’t even have to be a whole lot of work,” he says.

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