On Canada Day, parts of Ottawa were hit with a one-in-200-year storm. Nearly four months later, it’s still having an impact as the polls open for Ontario’s municipal elections.

As much as 167 millimetres of rain, more than an average month’s worth, fell in a matter of hours on the southwest corner of the city on July 1. Combined with high winds, the storm closed roads and downed power lines. City staff admitted the sudden deluge overwhelmed neighbourhood drainage systems, and more than 7,000 people reported their basements had flooded. It was a big contributor to what became Ottawa’s wettest summer on record.

But it was all heavily concentrated in one part of the city — so localized, in fact, that Environment and Climate Change Canada didn’t even clock it in its system for monitoring climate-driven extreme weather, a spokesperson confirmed to The Narwhal. That system only looks at rainfall across the broader region, which didn’t record the same degree of rainfall levels that day.

The lopsided impact demonstrates how climate change doesn’t affect everyone equally.

Some residents are more exposed to climate risks, like those who live along shoreline, or in neighbourhoods that don’t have robust enough sewer systems to handle huge amounts of stormwater.

That’s a big issue for Ottawa, as both heavy rains and flooding are expected to be significant risks across the city in the future, as the climate keeps heating up from fossil fuel use.

A 2020 report commissioned by the City of Ottawa and the National Capital Commission predicted that climate change will bring “more intense precipitation.” This will increase the risk of flooding and stormwater overflows, and “municipal planning must account for climate impacts, including future flood risks,” the report noted.

“The real surprise isn’t the storm. The surprise is that we are still treating these events as unexpected rather than preparing for the climate reality we know is already here,” Community Action for Environmental Sustainability Ottawa said in a statement following the storm. 

“Every flood, every heat wave and every major storm is another reminder. Climate action isn’t only about preventing a dire, far-off future, it’s about protecting our communities today.”

Many Ottawans have spent months dealing with the mess the storm caused, removing ruined furniture and mould, while also dealing with the complexities of insurance that left some people out of pocket. Meanwhile, the city has been investigating flooding impacts and studying what can be done to fix the situation.

The issue has spilled over into the Oct. 26 municipal elections. All four leading candidates in Ottawa’s mayoral race have promised to do something to protect residents from future flooding.

Ottawa mayoral candidates talk flooding

According to Jeff Leiper, a three-term city councillor who is running for mayor, the Canada Day storm was another example of the extreme weather, energized by climate change, that has pummelled the city in recent years. There have been multiple tornadoes, heat waves, flooding, toxic wildfire smoke and a derecho storm.

“On the whole, we have a good idea that we need to make our infrastructure considerably more resilient to more extreme storms,” he told The Narwhal in an interview. “But we are not at the point where we have funded making our infrastructure appropriately resilient.”

Leiper has announced a $50-million plan to fix sewers and other infrastructure in the three Ottawa wards hit hardest by the Canada Day storm. His plan would also increase grants to those impacted by flooding, create a new team to help residents with insurance claims and relief programs, waive permit fees for flood repairs and increase municipal staff responding to 3-1-1 calls during major storm events. 

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who has held the title since 2022, is running for a second term. He plans to prioritize $500 million in funding for “infrastructure that make[s] our communities stronger in the face of extreme weather,” including heavy rains which cause flooding. He said he would “expand the application of a climate lens for infrastructure investments.” A spokesperson for his campaign told The Narwhal he will make “all necessary investments” to fix infrastructure “in the areas directly impacted by the July 1 storm.”

Sutcliffe’s plan includes upgraded storm sewers and ditches, with priority “given to addressing infrastructure gaps in flood-prone communities as guided by expert recommendations.” 

The campaign spokesperson said they disagreed with Leiper’s assertion that climate infrastructure hasn’t been funded. Ottawa’s 2026 budget includes $94 million in capital contributions “that apply a climate lens to projects across the city.”

Another mayoral candidate, Neil Saravanamuttoo, an economist, plans to replace sewers, prioritize infrastructure investments in existing neighbourhoods and carry out flood mitigation measures like creating stormwater ponds and planting trees. He is also promising “city-run neighbourhood retrofits,” where the city arranges the bulk of the buying and financing, and also helps residents apply for federal rebates.

“The Canada Day flooding was a wake up call for Ottawa,” Saravanamuttoo’s platform states. “Weather events that we thought were once-in-a-century events are now happening every few years, and we are seeing the significant cost that flooding can impose on Ottawa households.”

Alex Lawson, a business owner who is another contender for mayor, said he would review the city’s process for responding to disasters and produce a report that examines maintenance records for sewers, street by street. 

A spokesperson for the Lawson campaign, Laura Kurkimaki, also said Lawson has experience navigating disaster response from his time on the board of West Carleton Disaster Relief, and he believes the city’s emergency response plan puts “too much pressure on volunteer organizations.”

City staff, mayor dispute minister’s comments on flood response

Leiper said he felt the city’s response to the flooding was “far too slow” and that as mayor, he would have “visited the flooded sites earlier and more frequently.”

At an Oct. 6 meeting of the Ontario legislature’s Justice committee, Chandra Pasma, the NDP MPP for Ottawa West–Nepean, the riding which includes the affected area, also criticized the provincial response. 

“Why was no help sent to Ottawa, despite the city’s request to actually help people clean out their homes and make them safe to live in again?” she asked.

“In the situation in Ottawa, the flooding and the rain happened on July 1. We didn’t receive a request for assistance until July 9,” Ontario Emergency Preparedness Minister Jill Dunlop said. “When we did have the request for assistance from Ottawa, we did work with some of our partner organizations.”

Sutcliffe’s campaign disputes both the minister’s timeline and Leiper’s comment about the city’s response. 

The campaign’s spokesperson told The Narwhal that Sutcliffe and his office had spoken with city staff and emergency officials the day of the storm, and that the following day, July 2, he “spoke personally with residents and councillors in the affected areas.” 

“Over the course of the following days he continued to contact affected residents, visit them on site and direct city officials to provide immediate solutions,” the spokesperson said. He then spoke with Dunlop, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Municipal Affairs Minister Rob Flack on July 2 and 3, the spokesperson added.

A city general manager also told CBC News city staff were in touch with the provincial emergency operations centre immediately following the floods and maintained contact “nearly daily.”

Dunlop’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Narwhal. 

Ottawa is just one of 414 municipal governments holding elections across the province, with 2,800 elected positions to be filled, according to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. Local governments are responsible for administering the vote. Find your municipality’s contact information here.

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In 2019, municipalities across Ontario declared a climate emergency. The backdrop was a groundswell of attention to global warming, including tens of thousands of people filling the streets around Ontario’s legislature in September, demanding urgent action on climate change.

The demonstration was part of the Global Week for Future, inspired by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement. Young people marched alongside families, seniors and environmental advocates. The crowd outside Queen’s Park in Toronto was so large that some demonstrators couldn’t hear the speakers addressing the rally.

Table of Contents

• Toronto: uphill battle on reducing building emissions, promoting active transportation
• Mississauga: possible rise in emissions as Ontario’s grid gets dirtier
• Brampton: torn up bike lanes, no published emissions reductions reports

Lyn Adamson, co-chair of the environmental advocacy group ClimateFast, spent months helping organize the demonstration. “It was something I’d never seen,” she said. “I’d never seen that kind of mobilization.”

Mississauga and Brampton had declared an emergency in June, while Toronto City Council joined the list the week after the march. In the country’s largest city, council called for accelerated action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and asked city staff to examine how Toronto could reach net-zero emissions by 2040.

Seven years later, municipalities across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have introduced new climate policies, invested in energy-efficient buildings and expanded programs aimed at reducing emissions. But despite that progress, emissions are not falling quickly enough to meet many of their targets.

With Ontario’s municipal election approaching on Oct. 26, environmental advocates say the next four years will be critical in determining whether cities can turn their commitments into measurable results. And the term will take municipalities to 2030, a deadline attached to several major greenhouse gas reduction targets.

In Toronto, decisions about building emissions standards and retrofits, and transportation investments remain outstanding. Mississauga’s next council is expected to consider an updated emissions reduction plan in early 2027 and Brampton faces questions about how much progress it is actually making on its climate commitments.

And progress across the province has been slowed by the Ontario government stepping in to prevent cities and towns from instituting ambitious strategies it said could impede development. 

Here’s a look at some of the commitments and progress made by municipalities, as they welcome the next municipal council to take the helm.

Climate action hasn’t kept pace with promises

Greenhouse gas emissions across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area represent 46 per cent of Ontario’s emissions. They reached approximately 54.7 million tonnes in 2024, a modest increase of 1.1 per cent from the previous year, according to the latest carbon emissions inventory from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.

Buildings accounted for 45 per cent of regional emissions, largely from natural gas used for heating and electricity generation. Transportation made up another 37 per cent.

Overall emissions remain far from where they need to be to reach net-zero targets that were developed in line with the United Nations and global scientists to stave off some of the worst effects of climate change.

The Atmospheric Fund, an agency of the City of Toronto, estimates the region would need reductions of approximately 11 per cent every year to meet its collective 2030 climate targets.

Gabriella Kalapos, executive director of Climate Action Partnership, said municipalities have made progress since 2019, particularly in understanding where emissions come from and identifying opportunities to reduce them. “It’s nowhere near the level of action that’s actually needed to respond to this climate emergency,” she said.

Toronto has strengthened its climate plans, but targets remain out of reach

For Adamson, Toronto’s climate commitments aren’t just about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They’re about making everyday life easier for residents, whether that’s because cycling is safe, public transit is reliable or utility bills are lower because homes use less energy.

She believes progress has been too slow.

Under its TransformTO climate strategy, the city has set a target of reducing community-wide emissions by 65 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030, and ultimately reach net-zero emissions by 2040.

Toronto acknowledges it is not on track to meet that goal. In 2023, the city released its most recent inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, finding community-wide emissions were just 35 per cent below 1990 levels. Buildings accounted for 55 per cent of emissions, followed by transportation at 36 per cent.

In an email to The Narwhal, James Nowlan, executive director of City of Toronto’s environment, climate and forestry division, wrote that buildings and transportation remain among the most challenging sources of emissions to address because many of the necessary changes extend beyond the city’s direct control.

Take the city’s multi-year battle with the provincial government to maintain some existing bike lanes and build more on main arteries of the city. Right now, the province is winning, having dispatched crews on a $48-million job to rip lanes out of major streets in the middle of the election campaign. 

Premier Doug Ford’s government has also clamped down on how municipalities can implement green building standards. It restricted municipalities from mandating any green building features that go beyond provincial requirements. This put the Toronto Green Standard, a framework that has shaped development in Canada’s largest city for more than 15 years, in the crosshairs.

The standard required developers to incorporate features — such as bicycle parking, electric-vehicle charging stations and green roofs — to reduce emissions and improve resilience to climate change. The province has argued that standardized development requirements can help speed up construction during a housing crisis.

Environmental advocates, however, say the changes undermine municipal authority, including the ability to address local climate priorities. Kalapos said municipal progress on energy-efficient development policies has been complicated by provincial intervention.

“If you don’t have a supportive framework for climate action at the provincial and federal level, municipalities are really hamstrung to be able to move forward on their targets,” she said. “We are not going to meet this climate change imperative off the property tax base.”

The city is still developing emissions standards that would see building owners gradually reduce emissions through upgrades and retrofits. But provincial legislation will prevent Toronto from making the changes mandatory.

“It’s all voluntary. There is no deadline for anything,” Adamson said, arguing that relying on voluntary measures makes it difficult to achieve the scale of change needed.

Still, cities are trying. In Toronto, a new TransformTO action plan outlines further measures to reduce emissions between now and 2030, including support for community-led initiatives.

The city budgeted more than $2 billion in 2026 for emissions-reduction initiatives, including ongoing support for a bike share program and household composting. 

In Mississauga, emissions are not falling fast enough

In neighbouring Mississauga, the city reports progress on 59 of the 89 actions outlined in its 2019 climate change action plan, a 10-year municipal roadmap aimed at reducing emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050. The plan was adopted months after council declared a climate emergency in June 2019.

Only 13 of the actions are considered fully complete, standalone actions, such as developing a program that diverts dog waste from landfills and converts it to energy and a strategy on increasing urban agriculture. Another 46 items, like gradually replacing municipal vehicles with electric alternatives, are mostly complete, with work ongoing and possibly evolving.

Carrah Bullock, Mississauga’s supervisor of climate policy, said the original plan was designed to lay the groundwork for future climate action, but did not include ways to measure its direct impact on emissions. The city is now updating its climate plan to better track the reductions associated with individual initiatives.

Despite this progress, Mississauga acknowledges, like its neighbouring cities, that it is not on track to meet its 2030 emissions targets. In fact, preliminary 2025 data suggest that emissions may have been higher than 2024, due largely to issues that, once again, are in the provincial government’s hands. 

Ontario’s power grid has become less clean since 2021, when it was 94 per cent emissions-free. That number is now below 90 per cent, due largely to nuclear plants being taken offline for refurbishment. Having cancelled hundreds of renewable energy projects upon taking office in 2018, the Ford government has relied mainly on natural gas to replace them. The Atmospheric Fund reported that electricity-related emissions increased 28 per cent across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area in 2024 because of greater reliance on natural gas-fired generation.

The city has made progress on emissions reductions within its own buildings and vehicle fleet. Dianne Zimmerman, Mississauga’s environment manager, pointed to the introduction of a green standard for city-owned buildings, including a new fire station built to a net-zero standard. The city has also electrified municipal vehicles and equipment.

But reducing emissions from privately owned homes and commercial buildings remains a significant challenge. Bullock said a proposed community building retrofit program has been progressing more slowly than the city would like.

The city’s updated emissions reduction plan is expected to go before council in early 2027, followed by a separate climate resilience strategy focused on coping with extreme heat, storms and other effects of a warming planet.

Residents see both progress and setbacks in Brampton

David Laing, president and co-founder of the Brampton Environmental Alliance, regularly uses a bicycle for transportation. When Brampton began introducing cycling infrastructure in the years after declaring a climate emergency in 2019, he noticed the difference.

The improvements, he said, “made my life an awful lot easier and safer and more comfortable.”

But now, the city is reversing course, removing some of those bike lanes to make way for cars — such as on Howden Boulevard in the city’s Westgate neighbourhood — leaving him frustrated with what he sees as inconsistent decisions about transportation and climate action.

According to The Atmospheric Fund, transportation produced approximately 1.81 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in Brampton in 2024, accounting for nearly half the city’s total.

It’s one example of why the city’s progress on community-wide emissions has been in question.

In 2019, Brampton released its community energy and emissions reduction plan, aiming to cut community-wide emissions by 50 per cent below 2016 levels by 2041, and at least 80 per cent by 2050.

Since then, it has taken steps to electrify public transit, including a $4-billion partnership in 2025 with U.K.-based company Zenobē to transition to as many as 1,000 electric buses over the next decade. And the city has developed an updated environmental master plan, subsidized building retrofits and launched a program to help local businesses reduce their energy use.

But the results of those efforts haven’t been published. Laing said the city needs to make it easier for residents to understand which climate commitments have been completed, how much money has been spent and whether emissions are actually declining.

Without that information, there’s little to keep city administration — and incoming mayors and councillors — accountable.

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From the surface, a strip of water contained by docks at the southeastern edge of the Hamilton Harbour appears much like any other in the industrial centre, once known as “Steeltown.” Cargo ships bound for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway line the boat slip’s western edge. On the eastern side are piles of black slag — the hard, clumpy by-product of steel processing.

But beneath the water lies a legacy of pollution, one which The Narwhal has learned is a decade behind in being cleaned up, in part due to the economic fallout of U.S. tariffs on the steel industry.

The sediment in the Kenilworth Avenue boat slip is contaminated with chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and heavy metals that are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms; exposure can cause reproductive problems, reduced growth and developmental effects.

The steel-maker Dofasco, which has operated on the shore since 1912 and was purchased by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal in 2006, owns the boat slip and has publicly pledged to contain the contaminated sediment. Decades of industrial activity contributed to the contamination: a 1999 scientific report published by Environment Canada’s Water Science and Technology Directorate identified runoff from the steel-maker’s coal piles as one source of metals and other toxins entering the water, along with industrial cooling water, stormwater and sewer overflows from various sources. 

According to a 2015 project description the company submitted to the federal environmental assessment office, some concentrations of chemicals found in the area were high enough to be considered hazardous waste under federal criteria. That means the waste would have to be transferred off-site to a landfill or contained within an engineered cap.

ArcelorMittal Dofasco proposed covering one contaminated area with such a cap. A separate containment structure along the eastern edge of the boat slip would lock in additional contamination, including some dredged up and pumped in from other areas.

Work was scheduled to begin in August 2016 and, aside from long-term monitoring, finish by June 2017. But more than nine years after that deadline, the cleanup remains unfinished, with no containment structures in place. According to company records reviewed by The Narwhal, as of 2025 the anticipated cleanup cost was US$28 million. By May 2026, a company statement given to a group coordinating efforts to restore Hamilton Harbour, and shared with The Narwhal, showed progress had stalled due to the economic pressure U.S. tariffs have put on Canada’s steel industry. 

ArcelorMittal Dofasco did not respond to detailed questions or multiple requests for comment by publication time.

The Narwhal reviewed annual reports, meeting notes and project updates going back to 1999. The documents lay out early efforts — and then years of delays — in removing the contaminated sediment and working toward the broader project of cleaning up Hamilton Harbour.

A former senior executive at the steel-maker, who requested their identity be kept confidential for fear of retribution, said the remediation was taken seriously while they worked there, before retiring in the past decade. “We had hired people to do the engineering work. We had put money aside in a special account, so everything was being set up,” they told The Narwhal, adding approximately $5 million had been allocated for the project at the time. (The company’s 2018 financial report notes it expected to spend US$5 million on the cleanup the following year.)

A note on trust, integrity and unnamed sources+

This story uses information from sources The Narwhal has agreed not to name. The Narwhal only agrees to keep names confidential when we believe two things. First, that the person we’re speaking with is putting themselves at genuine risk, either personal or professional, by sharing this information with us. Second, that the information they’re sharing is in the public interest. Our decision to do so is never made lightly. 

There are two types of unnamed sources. A confidential source is someone whose name we know, but aren’t sharing. We make multiple attempts to verify their identity and information with other sources. If we aren’t able to get a second source, we say so. 

An anonymous source is someone whose name we don’t know. It is incredibly rare for The Narwhal to publish a story with a completely anonymous source. In these instances, we don’t publish until we have verified the information shared with us with at least one other source. 

And again, these stories must be in the public interest. 

As Canadian governments become increasingly secretive, the courage of whistleblowers is to be admired. We value them greatly. At the same time, our promise to readers is The Narwhal will always make sure the facts are airtight. 

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Although the original 2017 deadline passed, the former executive said the project continued advancing internally. Upon retirement, they believed it was close to moving into construction.

“It was just a matter of hiring a general contractor to do the work.”

But records show that work is far from done.

A history of contamination and efforts to clean up Hamilton Harbour

Kristin O’Connor, who coordinates efforts to remediate Hamilton Harbour at Conservation Halton, says the waterway’s transformation began as Hamilton expanded during the 1800s and 1900s.

“It was consciously decided that the Hamilton Harbour would be the dumping ground for industry and for sewage,” O’Connor said of her belief about how the contamination problem began across the harbour.

Over time, natural shorelines were filled in, wetlands disappeared and large sections of the waterfront were converted into industrial lands. The result was decades of deteriorating water quality, algae blooms, contaminated sediment and damage to fish and wildlife habitat. O’Connor points out a visiting urban planner described the harbour as the world’s largest and most beautiful septic tank in 1958.

In 1972, seeing a number of similarly degraded shorelines around the Great Lakes, Canada and the United States agreed to work together to clean up some of the most deeply polluted sites. The two countries signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1987, which listed 43 official areas of concern, where industrial pollution was the most deleterious. Hamilton Harbour was one of them.

The harbour ultimately had 11 of 14 possible categories of environmental impairment identified through the Great Lakes restoration framework. Among them were restrictions on eating fish and the degradation of benthos — small organisms that live in or on sediment at the bottom of waterways. Those two concerns are particularly relevant to the Kenilworth boat slip.

How did ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s boat slip become contaminated?

The contamination in the Kenilworth Avenue boat slip didn’t come from a single incident. For generations, Hamilton Harbour, extending off of Lake Ontario, was shaped by steel-making, shipping, urban development and the discharge of industrial waste and sewage.

The 1999 scientific report examined contaminant levels in 1996 and found run-off from Dofasco’s coal piles was heavily contaminated with metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. The group of chemicals is associated with sources including petroleum products, steel-making and coking operations — the process of heating coal at high temperatures to produce fuel for steel-making. Some are considered to be cancer-causing and toxic for aquatic life. After the study came out, Dofasco contracted work to capture and treat run-off from its coal piles.

Also found within the sediment, PCBs, once widely used in industrial equipment, can remain in the environment for long periods and accumulate in animal tissue. Environment and Climate Change Canada identifies the human-made chemicals as potential human carcinogens that are toxic to fish at low levels. The United Nations Environment Programme has reported they accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, becoming more concentrated and harmful as they move up the food chain.

Dofasco acknowledged the sediment problem in its 2002 annual report, saying, “The company’s boat slip contains contaminated sediment from a time that pre-dates environmental awareness and control technologies.”

At the time, the company said it was working with the federal and provincial environment departments and other stakeholders to examine options for addressing the contamination. Neither Environment and Climate Change Canada nor Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks responded to requests for comment by publication time.

ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s 2015 project description acknowledged the pollution could negatively affect local aquatic organisms and noted the cleanup was intended to prevent them and other wildlife from coming into contact with the most heavily contaminated material.

The Canada Water Agency, the federal agency responsible for freshwater governance, said in a statement to The Narwhal that cleaning up the Kenilworth boat slip, along with a nearby contaminated site known as the Strathearne boat slip, remains necessary to reduce contamination from PCBs, PAHs and metals.

Enter the Hamilton Harbour Remedial Action Plan

After Hamilton Harbour was designated an area of concern, restoration efforts kicked off, starting with the development of a remedial action plan to address decades of environmental damage.

The Hamilton Harbour remedial action plan brings together governments, industry, conservation authorities, researchers and community organizations to restore the harbour. Dofasco and Stelco, Hamilton’s two major steel producers, have been involved in the process since its early years. O’Connor, the remedial action plan coordinator with Halton Conservation, says the Kenilworth boat slip was one of many environmental problems contributing to the harbour’s designation as an area of concern.

Over the decades, the partnership has worked on projects ranging from wastewater treatment improvements to shoreline restoration and fish habitat rehabilitation. One of its largest undertakings — and one that looks to be a model for success — is the cleanup of Randle Reef.

Located near the property of Stelco, Randle Reef was the largest contaminated sediment site on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. A $138.9-million cleanup began in 2015, funded by the federal and provincial governments, municipalities, the port authority and industry. While Stelco was not deemed solely responsible for the pollution at Randle Reef, it supplied $14 million in steel to build a box to contain it. The sediment there was contaminated with the same toxins found at Kenilworth, and had to be dredged and moved into the steel container. The final phase, which involves installing a cap over the box, is scheduled for completion in 2027.

Kenilworth, however, has followed a different path.

ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s 2015 remediation plan outlines how it would contain the most contaminated sediment in the two proposed structures: one approximately 66 metres wide and 120 metres long and the other roughly 264 metres long and 44 metres wide. Less than 40,000 cubic metres of contaminated sediment was expected to be dredged from other areas of the boat slip and relocated into the containment structures.

Sediment containing naphthalene — the most volatile member of the PAH family — would be tested and, where required, transported to a licensed landfill for hazardous waste disposal. Other areas would be covered with sand to isolate contamination remaining after dredging. A temporary water treatment system would manage wastewater generated during the work, while long-term monitoring would assess the integrity of the containment structures. The approach was designed to minimize disruption to shipping operations while reducing exposure to contaminated sediment.

Unlike the multi-partner Randle Reef project, ArcelorMittal Dofasco was identified as the “sole proponent” for its boat slip remediation. O’Connor says the remedial action plan identifies the environmental work that needs to be completed, but individual partners are responsible for carrying out their own projects. “We don’t fund it. We don’t monitor it,” she said.

In its 2023 annual report, ArcelorMittal Dofasco listed a US$31-million environmental provision for the expected cost of remediating toxic sediment at the Kenilworth boat slip. The company’s 2025 annual report included a US$28-million provision for the project. These provisions are accounting estimates of expected environmental costs, not proof that money has been spent on remediation or that those amounts are held in a dedicated account.

The remediation timeline starts slipping

In 2020, the International Joint Commission, a Canada-U.S. organization that investigates and mediates transboundary issues involving fresh water, reported that ArcelorMittal Dofasco was expected to clean up contaminated sediment near the Kenilworth boat slip over two years beginning in 2021.

A Hamilton Harbour remedial action plan fact sheet originally published in 2018 and updated in 2023 continued to describe ArcelorMittal Dofasco as obtaining provincial approval to manage PCB, PAH and metal-contaminated sediment in the boat slip. Meanwhile, meeting records from the Bay Area Implementation Team, the group of partners responsible for implementing the remedial action plan, show the project remained under development.

At a June 13, 2023, meeting, ArcelorMittal Dofasco reported conducting additional sediment sampling and working with an engineering consultant to review the results. The company was preparing an updated environmental summary report as part of the permitting process and reviewing the engineering design.

A year later, the project still had not moved into construction. Meeting notes from June 20, 2024, state a tender was being prepared for proponents to bid on the remediation work. The notes state that technical options and logistics were being reviewed as well as further consultations with the Indigenous community.

By November 2025, the project timeline was still being reviewed, according to notes, but ArcelorMittal Dofasco remained committed to the cleanup.

The most recent update provided to the Bay Area Implementation Team came from ArcelorMittal Dofasco on May 29, 2026: “The current market context and threat to the Canadian steel industry as a result of the U.S. tariffs creates a very difficult environment for the company and the industry. So much so that every investment must be carefully reviewed and managed in order to continue to be a sustainable business. Given this, there is no further update or progress since the last meeting.”  

The statement comes amid substantial uncertainty facing Canadian steel producers.

U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in March 2025, before doubling them to 50 per cent that June and escalating further with additional trade pressures through 2026. In steel-making communities, including Hamilton, workers have faced job losses as a result. That includes at Stelco, which has laid off hundreds of workers in the past weeks.

But that doesn’t account for the past decade of delays on remediating the Kenilworth boat slip.

Chris McLaughlin, executive director of the Bay Area Restoration Council, said the precise circumstances behind the years of delays remain unclear. He called for greater leadership from the federal and provincial government in addressing the project’s technical and economic obstacles, and said the public deserves clearer commitments and timelines from the company for completing the work.

“There is a moral imperative to reconcile with our destructive industrial past,” he said. “Effective cleanups and restorative actions with public engagement and community connections create meaningful improvements and sustain hope.”

Rajpreet Sahota is a community and policy reporting fellow. Her position is funded in part by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input.

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

This article was produced in collaboration with the Toronto Star.

Every election, I consider whether I’m voting for a candidate — or against one. My dream is to hopefully fill in the bubble beside the name of someone exciting. Instead, I often find myself drearily choosing someone okay (I guess) to block someone I can’t stand. The upcoming Toronto mayoral election is a case in point.

The two front-runners each have a caricaturish portrait of the city. The incumbent, Olivia Chow, lives in a shimmery mirage where Care Bear stares transform traffic jams into affordable homes. Her challenger, Brad Bradford, lives in an apocalyptic hellhole where rats keep trying to gnaw his leg off. The rest of us watch as this once-shiny city dulls, made sticky by a spiderweb of problems. We need sophisticated, strategic ideas, and have been given a choice between cops and school lunches. 

Is this really all we have to work with? 

No, actually. There will be 53 mayoral candidates’ names on the ballot on Oct. 26. But Torontonians tend to ignore the so-called fringe, perhaps burned by eras when kooky or frightening candidates got too much airtime. We rarely meet, never mind evaluate, let alone choose, a promising unknown. 

Hoping to find a bubble worth filling, I went in search of options — and actually found a little hope. Before I name names, though, here’s how I did it. 

First, I used the Toronto Star’s Vote Compass tool, which showed how my takes on the city’s challenges, costs and priorities compared to candidates’ positions. I used that to narrow down which platforms to read in The Local’s candidate tracker, clicking through to websites of those who seemed serious and promising. 

It wasn’t quick, but given the threats to democracy from misinformation, shrinking attention spans, dark money, competing crises and plain old apathy, the effort seemed worth it. Then again, I get to count this as work. Not everyone has the time or ability to do it. And Toronto has a type of electoral system that is “really challenging for voters,” according to Jack Lucas, a political science professor at the University of Calgary. 

Lucas is co-director of the Canadian Municipal Barometer, an ongoing study of local government. One of his interests is the role and value of political parties at the municipal level. In some provinces, municipal candidates can run with party affiliation, as they do federally or provincially. In Ontario, including Toronto, each candidate — and winner — is a lone wolf. 

Theoretically, this discourages hard divides between “conservatives” and “progressives,” since councillors vote independently on every issue, allowing them to disagree or join forces from one cause to the next. Lucas says polarization is happening anyway, though, which the cops vs. school lunches showdown suggests is true. 

Meanwhile, voters are left adrift in a sea of unknown candidates. All alone, they need to seek out and analyze information on not just policy, but integrity, experience and the ability to actually get the job done. Lucas believes a party system helps voters discern who’s worth their time. Without them, he says, it’s not surprising people gravitate towards known quantities. 

I’m not quite sold — to me, independence and coalition-building are unique, important aspects of municipal governance we should try to strengthen, not abandon. Also, parties can be risk-averse and boring, stoking stereotypes and prejudice. But Lucas did sway me when he said the muscle of party machinery can help new candidates find their feet. “It’s a lonely enterprise,” he said, “and if you don’t already have a network of support behind you, it can be really challenging to break through.” That, plus parties have money. 

Which brings me to mayoral candidate Laura Dean, who has raised $25,000 for her campaign. It’s more than she expected, she told me. It’s also oodles less than the nearly $1.6 million Chow spent in 2023. It’s not enough to buy even one ad between Blue Jays’ innings, Dean said, let alone the back-to-back spots Bradford is running.

Dean has spent more than a decade advising Ontario municipalities on land use (including housing starts!) as a partner at a Bay Street law firm. It’s a career she chose after time spent at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the now-defunct provincial climate secretariat. That last bit is what made this environmental journalist give her a call. 

“When this election cycle came up, I was really shocked by the tone and just the quality of the discourse — it’s so poor. And, more, extremely polarizing,” Dean said about deciding to run. “The Canadian public so desperately needs more options and good quality conversation.” 

Dean isn’t starry-eyed about her prospects and that’s fine. Plenty of worthwhile candidates need to try and try again. The point is, not every unknown is kooky or scary. Many are worthwhile, and with dozens of options, it’s bad practice to let polls decide front-runners (and debate invitees) before the race even starts. If a wider choice sounds appealing, Dean and other non-celebrity candidates will headline an “alternative” mayoral debate at City Hall on Oct. 20.

Dean said the enthusiasm she’s received has her already considering her options for 2030. While many people say they’re glad she’s running, she said, they aren’t ready to fill her bubble just yet. Torontonians are practiced in voting for the person they consider okay (I guess) as they try to block the candidate they can’t stand. Maybe next time, we’ll believe we deserve better.

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.

A few days before I visited Devil’s Glen, a resident who lives near the Ontario provincial park got into a yelling match with a rock climber. It allegedly ended with the climber’s hands around the neighbour’s neck, and a call to the police. Over the years, there have also been allegations of litter stuffed into caverns used by at-risk bats, of centenary cedar trees sawed off, of cars egged and climbing routes sabotaged along this stretch of Niagara Escarpment in Clearview, Ont.

For that neighbour, Adam Pearce, concerns started shortly after he moved into his home nearly two decades ago. He began noticing rock-climbing routes on the escarpment abutting his property — hundreds of bolts on bald stretches of cliff face are a giveaway. After a climber fell eight metres and had to be rescued by fire crews and paramedics, Pearce redoubled his efforts to understand how the sport was being monitored and regulated by Ontario Parks. 

He learned it largely wasn’t. For years, rock climbing was just an illicit pastime he and parks ecologists worried about. Then, the Government of Ontario officially sanctioned it. 

I met Adam and his wife, Holly, at their house in late August. Flower beds and bird houses decorated the property, along with dozens of animal skulls the couple has found. We entered a trail out the back of their yard, where they’ve erected “No Trespassing” signs. Within minutes, we were in the park, beginning our descent along a thin slice of trail overlooking a steep drop into the forest below. I couldn’t help but think about these contested grounds, and what would happen if the Pearces came across a climber.

I knew the possibility for tension was high. For months before visiting, I’d been speaking with sources — including climbers themselves, residents and scientists — while reading more than 1,200 pages of documents detailing conflicts between rock climbers, neighbours, environmental organizations and government agencies about this slice of escarpment. 

Several document packages made accessible through freedom of information legislation and either obtained by or shared with The Narwhal show a paper trail of a conflict that goes far beyond squabbles between neighbours and climbers. It shows how the actions — or inactions — of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks have allowed the situation to deteriorate so dramatically.

The most recent chapter of this story dates back to May 2023, when Ontario Parks, which falls under the provincial Environment Ministry, put up signs closing several climbing routes in particularly ecologically sensitive areas in Devil’s Glen. That summer, climbers spoke with news outlets, posted on social media, wrote blogs to criticize the “unprecedented” decision and, according to one of the document packages, emailed Ontario Parks staff to say the move was taken in “bad faith.”

By August that year, the documents show, the office of then-environment minister David Piccini had ordered all the remaining signs be removed — even though at least one government biologist argued removing the signs had “no scientific rationale.” Climbing has continued indiscriminately in the park since. Ontario Parks did not respond to a request for comment or specific questions for this story.

Creating a rock-climbing route is a fairly invasive procedure. Climbers use folding saws, garden shears and crowbars to pry off loose and wiggly rocks. In a detailed guide to “Route Building 101,” the Association of West Kootenay Rock Climbers in B.C. reminds climbers: “Bushes and small trees that stick out of cracks need to have the roots removed to avoid future growth. Hacking away at small stumps with a hatchet might be necessary.” Other advice is to use an “old ice axe” to remove roots from the cracks. Climbers use battery-powered hammer drills to affix bolts to the cliff face to clip on to — permanent anchors to catch them if they fall. 

The Narwhal spoke with Mike Penney, volunteer president of the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, about these concerns. He’s been targeted for disputing Ontario Parks’ efforts to close some areas off to climbing, and shared photos of posters in which his likeness is shown arguing about the scientific evidence behind those closures. The posters were shared on social media and, he said, left on the vehicles of climbers. “I’m not denying that there is an impact to our natural environment through climbing,” he says. “But I would argue that climbing has the least amount of impact out of any recreational sport that you could think of.”

The Pearces don’t agree with that assessment. They say they’ve seen sensitive plants ripped from the cliff face, tree limbs sawed off and a path built with gravel chipped off the side of the cliffs to allow for easier access. With more than 140 rock-climbing routes across the approximately 700 metres of escarpment within the park, they became increasingly worried about the ecosystem — the hundreds of bats that pour from caves and cracks in the fall and cedars that sprout from cliff faces in ways that seem to defy nature.

It made them de facto vigilantes. “We watched them start vandalizing the cliff and we reported it numerous times to Ontario Parks,” Pearce said, as we looked up at a route. Climbers are fond of quirky monikers, giving routes names such as Mystery of a Lost History, Hyperion and Sympathy for the Devil.

“Holly and I would come across them and say, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on? You’re not allowed to do that.’ And they tell us to mind our own business,” Pearce said. 

In turn, the Pearces have been accused by climbers of destroying routes, stealing equipment and egging cars — all of which they deny.

“We never thought that it would affect us on a level that it has,” Pearce said, saying the couple has received calls in the middle of the night with people threatening to burn their house down. “[The Ontario Provincial Police] told me I should always have a body cam walking in the park.”

The Ontario Provincial Police said it was unable to comment on detailed questions from The Narwhal about the number of calls for service, investigative actions or whether charges have been laid.

Over the years, the Pearces have sent more than 100 emails and made dozens of phone calls to Ontario Parks. In response, in 2026, the provincial agency issued them a cease and desist letter for excessive emails, phone calls and social media posts, which the ministry said are “inappropriate and serve no constructive purpose.” The consequences of breaking the cease and desist order were not specified, but the Pearces have continued emailing park staff.

To the Pearces, the letter is another roadblock in understanding how recreation and conservation are being balanced in the park — if they are at all.

“We’re not trying to say there shouldn’t be rock climbing,” Pearce said. “All we are asking for is that Ontario Parks does their job.”

A month after the Pearces were told to cease and desist, the Parks department issued a new management plan explicitly permitting climbing in Devil’s Glen. The plan, issued under current Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, states climbing “will be secondary to the protection of the cliff’s important geological, biological and cultural heritage,” and that a “leave no trace ethic” will act as the guiding principle. 

The plan sets out broad protections for the park, but doesn’t include details on how they’ll be enforced. As a “non-operating” park, there is no permanent office or on-site superintendent at Devil’s Glen. The plan does say park authorities can put up fencing and signs to keep climbers off particularly sensitive areas — again.

Derek Morningstar said he first visited Devil’s Glen in 2024, after being invited by an Ontario Parks specialist to research bats in the area. “We could tell right away that that was a pretty important place for bats,” the ecologist and founder of the bat research company Myotistar said in an interview. “There’s a huge amount of bats flying along there during the swarming season, and there are crevices and caves we think that haven’t been explored. Certainly they’re swarming there and probably hibernating there as well — several endangered species.”

Six of the province’s eight bat species have been found in the area, many of which are currently listed as endangered thanks to widespread fungal disease and habitat loss. This includes the eastern small-footed myotis and little brown bats, whose numbers have declined significantly in recent years.

In an April 2025 email contained in one of the document packages, Morningstar wrote to Ron Gould, an ecologist and protected areas specialist at Ontario Parks also studying the Devil Glen’s ecosystem. He shared his observations with the Parks staffer saying the location was one of the most significant swarming sites he had ever worked at: “It seems like during the swarming season, bats are just about everywhere in that area.”

His findings supported what Ontario Parks scientists had found, and sought to protect back in 2023 when the agency erected signs prohibiting climbing at 23 of the park’s existing routes. The signs went up in three sensitive areas that housed rare ferns, roosting bats and cliff-nesting birds across a 100-metre length of the escarpment in the park, a fraction of the climbable cliff face.

Gould said he was unable to give comment for this story due to fear of reprisal, but the documents contain an email he sent to his boss, Greg Wilson, the southwest zone manager for Ontario Parks, in May 2023. “These protection areas still leave a significant climbing opportunity,” wrote Gould, who has worked with species at risk and habitat protection at provincial agencies for more than two decades. 

For the Pearces, the signs were a win. But, the move was unpopular with climbers. In May 2023, Penney, with the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, wrote an email to Ontario Parks staff saying, “We are extremely disturbed by this development.” 

“If this is official signage, this is a statement by Ontario Parks that there is no longer any interest in ongoing communication, or a consultative relationship with the climbing community.”

Parks manager Wilson also declined to be interviewed for this story. But emails show his reply to Penney: “The signage was installed by Ontario Parks to protect the most sensitive ecological values in Devil’s Glen Provincial Park. … The intention of the signage is to notify park visitors that these areas should not be disturbed. We are still very much interested in an open and collaborative relationship with the [alliance].”

Things didn’t quite play out that way. 

“We realized that we actually needed to mobilize the climbing community,” Penney told The Narwhal. In an attempt to get the environment minister’s attention, the group solicited nearly 4,000 letters, he said, to reopen climbing in all areas of the park.

In his interview with The Narwhal, Penney said Ontario Parks had closed “the entirety of Devil’s Glen to rock climbing” in 2023. When The Narwhal asked about the discrepancy between that statement and Ontario Parks records showing only 23 routes of 140 routes had been closed, he replied: “I don’t really see why that matters,” adding the route count was incorrect, and that substantially more than 23 routes were closed. 

Penney said he used to spend 30 to 50 days each year climbing at Devil’s Glen. He loves the blue-ish grey limestone and the challenging routes. “One of the privileges in walking through these places is also learning about the environment and learning about some of the species that you’re now walking in amongst,” Penney said over the phone while driving home from his day job as a business development manager for a soup company.

He said he visits the area less now, given escalated tensions. He told The Narwhal that climbers have described being threatened, called racial slurs, filmed while relieving themselves in the woods and having the bolts they use to fasten themselves to the cliffs cut off.

He told The Narwhal about an email he received in his role at the alliance, sent from Adam Pearce to the climbers and other stakeholders in September 2025: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted.” But Pearce told The Narwhal this was taken out of context and was only part of the picture. The Narwhal reviewed the email, which read in full: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted without full transparency and accountability. The community will not tolerate policy built on silence and spin.” 

After the “No Climbing” signs went up in spring 2023, some of them were vandalized, according to an email from Wilson contained in a freedom of information package. Meanwhile, climbers’ protest letters flooded in and, in May 2023, Ministry of Environment staff had a meeting with representatives from the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. There, according to the minutes, Penney raised concerns about the “continued involvement” of unnamed Ontario Parks staff members and proposed bringing in third-party biologists to validate the agency’s science.

When asked about this by The Narwhal, Penney criticized the research done by Ontario Parks’ ecologists. He said he could not be more specific about the methodology or scope, as the alliance hadn’t actually seen the ministry’s research informing the closure decision, but said the route count Ontario Parks used when planning the closures was incorrect.

Within a few months, internal emails show, then-environment minister Piccini’s office specifically directed Ontario Parks to remove the signs. Soon after that, Gould raised concerns.

Weeks after the signs came down, Gould wrote to Wilson and other colleagues that he had received reports of climbers developing new routes in Devil’s Glen and “installing new bolts directly within our previously posted protection areas.”

In October, Gould wrote: “There has been no scientific rationale involved in the removal of the signed protection areas so hopefully we can get those back in place soon. These ongoing climbing activities within the sensitive areas are likely to cause further user conflicts and impacts to park values, both of which should be avoided in our protected areas.”

About a year later, records show Gould was told by his manager, Wilson, to postpone work at the park. “As a reminder, it is my expectation you will consult with me and receive approval from me prior to performing any work related to Devil’s Glen,” Wilson wrote in a September 2024 response to an email from Gould with subject line, “Trip safety plan for Devil’s Glen and [redacted].” Wilson continued that he “would like to hold on this work for the time being,” and added he was working to get an update on the proposed amendment to the park management plan.

Wilson did not respond to questions about why signs were removed, or whether Parks biologists were asked to hold off on work at Devil’s Glen.

Ontario Parks did not confirm whether Gould still worked on the Devil’s Glen file at the time of writing, and The Narwhal has since learned he was dismissed from his work at the agency altogether. An email sent to him on Oct. 6, bounced back, saying his account was not found on the Ontario government’s email service. He was the only protected areas specialist listed for Devil’s Glen and the larger southwest parks zone on Ontario Parks’ website.

Around the time Gould was directed to hold off of work at the park, in fall 2024, a member of the alliance’s Facebook page posted that they’d heard of a climber being “approached aggressively close and made to feel uncomfortable by a man and a woman” saying climbing was not allowed on a route in Devil’s Glen. 

Penney responded, encouraging climbers to use all portions of the park and adjacent Crown land, saying: “Climbing is permitted at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park, on the entirety of the cliff.” He wrote that climbing was allowed and encouraged by Ontario Parks and the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. “Please please please continue to climb at [Devil’s Glen], enjoy yourself.”

Penney wrote to The Narwhal in an Oct. 7, email saying, “We recognize that there are legitimate conservation concerns and strongly support responsible environmental stewardship. The concern is that the conflict has, in our view, escalated beyond a normal policy disagreement.”

The Niagara Escarpment curves up from western New York, through southern Ontario and runs along Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula before heading back south to parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Devil’s Glen sits along its eastern portion in Ontario, a part of the important, delicate ecosystem that researchers and Ontario Parks officials have understood the importance of protecting for decades.

Among those experts is Doug Larson, a retired researcher and University of Guelph professor, who began studying North America’s escarpments in the 1980s.

“We found trees that were almost 10 times older than anything found elsewhere in Ontario,” Larson said of the Niagara Escarpment, over the phone from his home in Guelph. “It really is the last undisturbed stand of forests in eastern North America because of the fact people can’t get to it.”

That is, unless they climb.

In his 2004 book about the ancient cliff face forests in the Niagara Escarpment, The Last Stand, Larson wrote about European immigrants who introduced rock climbing to the Niagara Escarpment after the Second World War. “Trees hundreds of years old came in direct contact with humans for the first time,” he wrote. 

Then, at the turn of the millenium, the advent of indoor climbing gyms and advances in climbing equipment made rock climbing more accessible and popular than ever. It spread across the escarpment. “Sawn stumps and branches are visual reminders that the climbers have not simply chosen rock with fewer trees,” Larson wrote.

The twisted trees, mostly cedars, cling to the face of the escarpment. Standing only one to three metres tall, with trunks as wide as a person’s leg, they may look stunted compared to the towering stereotype of old-growth forests, particularly in B.C. But, Larson said, they represent the oldest undisturbed forest ecosystem this side of the Rocky Mountains. And they’re a biodiversity hot spot, important for nesting birds and endangered mammals. A 2008 study by an Ontario Parks ecologist found Devil’s Glen has an “outstanding total of nine provincially rare” plants including male fern, smooth cliff-brake and green spleenwort.

Through the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, Larson’s research found climbed areas supported substantially fewer plants due to trampling, purposeful removal and soil compaction. He and his teams recommended new climbing routes be banned in protected areas. 

Not everyone was a fan. Ontario Rock Climbing, a website that sells climbing gear, published a post on the history of climbing in the province that references a 1991 study by Larson and colleagues. 

“This study had a very negative impact on the climbing community,” it read, calling this period the “Dark Ages” for outdoor climbing. “Although the results from the study were inconsistent, it led to … a number of other cliffs being closed to climbing. Public opinion became that climbing was not compatible with the Niagara Escarpment.”

Larson argued “there was nothing inconsistent” about his results: “We published that 30 years ago, and we got immediately despised by the climbing community because they didn’t like our story.”

“Climbers need to realize that some restrictions may be required to preserve the cliff face forest in perpetuity,” he wrote in 2004. “One of the main problems is that climbers have had free rein of the escarpment cliffs for over 50 years … it is extremely difficult to modify behaviour that has been entrenched for such a long period of time.”

Alerted by the Pearces, the conservation organization Ontario Nature has also taken an interest in Devil’s Glen. Conservation director Tony Morris said his organization isn’t debating whether climbing and nature can coexist, but whether efforts are actually being made to strike that balance.

“It’s about managing that activity in a way that doesn’t harm those sensitive ecological features,” Morris said. “It means not having just climbing routes appear all over the place, and ensuring climbers aren’t going into areas that bats are hibernating in and aren’t tying ropes off of cedars, 100-year-old cedar trees.”

Having also viewed one of the document packages before sharing it with The Narwhal, Morris said seeing expert staff seemingly being held back from monitoring ecosystems “raises some serious questions about the mandate of Ontario Parks” and about the management of other parks and beyond.

“If park ecologists, whose job it is to monitor ecological health of parks, aren’t allowed to visit the parks, that seems strange,” Morris said. He said he has struggled to get information from the Environment Ministry about internal scientific studies done at Devil’s Glen.

“This is just such a strange situation that it’s gone this far,” Morris said. “When you combine it with what else we’re seeing across the province in terms of attacks on natural heritage. It’s part of a bigger picture, in the sense that, even the areas that are supposed to be managed primarily for ecological integrity, it raises serious questions if that’s the case anymore.”

In 2025, two years after the ‘no climbing’ signs were put up and quickly removed, the Ministry of Environment posted a notice to amend the Devil’s Glen Provincial Park management plan on the provincial environmental registry, and opened it up for public comment. The amendment included listing rock climbing as a permitted use in the park. 

More than 600 comments were submitted. Over 90 per cent supported the proposal, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and managing rock climbing within the park. A minority expressed concerns about environmental impacts on cliff habitats and species such as ancient cedar trees and bats.

In April 2026, climbing became a permitted use in the park.

“Ecological integrity remains the top priority, and Ontario Parks will manage ecologically sustainable recreational uses and rock climbing at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park with ecological integrity in mind,” the decision reads.

The Ontario Alliance of Climbers credits this to their campaigning. One of its websites describes this regulation change as “the first such plan for an Ontario Provincial Park,” adding, “We are optimistic that this will be the first of many such plans. We need you, the climbing community, to write submissions supporting this plan … we are so close to clipping the chains.”

“I have a great relationship with Greg Wilson,” Penney told The Narwhal in mid-September about the alliance’s “productive conversations” with the Environment Ministry. “And they agreed that this was something that was long overdue, and put their support behind some resources to help Ontario Parks and help our partners there do what was necessary internally.” 

Penney told The Narwhal that “climbers are great stewards and advocates of our lands and of our climbing areas.”

When The Narwhal visited Devil’s Glen in August, shiny metal bolts were visible across the cliff face. There were no signs telling climbers which sensitive areas to avoid, even though Ontario Parks’ plan sanctioning climbing references a study that “recommended restricting climbing and access routes to the most disturbed areas where continued use is not likely to worsen existing impacts.”

The plan gives Ontario Parks the right to close routes deemed sensitive to climbing activity, and to prevent new routes from being established given that cliff area is “highly saturated … and the need or capacity to create new route opportunities is generally low.”

As we walked, the Pearces picked up garbage from the trail, stashing it in their backpack to throw out later. “You better wash your hands after,” Holly told her husband as he bent toward a personal hygiene product.

After about half hour of hiking, we came across two climbers, readying their gear and resting between routes. They were the only other people using the trail on the quiet Monday morning, and my stomach dropped, anticipating conflict. Holly, too, had readied her phone camera to capture the interaction. The climbers and Pearces exchanged polite, short greetings — remarking on the beautiful, mild weather.

Holly put her phone away. The climbers, now with full permission from Ontario Parks, surveyed their next climb.

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.

Gail Krantzberg spent decades working on Great Lakes policy and protection — years before this whirlwind year of politics on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border crept into the ways the lakes are protected. 

In Canada, U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war has seen federal and provincial legislation introduced in the name of national sovereignty, with major implications for the land, water and air. Now, Trump has given Lake Ontario a new name — at least for the purposes of the U.S. federal government and a couple online mapping services — like Google — that (controversially) followed suit. 

But changing the name doesn’t change the international boundary running through the lake. Nor does the executive order change the agreements and institutions developed by Canada and the United States to manage their shared waters, Krantzberg said.

Krantzberg, now a McMaster University professor, previously served as director of the Great Lakes regional office under the International Joint Commission, an independent organization established by the two countries more than a century ago to resolve disputes over transboundary waters.

Lake Ontario’s name dates back to the 17th century and comes from the Wendat word Ontarïio’, which means the lake is beautiful and great. It’s a part of the Great Lakes system where pollution, invasive species and the effects of a changing climate don’t stop at an international boundary. Protecting the lakes has long depended on governments, scientists and communities on both sides of the border working together.

The framework for that co-operation dates back to the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. The treaty set out how the U.S. and Canada would manage shared waters, including the Great Lakes.

That co-operation expanded in the 1970s as serious pollution problems emerged in Lake Erie. High levels of phosphorus contributed to major algae growth and fish deaths, prompting Canada and the United States to sign the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972. The agreement was updated in 1978, 1987 and again in 2012. It sets shared priorities for protecting the lakes, including controlling invasive species, reducing agricultural pollution or responding to the effects of climate change.

Amidst everything else going on, many people are questioning what, if anything, Lake Ontario’s name change actually means for the Great Lake and the many transboundary efforts to protect it. Here’s what Krantzberg had to say.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your biggest concerns about Lake Ontario right now, in light of the Trump administration changing its name — particularly when it comes to environmental protection and governance?

The name change is, in a way, a distraction from what’s actually happening to the lake. So we start worrying about the name change, and how he can do that and about hundreds of years of history of native naming of Ontario. There’s all this conversation, but it steers the conversation away from what Trump is actually doing for Ontario and all the Great Lakes. 

He’s pro-deregulation. Air emissions from coal-fired utilities, for example, continue to put out more mercury, and that mercury gets into the Great Lakes, the fish and the wildlife or humans that consume them. 

The pushback on banning and phasing out of very persistent chemicals like perfluorinated chemicals or PFASs — some people call them forever chemicals. These things will last in the Great Lakes for centuries, they basically do not break down. They have very detrimental effects on the health of humans as well as wildlife.

The cutting of monitoring — atmospheric monitoring, surveillance monitoring for weather forecasting and climate change modelling — puts not just our understanding of how the lakes are going to behave, but actually shipping at risk. We need to be able to forecast severe weather events so that cities can protect their drinking water for their people and shipping can be protected. 

The cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are really very, very serious. In fact, its Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory was cut by about 35 per cent. You lose the capacity to monitor and understand the lakes, and if you can’t understand the lakes, you can’t protect the lakes.

Beyond changing the name on U.S. maps and federal documents, does this have any practical effect on jurisdiction over Lake Ontario?

No. The only thing that that rename applies to is U.S. federal agencies and institutions. Of course, Trump has managed to get Google and Amazon and others to change their map online. If you go into the map online in the states, you’ll see Lake America. If you go to Canada, you’ll see Lake Ontario. If you go internationally, you’ll see both. 

But frankly, it’s the same body of water and it’s governed the same way. The states do not have to pay attention to it. In fact, we’ve heard the New York State governor say it’s Lake Ontario. Our prime minister and our premier said it’s Lake Ontario and it will always be Lake Ontario. 

In the states, certain federal administrations have to abide by the president’s order. It only applies to their name of Lake America. We don’t know yet, but it should not apply to how it’s managed or the nature of the challenges and threats to the lake.

Does either country have the legal ability to unilaterally assert greater control or jurisdiction over Lake Ontario? If so, what are the limits?

There is no way. Any control is only in terms of control of levels and flows of the lakes. So we can control the levels and flows just to protect commerce, people and ecosystems. For various reasons, we need to control levels and flows and that responsibility lies with the International Joint Commission. It is not driven by a desire by Canada or the United States to do one thing or another.

That said, nobody, no one really controls the lakes. That’s a massive piece of water — you can’t control that. What you can do is make it better or worse on your side of the border. And what we’re worried about right now is that it’s going to get worse on the U.S. side of the border, which means since the water goes all through the system, it will get worse on the Canadian side. One country cannot protect without the other country protecting.

Could a move like this affect the long-standing system of collaboration and shared management between Canada and the United States?

The name of the lake is only about how Trump and Ford don’t like each other, and so Trump said, ‘You know what, bully Mr. Ford. I’m not going to call it Ontario because I don’t like Ontario, so I’m going to call it America.’ That’s all that that is. 

This whole thing about American federal scientists in the United States having a censor happened well over a year ago. I remember getting invited to a conference where this particular invitation said, ‘If you are U.S. federal scientists, check with your administration whether you can attend because this is an international gathering.’ So that was a warning. It’s an international gathering. You may not be able to come and share your knowledge because you’ve been told you’re not supposed to share. 

Now, I don’t know what the rationale is behind that because we’ve always shared information. We’ve always shared science. In fact, when we monitor the Great Lakes, we coordinate surveillance and monitoring. A lot of that monitoring data is now not available to a lot of Canadian scientists who collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on hydrological modelling to understand climate change in the Great Lakes.

I believe co-operation on both sides of the border will continue. And I’ll say this because we have the Conference of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers. They are motivated to work together as a unit, regardless of country. The Great Lakes are a precious resource for their economy, for their social well-being, for their culture and for their people. They continually work on projects and programs to build, strengthen and protect the economy of the Great Lakes region, which is a multitrillion-dollar economy.

That co-operation and collaboration at the governor level is happening. At the mayor’s level, it’s happening. The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative has more than 400 mayors from both sides of the border. They’re passing resolutions on what they will do collectively to protect the waters of the Great Lakes for their shared benefits. 

The only collaboration that will be paused — and I think that’s the right word — is collaboration with U.S. federal scientists. But there are a lot of other scientists in the U.S. that collaborate with Canadian scientists, and that continues. 

But the overall collaboration, we’ve seen before. We saw when Trump came in and wanted to destroy, zero out funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which is a $300-million or so initiative to restore degraded areas around the Great Lakes. The governors said no way. The governor stopped them. It didn’t matter if they were Democrat or Republican. They said that’s jobs, that’s the environment, that creates wealth, that creates beauty in our waterfronts, that increases property values, that’s tax revenue. Like, hands off. This is not frivolous tree-hugging stuff. This is restoration of waters and of well being, and they stopped that.

Do you feel there has been a gap in coverage or public understanding of what this name change actually means for Lake Ontario?

There’s a lot of anger. There’s some people who laugh. You can call it what you want. It’s still Lake Ontario. 

But I would hope that the focus is on how we all work to ensure the lake stays protected. How do we ensure we do what we can, even as individuals, to do our part to be stewards for the lakes?

One of the messages that I’m hoping will come out of all of this is let’s not get distracted by a name change that will eventually be reversed anyway. Once Trump is gone, it’s not going to stick. That’s my prediction. I could be wrong. Let’s not get distracted by a political jockeying of position and power mongering. Let’s focus on what’s important, and that is the health of the Great Lakes.

Rajpreet Sahota is a community and policy reporting fellow. Her position is funded in part by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input.

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Aquatic global change ecologist Mary Jade (MJ) Farruggia found herself studying the impact of wildfires on lakes by accident. She was researching lakes in the mountains of California in the summer of 2020 when, in “a tragic turn of events,” wildfires swept through the area, smoke clouded the sky and her plans quickly changed.

“Wildfires are becoming more intense and more frequent, and so it just became a phenomenon that was getting harder and harder to ignore,” Farruggia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, told The Narwhal over the phone. “As lake scientists, we started wondering, ‘what’s the impact of this on the systems that we study?’ ”

Canada is home to two million lakes, more than any other country. And the last three wildfire seasons have been among the worst on record here, making research like Farruggia’s critical.

A record-breaking season in 2023 saw 15 million hectares of forest burned across Canada. The land hasn’t had much reprieve since. This year more than 4,700 fires burned more than four million hectares across the country by the end of August — many in Ontario.

“We as humans feel the impacts of [wildfire smoke],” Farruggia said. “If it’s affecting your own health, how is it also affecting your ecosystems and the nature around you and the systems that you rely on? Is your favourite lake going to be similarly impacted by smoke?”

‘Almost all’ North American lakes are exposed to wildfire smoke: researchers

Some of the direct impacts of wildfires on ecosystems are straightforward; as fires burn near lakes, they increase future flood risk, as plants that stabilize soil and filter runoff go up in smoke. Ash deposits contaminants and excess nutrients into the water, changing the makeup of watersheds.

For each lake and fire, the full impact depends on a slew of variables, including “the number of wildfires, their intensity, their location, the health of the ecosystem before the fire and even how much rain falls following a fire,” Terri-Lee Reid, a freshwater conservation researcher at the Canadian Wildlife Federation, said.

Less clear is how lake ecosystems far away from fires are being impacted as smoke travels, and Reid says there’s still more to learn. But, the science is much newer, and scientists like Farruggia and her colleagues spend their time designing and performing experiments to figure it out.

“Sometimes we get these summers where it feels like much of North America is covered in smoke,” said Steven Sadro, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. He is also Farruggia’s co-author and former advisor. “This is smoke that’s affecting millions of lakes at continental scales.”

Sadro and Farruggia coined the term “lake-smoke day,” which provides a metric referring to the number of days a lake is exposed to smoke in a fire season. They found wildfire smoke can drift hundreds of miles away from its source, making its impact widespread.

“We found a pretty shocking response … that almost all lakes in North America experience some number of smoke exposure days,” Sadro said, adding that many of them were experiencing a full month or more over the course of a year.

“Smoke in the atmosphere can reduce the amount of sunlight that can reach the lake, and that can impact water temperature. It can impact the growth of algae and aquatic plants, and then that can have further consequences,” Reid said.

Their research suggests that smoke blocks sunlight from reaching lakes, lowering lake temperatures and reducing photosynthesis and respiration in the body of water. 

What happens next is harder to predict. A lake’s depth, clarity, size, location and nutrient levels all influence how it responds to smoke. Larger lakes can be more resilient while smaller, clearer lakes can experience more algae growth due to the new nutrient deposits.

“The jury is really out on the magnitude of the impact. I’m not trying to say that millions of lakes in North America are having very large impacts from wildfire smoke. Some of them certainly may be,” Sadro said. “We don’t know what those numbers are yet.”

‘When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either’

While researchers work to untangle those relationships, Amy Cardinal Christianson, director of fire stewardship for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, says Indigenous Knowledge has long recognized the interconnection between fire, water and land.

She pointed to historical examples along the west coast where Indigenous communities have been aware of the cooling effect of smoke on waterways that western science has also recently ventured into. For example in California, when it was too hot for salmon to spawn, Cardinal Christianson said cultural burns would be used to help create a layer of smoke over the water to cool it and help the fish.

But while fire can be used beneficially, it can also cause harm to waterways.

“People often think of [a] lake as its own ecosystem, which it is, but it’s really tied into everything that’s around it,” Cardinal Christianson said. “When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either.”

She explained that, instead of having separate plans for forest management, watershed management and more, “we need to start looking at things much more holistically.”

“For Indigenous people, our teachings are that everything is interconnected and related. So when these fires are happening, one of the big concerns for us is the impacts on water,” Cardinal Christianson said. “It’s a constant worry in the back of my head, just like, what [are] going to be the long-term effects to the water that we rely on?”

The challenges of studying how wildfires affect lakes

Farruggia is part of a working group of 30 American and Canadian scientists looking for answers. The group includes Scott Higgins, senior research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area — a natural freshwater laboratory spanning almost 60 lakes in Kenora in northwestern Ontario.

“We work in the field and we certainly notice, especially during those intensive fire years, the smog and the ash clouds that drift over our site,” Higgins said. The boreal forest that spans Canada, including around Kenora, is sometimes referred to as a “fire forest” because its ecosystems are both flammable, and reliant on fire to help remove insects, disease and aged trees, allowing for new life to emerge.

“This is a really lake-intensive part of Canada,” Higgins said. “When the boreal forest burns, undoubtedly lakes are directly impacted.”

But while interest in researching the impacts of wildfires on lakes has been increasing as fire seasons become longer and more intense, he said the science is still in its infancy.

One problem, he said, is that, “it’s tough to do experiments on actual wildfires.”

It is often difficult for researchers to get into an area quickly after a fire to study the immediate impacts. Even if they can, there often isn’t data from before the fire to compare it to. To try to counteract this and build a better understanding, Higgins said, his team is planning to use the extensive, long-term data collected at the Experimental Lakes Area to its benefit, including adding wildfire ash directly into a lake to study the outcome, and to work with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to use a prescribed burn for study. 

“We’ll be able to put some pretty good numbers on how important these fires are to nutrient cycles and to metal cycles and to what they mean for biota,” or the animals and plants living in that environment, Higgins said. “I think science is going to be able to provide in the next five to 10 years for sure.”

In the meantime, Farruggia said the early evidence offers reason to be hopeful — even in sensitive, smaller and more remote lakes. 

“Lakes are actually very resilient systems. Even though we see there’s lots of sensitivity, especially in smaller, lower nutrient lakes, we have seen that they recover pretty quickly so far,” Farruggia said. “Lake resilience is something that I think could be celebrated.”

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Yvonne Zawada leads us down a long hallway where pipes and electrical conduits snake their way along walls.

We’re deep in the guts of the Lemieux Island Water Purification Plant, on the eponymous island in the middle of the Ottawa River.

“It’s a little bit like a maze,” plant manager Zawada says as we emerge into a high-ceilinged room filled with industrial-sized pumps, generators and other equipment.

She crouches next to one of the screens used to remove debris like branches and leaves, and opens up a service panel. Inside, the raw river water smells musty.

“What we pull in is this tea-like coloured water,” she says. It’s an apt comparison: the colour comes from organic materials like decomposing plant matter, which release tannins into the water just like tea leaves.

But in drinking water, it’s one of the many components that need to be screened out, filtered and disinfected before it can be sent through roughly 3,000 kilometres of distribution pipes.

Along with the Britannia plant in the west end of the city, Lemieux Island treats most of the 275 million litres of drinking water that close to a million Ottawans consume each day. (For residents in outlying communities, the city also has six groundwater well systems that are treated separately.)

What comes out of most Ottawans’ taps originates in the Ottawa River’s drainage basin, a huge, mostly forested landscape that stretches across 146,300 square kilometres of Quebec and Ontario. It covers roughly as much area as the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

The river draws on a dense network of tributaries and many wetlands that act as natural filters.

Because the Lemieux Island and Britannia plants draw directly from the Ottawa River, their operations rely on governments safeguarding that source water — not only by continuing to carry out rigorous treatment and testing, but also by protecting the watershed.

Those protections could be threatened, critics say, by recent federal legislation that would shift the way environmental projects are assessed, along with a provincial government push to speed up development by overhauling the system for managing watersheds.

Access to clean water is not equal across Canada

If you live in a big Canadian city, it’s easy to take the clean drinking water that flows from your taps for granted.

But as of Sept. 10, the federal government is still tracking 38 active long-term drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves across the provinces, except for in British Columbia where figures are tracked separately. As of Aug. 31, there were a total of 30 long-term drinking water advisories in effect across B.C.

In 2015, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to end drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves within five years (although he was excluding B.C. First Nations when he made that promise.)

The Trudeau government admitted in 2020 that, although it had lifted close to 100 advisories by then, it would still miss its target.

Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the government has refused to commit to a new deadline for ending drinking water advisories, although it says it is still working towards lifting them. In December 2025, the Federal Court found Canada has a certain duty to First Nations to take reasonable measures to provide them with safe drinking water, and in June, the government unveiled new legislation it said would help “unlock” funding for communities to tackle their drinking water issues properly.

That bill is currently sitting at the beginning of the process for getting legislation passed in Canada, so the government will have to move it forward before it can become law.

Straight to the source of Ottawa’s drinking water

Even where there is purportedly clean drinking water, crises do occur. In 2000, in the southern Ontario town of Walkerton, seven people died and roughly 2,300 people became sick after farm manure contaminated a well. The fallout from the crisis led to the creation of committees that oversee the sources of drinking water in Ontario, called source protection committees.

Ottawa has its own history of ignoring waterborne health threats, to tragic results, and it’s one of the reasons the Lemieux Island plant exists.

For much of its existence in the 19th and 20th centuries the national capital region, which includes Ottawa on the south side of the river and Gatineau on the north side in Quebec, has dealt with successive public health concerns over sanitation.

There was pollution from sawmills during the timber trade, and even raw sewage dumped into the river as the local population began to climb, leading to waves of typhoid fever in the early 20th century.

For years, the poorer districts of the town dealt with typhoid-related deaths that were effectively ignored, even though health officials would have known by then that chlorine could be used as a disinfectant, according to a column by James Powell, a director of the Historical Society of Ottawa.

A typhoid epidemic between 1911 and 1912 killed 185 people in Ottawa, with thousands of other cases reported, Powell wrote.

Construction on the Lemieux Island Water Purification Plant began in 1928 and the plant opened in 1932. Standing in the marble-clad main hallway, Zawada said the city “built this plant in response to public health concerns.” It received a heritage designation in 2024.

The capital region continued to deal with contamination, from industrial activity as well as sewage. Ottawa opened a wastewater treatment plant in 1962 that continues to operate today as well as a sewage overflow tunnel in 2020.

While the water quality is much better than it was in the decades past, there are still issues and threats to that source water.

For one, there are the more simple challenges, like those brought on by Ottawa’s infamous winters, when slush and tiny ice particles called frazil ice can build up on the metal surfaces of the intake at Lemieux Island, Zawada said.

“If you go to Dairy Queen and get a slushie, that’s kind of what it is,” she said. “We call them slush puppies, or slush pods, because they float on the water and they can plug up our screens.”

Then there are the more complicated threats. In early 2026, for example, the federal government fined a Quebec company $1.35 million under the Fisheries Act for discharging sodium chlorite, which is harmful to fish, from its chemical manufacturing plant into the Lièvre River, which drains into the Ottawa River.

Ottawa Riverkeeper, a charitable organization, says other threats, spanning from municipal and agricultural runoff to the destruction of wetlands, alterations to the river from its many dams and other human impacts like boating, are also applying pressure on the watershed.

Another issue is climate change: more than 6,000 people reported flooded basements after intense summer rainstorms in July and August overwhelmed drainage systems. July was the rainiest month in Ottawa’s history.

Federal climate scientists have concluded that heavy rains and flash floods will become more frequent and more severe in Canada due to climate change.

City officials say that, while the drainage systems “could not move water away quickly enough,” drinking water services themselves remained operational.

Providing clean drinking water also doesn’t end at the plant. A recent Canadian Environmental Law Association report found a few schools in Ottawa have high levels of lead in their drinking water.

No matter how pure the water is coming out of a treatment plant, it can still pick up contaminants, for example if it runs through pipes in older buildings that aren’t flushed properly or tested regularly.

Aside from being treated, how is water protected in Canada?

Health Canada sets out thresholds for concentrations of certain substances in water, like lead or mercury, drinking water is ultimately regulated by the provinces.

In Ontario, that’s seen its share of changes.

For one, the Ford government is moving ahead with amalgamating the conservation authorities tasked with protecting watersheds, from 36 organizations into nine regional authorities.

That shift, which becomes official in February 2027, has raised concerns among staff at authorities and the source protection committees that work closely with them. The province has said it’s not making any “fundamental” changes to source protection committees.

The federal government is also proposing changes to environmental oversight through new legislation, Bill C-39.

Among many changes, the bill proposes to force all projects subject to federal reviews to be approved or rejected within one year. That would mean all environmental and other analyses would be carried out over a matter of months.

Standing in front of a map of the watershed, Zawada argues there’s limited development that affects the water quality of the Ottawa River. “It has very little impact because of the region that it covers being forested,” she said.

The environmental advocacy group Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement has warned this timeline won’t work for large-scale projects that can often involve complex risks to watersheds, as well as to other factors like wildlife.

These risks can require long-term studies, and their complexity demands meaningful consultations with First Nations and significant public input, they said.

After the federal government proposed a series of similar changes for environmental assessments in a discussion paper back in May, Ottawa Riverkeeper said it could “significantly weaken environmental protections.”

To keep drinking water safe, it takes environmental protections for watersheds, health and safety rules and diligent 24/7 testing and monitoring — like the more than 100,000 water quality tests each year done by the City of Ottawa.

“We have some of the best water around the globe, because of our source water and the process that we use,” Zawada says. “Our water is very safe.”

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Norm Lamothe soiled his undies twice. The second time, he was much happier with the result. 

Soiled them — in a manner of speaking that is. After two months, buried in the ground, the cotton fabric of a once-pristine set of white men’s briefs had largely disappeared, and mostly just the elastic waistband remained. It was a sign changes in farming techniques were paying off. 

Lamothe runs the family-owned Woodleigh Farms outside Peterborough, Ont. Far from the realm of bodily functions, the brief burial experiment — dubbed a “Soil Your Undies” test — is popular in farm country. It’s a simple, albeit cheekily named, way of measuring just how active the tiny organisms like bacteria and fungi are in soil — and by extension, how healthy the soil is. Just bury a plain cotton undergarment, wait a couple months and dig it back up. The organisms chew up the natural cotton fabric, so more microbial activity means a more degraded undergarment. Dig up a fully intact set of tighty-whiteys, and you know the soil in that area needs some TLC. 

Lamothe first diagnosed his poor soil by doing a Soil Your Undies test in 2015.

“That’s really what started my journey down the soil health path,” Lamothe says, standing in front of one full pair of Hanes and the tattered remains of another, lovingly displayed on his office wall. “Much to our chagrin, they were completely intact.”

It was a self-described “wake-up call” to improve his farm’s practices for the climate, biodiversity and his own business resilience. 

The environmental impact of farming is an extraordinarily complicated subject, and the footprint agriculture leaves is suitably quite varied. In terms of emissions, agriculture accounts for about eight per cent of our national total, or 10 per cent if you include emissions from energy use on farms. The culprits are many: nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, can escape to the atmosphere from soil. Cattle, sheep and other ruminant livestock create methane — another greenhouse gas — through their digestive processes and release it into the atmosphere, mostly by way of belching. And carbon dioxide is released by decaying plant matter.

Another major source of emissions is fossil fuels. Diesel, made from crude oil, is the main fuel source for the vast majority of tractors and other farm equipment, and fossil fuels — used on and off farms — are the single greatest contributor to climate change globally.

On the flip side, some farming methods can also be a real boon for ecology. Grazing cattle on native grasslands or in pastures with a diverse array of plants (called forage crops in farming circles) can benefit soil health and bird communities, while sequestering enormous amounts of carbon. On the other hand, regular ploughing and excessive fertilizer use can be harmful to soil and waterways. When it comes to environmental impact, the reality on the ground often necessitates doing things that are both better and worse for the environment.

Lamothe isn’t unique in his drive to find climate solutions on his farm. He joined peer groups like the Ontario Soil Network and Farmers for Climate Solutions for guidance, and to support others looking to make positive change. There are farmers and ranchers across Canada — and across the globe — doing this work. I’ve had the good fortune to meet many of them, as a farmer myself, as well as a journalist. They are doing their best to produce the food and commodities we all rely on, in a way that leaves the land in a better place. Some are motivated by water quality and biodiversity, others by profitability and resiliency in the face of extreme weather conditions like heat waves, floods and drought. Some have their eye on trade disruptions and other business challenges forcing them to rethink the status quo. 

Each has a compelling story. And not every one involves undies.

Energy

Lamothe’s farmyard sits at the end of a meandering tree-flanked driveway, eventually opening to buildings set partway up a gentle slope. The landscape here is a mix of rolling pasture, cropland and woodland — all things a flat-lander like myself can appreciate; from the centre of the county where my family farms in southwestern Ontario, it’s so flat you can see the skyscrapers of metropolitan Detroit, about 33 kilometres away as the crow flies, on a clear day. From Lamothe’s driveway, I can’t even see the extent of his property.

Photographer Bryan Dickie and I arrive to find Lamothe in the greenhouse near a cluster of outbuildings and then a pasture where a flock of sheep graze at the far end. Past the outbuildings, we can see the beginnings of his crop fields.

As is typical on farms, there is a little bit of everything everywhere at Woodleigh. Not messy, but clearly busy.

Lamothe is rinsing a pile of plastic flower pots used in the greenhouse —  a structure he calls a “passive solar” facility. It’s built with a sloped roof to capture ambient heat at the peak. That heat gets pulled down into the ground where it’s stored in ducts during the hottest parts of the day. That heat can then be recovered in the cooler months, and at night when the temperature drops, keeping the greenhouse above freezing, even when it is -25 C outside. No additional heating is needed.

Reducing fossil fuel use, as it turns out, is just one of Lamothe’s many proclivities. Norm assures me he “absolutely loves” his fully electric pickup truck, not least because it saves him about $6,500 a year in fuel. 

Another is soil health, ever since that fateful and telling first untarnished pair of Hanes.

Soil

The two most common field crops in Ontario are seed corn — the kind used for animal feed, ethanol and myriad other purposes — and soybeans, both for human and livestock consumption. Winter wheat, which is planted in autumn, typically into recently harvested soybean fields, takes third place. A typical yearly crop rotation for farmers in much of Ontario will involve at least a couple of these. What farmers plant ultimately comes down to economics. Corn and soybeans tend to pay better than winter grains, meaning the latter can sometimes fall out of favour.

Soil health, however, thrives on diversity. 

Keeping different crops in the rotation adds different root structures, helping to break up hard soil to create better water retention and provide a more biodiverse environment that, in turn, supports a wider (read: healthier) variety of soil organisms. Long-term research trials from the University of Guelph have shown more diversity helps build soil health, as well as crop yields. 

Lamothe’s crop rotation was once dominated by corn and soybeans. Adding wheat and oats was one of the first things he did after failing that undies test. When I visit in July, Lamothe’s fields are flush with corn, soybeans and oats. He’ll sow winter wheat on some of his soybean acres later in the year. On areas of the farm that have historically been less productive, he planted trees and native grasses. Cover crops — planted to improve soil, rather than for harvest and sale — will go on his winter wheat fields after they’re harvested.

He also started growing hay on areas prone to erosion, so there would always be roots present to anchor the soil. 

Then came the sheep. 

In 2022, Lamothe brought in the flock to graze the hay. The manure from the sheep flock also reintroduces nutrients to the fields — alongside compost Lamothe makes from wood chips, crop residue and other organic waste. 

Ten years after burying his first pair of britches, Lamothe tried soiling his undies again. The results were much better.

“Whether the change came from our practices or differing weather conditions is up for debate, but certainly we saw we had microbial activity,” he says, adding the physical remains, framed in his office, “make a nice conversation piece with people in here wondering why there is underwear on the wall.”

Carbon

A common challenge for farmers — myself included — is ensuring crops get the nutrients they need at the right time. Sometimes there might not be enough of a given nutrient in the soil, like phosphorus or boron. In other cases, the amount is fine, but they timing is off. 

Fertilizers help, which brings us to another outbuilding on Lamothe’s farm. This one is rich with the smell of barbecue smoke. 

It was the main farm workshop in a past life, a large steel shed that’s more steampunk than down-in-the-country. Conveyor belts and hay bale elevators connect two large trailers with steel sifters, feeding into a cylindrical dryer the size of a bus. It’s all part of Lamothe’s latest venture: a biochar production system.

Biochar is a black, charcoal-like substance created by heating organic material, like wood, in an oxygen-free environment (known as pyrolysis, if you’re technically inclined). The process starts with wood chips from the farm’s forestry business — as I said, there’s a little bit of everything here — which are loaded from old trailers, previously used for hauling potatoes, onto the conveyors and sifters, where they’re sorted by size. Chips that are too big or small are removed for composting, while what remains is put through the dryer, then into a burner.

“Ecologically speaking, this plant is very efficient because we’re using the energy it’s creating to run the whole system,” Lamothe says. And even the acidic byproduct of this process, known as “wood vinegar” — a product similar to the liquid smoke you might use in barbecue sauce — has valuable properties for soil. It helps with plant growth and acts as a natural pesticide.

Biochar is full of carbon, which when added to soil, becomes soil organic carbon — an indicator of good soil health. It helps to regulate nutrients in the soil, microbial activity and moisture. Combined with compost and manure, that can translate to more nutrients slowly released to crops over a long period.

“We’re taking all that carbon that would otherwise go up in the atmosphere and sequestering it in these particles that are going into the soil forever,” Lamothe says. On an annual basis, running at full capacity, the system will sequester 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, making approximately 500 tonnes of biochar. 

“That’s net — after all the trucking, the forestry activities, moving of materials,” Lamothe says. “That’s pretty remarkable, and it says something about what could be done at scale for the environment in this country.”

Biodiversity

On the other side of the urban hive that is the Greater Toronto Area, and closer to my own family’s farm, I find myself looking at a beautiful herd of Hereford cattle. They’re grazing, rather lazily, in what to the untrained eye might look like a pasture overrun by weeds.

It’s actually a 19-acre tallgrass prairie, established by farmer Blake Vince in 2018. Here, outside Chatham, Ont., we’re in what’s known as the Carolinian forest zone that covers the southernmost part of Ontario, and peters out just north of Toronto. Vince is cultivating grasses like big bluestem, flowers like black-eyed Susan, prairie dock and much more. My favourite might be the compass plant, with its weird leathery leaves that look almost tropical. The prairie has become Vince’s self-described “happy place,” and is the result of years spent trying to improve his farm’s ecology.

Vince planted the tallgrass prairie as part of a federal government initiative to bring at-risk species back to agricultural lands. Insects, birds — and the birders that come with them — have arrived from near and far. One memorable birding visitor, Boris from Bulgaria, encouraged Vince to sell coffee at the roadside. “He said ‘Charge $10 a cup. People will pay. You’ll make money,’ ” Vince says with a chuckle. As of this writing, he’s opted to not pursue that particular revenue stream.

Most recently, the cattle brought the prairie pasture to another level. 

Despite their reputation as a source of methane — a potent greenhouse gas that breaks down into carbon dioxide over about a decade — Vince says livestock can complete the proverbial circle on farms. Among rows of crops and cover crops, or on pastures, cattle add nutrients to the soil (via manure) and encourage nutrient cycling as they eat the plants, which regrow, pulling more carbon into the soil. He introduced the small herd of Herefords to his fields, where they graze in different areas on a rotating basis, including the prairie.

The side benefit was yet more insects — including dung beetles, highly valued for their ability to transfer nutrients from manure into the soil — and more birds to eat those insects. 

He encourages me to “just listen” as I go by the prairie. The chirping, buzzing and other sounds of life are distinctly loud compared to the adjacent corn and soybean fields, and get louder the closer you get.

“I wanted to do something for nature,” Vince says. “And realized the only person stopping me was the guy looking back in the mirror.”

Water

Like myself, Vince farms a landscape that is very flat, relatively void of trees and intersected everywhere by roads and drainage infrastructure like culverts. In 2011, when nearby Lake Erie endured a particularly severe summer of algae blooms and attention focused on the farms sprawling across that flat land, Vince started thinking more about the impact his own farm had on the surrounding environment. 

Generally speaking, algae are organisms found in water that can rapidly expand into large blooms if they encounter excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus — two elements used extensively on farms. In turn, large algae blooms can create toxins and low-oxygen “dead zones” in the water. Lake Erie is particularly prone to algae blooms because of its warm, shallow waters that encourage growth.

Excess nutrients come from many sources, including municipal and industrial wastewater. On the farm, nutrient runoff can spike when fields are hit with heavy rain shortly after fertilizer is applied. Because nutrients bind to soil particles, soil loss from wind or water erosion can also contribute to algae blooms. The nutrient losses from individual farms might be small, but because agriculture dominates the landscape here, repeated small losses add up. 

While he can’t control municipal water systems or the weather, Vince recognized he could exert more control over how much water and nutrients his soil was capable of holding. In 2013, he enrolled in an agricultural scholarship program — the same one I completed earlier this year in biodiversity and climate solutions — to investigate methods of keeping soil, and soil nutrients, in the field where they belong.

By the end of the two-year program, Vince had adopted a new mantra: “roots, not iron.” It means using plant roots to manage the soil, rather than metal tillage equipment. As Lamothe saw, living roots improve the soil’s ability to hold water like a sponge, whereas a hard surface lets it run off. All of it helps keep soil and soil nutrients in the field, and out of local waterways.

And these days, with up to 18 different cover crops potentially growing in his fields during parts of the year, there is almost never bare soil left to potentially wash or blow away.

As the soil holds the water better, it helps insulate crops from drier conditions. That’s key, as more severe swings in weather conditions are being seen by farmers as the climate changes. With so many nutrients inherent and available in his soils, Vince’s fertilizer bill is also substantially lower. He estimates saving “a minimum of 10 per cent” each year for nitrogen fertilizer, which “is a huge cost savings” for nitrogen-hungry crops like corn and wheat. Nutrients can still leave his fields after a heavy rain, but data he collected in partnership with his local conservation authority indicate he’s losing less overall. 

And remember that Soil Your Undies test that kicked off Lamothe’s journey into underground health? Vince is one of the originators. He buried his first pair of briefs in 2015, and helped kick off a trend that, just this year, won an Ig Nobel Prize — a parody of the prestigious awards — for soil science.

“Soil is a collection of living, breathing organisms,” Vince says. “We need to learn to appreciate and respect them.”

Economics and the environment

Across Canada, farms operate on slim margins. Land and equipment are horrendously expensive, and for most, the price they earn for their crops and livestock is beyond their control.

I like to say farming, just the biology of farming, is inherently complex. Then add to that the complexity of weather — with climate change bringing on even more variability, and the occasional introduction of new crop and livestock diseases — along with economics, politics, family and social dynamics, even what it takes to keep machinery running. Most of the time, farmers and ranchers want to do whatever they can to reduce the number and size of variables they face. Trying something new more often adds uncertainty, rather than reducing it. 

I know this firsthand. On our farm, for example, we have been trying to introduce more cover crops after we harvest soybeans. The first year, our cover crop of oats hardly grew because we planted it too late. Another year, the spring was so wet we couldn’t drive machinery into the field to knock back the cereal rye cover crop, meaning it was chest-high and a pain to deal with come spring planting. 

Still, we want to try new things. A lot of farmers do.

There’s the Bernard family, from Prince Edward Island, who are rebuilding their soils and local biodiversity by incorporating cattle into their organic cereal crop business. In Manitoba, the Nerbas family have adopted a grazing system that maximizes the time their pastures have to regrow, supporting their farm’s biodiversity and carbon sequestration potential. Sean Smith, another Manitoban, has partnered with local conservation groups to turn a low-lying and unprofitable part of his family’s farm into a naturalized wetland. 

I could go on.

Lamothe and Vince are the first to tell you they don’t have everything figured out — and likely never will. Investing in ecology on the farm can be complicated, frustrating and require constant troubleshooting. It took time for them to get where they are, and whatever they try next will necessitate the same learning process. But it can be fun, and rewarding as well.

Back in July, as we walked through one of Vince’s fields, some parts waist- or knee-high with a cover crop of crimson clover and cereal rye, I nearly stepped on a wild turkey hen. She was minding her clutch of eggs and I could barely make out her brown-feathered form among the greenery. It’s a sign that I should watch where I’m walking, but also that Vince’s efforts have done a lot for above-ground ecology. White-tailed deer also like to bed down in the thick green cover.

Just the day before, Vince had planted corn directly into that cover crop. In a little more than four months, he’ll harvest it. In spring, the cycle will start again.

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A small town on northwestern Ontario’s border with the U.S. is quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario. It’s one that could mean a dramatic change for the community’s water supply.

Fort Frances, home to about 7,500 people, sits where Rainy Lake empties into the Rainy River and flows north into Lake of the Woods. Fort Frances’ drinking water comes from Rainy Lake, which is bisected by the Canada-U.S. border — and vulnerable to the whims of either country’s leadership. So is the town’s economy, which relies on fishing and tourism, as well as the rhythms of a border community built around the water.

Now, tensions between the U.S. and Canada threaten those rhythms. This spring, U.S. President Donald Trump took aim at a moratorium on mining in Rainy River’s watershed, and its waters that flow past Fort Frances and numerous First Nations communities around it. Last month, tensions ratcheted up, as Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid an escalating trade dispute.

The watershed that surrounds Fort Frances is called Rainy-Lake of the Woods, and it straddles both sides of the border west of Lake Superior. About 450,000 hectares of protected forest, rivers and interconnected lakes on the U.S. side is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, or colloquially, the Boundary Waters. In 2023, the Biden administration protected roughly 91,000 hectares of Superior National Forest just outside the Boundary Waters from mining for 20 years, citing the risk such development posed to the surrounding waters.

Mined copper-sulfide ore is processed to extract metals used in electrical wiring, electronics and rechargeable batteries. But when that ore is exposed to air and water, it can add sulfuric acid and heavy metals into nearby waters. When dissolved in water, that sulfuric acid breaks down into sulfate, which is toxic to wild rice, a plant central to Anishinaabe diet and culture — Minnesota has regulated sulfate in wild rice waters since 1973 for that reason. Sulfate also feeds the bacteria that convert otherwise harmless inorganic mercury into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and, through them, the people who eat them. 

But in April 2026, U.S. Congress reversed the protection for the stretch of Superior National Forest outside the Boundary Waters. The Senate voted 50 to 49 to lift the Biden administration’s moratorium that stood in the way of the Twin Metals mine, a project targeting copper, nickel and other metals, majority-owned by the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta. 

President Trump signed the resolution into law in April.

In a statement to other media, Kathy Graul, director of public affairs and communications for Twin Metals Minnesota, said, “Any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong, multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine. The [Senate ruling] restores this process, and projects must prove they can meet the stringent environmental standards that have long been in place in Minnesota before moving forward.”

Back over the Canadian border, Fort Frances’ water treatment plant can handle natural fluctuations in the source water — but it wasn’t designed to handle the kind of contamination mining activity could potentially introduce, Travis Rob, the town’s manager of infrastructure and growth, told The Narwhal. Addressing that risk would mean either a costly overhaul of the plant’s treatment processes, or securing an entirely new water source, which would be “neither easy nor cheap,” Rob said. “This is what has me so concerned about the proposed mining activities.” 

He and his team have talked at length about what changes to watch for in the water that feeds the treatment plant and when the town would need to act, he said. But the stakes extend beyond Fort Frances itself. Couchiching First Nation and others also receive drinking water from the town’s treatment plant, Rob said. 

In August, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued a reprieve of sorts, signing an executive order directing state agencies to stop issuing leases or permits for copper, nickel and other non-iron ore mines on the U.S. side of the watershed, and to review all existing mineral leases in the area, including Twin Metals’. 

While this might hold up Twin Metals’ plans in part, the order is not immune to legal challenges from mining companies — or future actions of the Trump administration.

A smalltown mayor and First Nation’s chief seek support amid Trump’s mining push

The proposed Twin Metals mine sits at the headwaters of the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

The project has held leases in the area since the 1960s, under different owners proposing to mine copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum group metals from a deposit up to 1,300 metres below the surface, processing roughly 20,000 tons of ore a day for more than 25 years. 

According to the company, about half the waste rock, or tailings, would be stored underground; the rest would be dried out and kept above ground. Twin Metals says its processing “will remove most of the sulfide minerals,” meaning its tailings won’t result in acid drainage, and that the mine won’t discharge water used for that processing. Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, an advocacy groups opposed to the project, has argued the risk  of acid drainage from the project’s tailings remains based on other mines, and exploration work in the watershed.

That same watershed carries north past Fort Frances, through Treaty 3 territory, the traditional lands of 28 Anishinaabe First Nations in northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, and eventually to Hudson Bay.

Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation — formerly Lac La Croix First Nation — condemned the reversal in an April statement, according to NWONewswatch, saying neither it nor affected U.S. tribes were given the chance to testify before Congress voted.

Chief Carrie Atatise-Norwegian of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, whose territory borders both the Boundary Waters and Quetico Provincial Park, has framed the stakes even more starkly. “This decision threatens the lives of our people, water resources and our ancestral lands,” she told CBC in April, after the U.S. Congress lifted the moratorium. “As stewards of our lands, [we] will be asserting, exercising and protecting our rights, jurisdiction and sovereignty as a nation.”

By May, Atatise-Norwegian was in Washington, D.C. In Minnesota Senator Tina Smith’s office, she signed a memorandum of understanding with the chairs of three U.S. tribal nations: Red Lake, Grand Portage and Bois Forte. They agreed to present a unified cross-border position on protecting the Boundary Waters and treaty-protected homelands, according to Red Lake Nation News. Atatise-Norwegian did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for an interview. 

The concerns of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation are shared by many Treaty 3 nations in Ontario. “This is not just a local issue, it is a transboundary concern that directly affects our waters, our environment and our way of life,” Ogichidaa (Grand Chief) Francis Kavanaugh of Grand Council Treaty 3, which represents 28 First Nations across northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, said in an April statement.

The day after the U.S. Senate voted to lift the moratorium, Fort Frances Mayor Hallikas emailed the office of Marcus Powlowski, the Liberal MP for Thunder Bay-Rainy River, urging him to speak out, and to reach out to Minnesota politicians directly. Hallikas said he also raised the issue with provincial politicians a few weeks later at the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association’s conference in Thunder Bay, but was told it was a federal issue.

In May, the Rainy River District Municipal Association, of which Fort Frances is a member, wrote to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, aligning itself with Grand Council Treaty 3’s opposition to the mine. The letter states that sulfide-ore copper mining could cause “irreversible harm to water quality, wildlife, public health and a sustainable outdoor recreation-based economy.” It calls on “all levels of Canadian government” to engage with the U.S. and Minnesota on the issue.

“Any decision that could put [these waters] at risk is not solely a Minnesota matter,” Hallikas wrote in an email to The Narwhal. “It is an international and downstream concern that directly affects peoples in northwestern Ontario.”

He drew parallels to Grassy Narrows First Nation, where industrial mercury contamination, which can cause issues like tremors, cognitive effects and neuromuscular disorders, is one of the most consequential environmental health crises in Canadian history. 

“Northwestern Ontario understands the devastating consequences of mercury contamination,” he wrote. “That history demands vigilance, transparency and precaution.”

A binational board with no enforcement power, watching and waiting

In 1909, Canada and the U.S. signed the Boundary Waters Treaty, governing cross-border water disputes and creating the International Joint Commission to oversee exactly this kind of issue.

Merrell-Ann Phare, one of three Canadian commissioners, said the commission has no enforcement authority and no regulatory authority over water quality. Its role is to resolve disputes between nations, not enforce laws.

“We take great care to stay out of the domestic issues that are happening,” Phare said, so the commissions can preserve its neutrality for the moment a request to mediate comes in.

Only governments in Ottawa and Washington can jointly trigger that kind of review, known as a reference, under the treaty. Provinces, states and municipalities have no standing to request one directly, though Indigenous nations can be named partners.

The Ktunaxa Nation is a partner to a case in B.C.’s Elk Valley, where coal-mining pollution flows downstream into Montana and Idaho, causing unnaturally high selenium levels that have led to deformities in fish. It’s a problem the nation had raised for more than a decade before Ottawa and Washington formally asked the commission to step in, in March 2024.

That in itself is a point of concern for Johann Strube, an environmental sociologist who has studied water governance in northwestern Ontario, speaking in a personal capacity rather than as a spokesperson for Grand Council Treaty 3, where he is a natural resources policy analyst. The joint commission, he said, “was founded to advance the settler-colonial interests of Canada and the United States and explicitly excluded Indigenous nations from decision-making.”

The structure of the commission, Strube said, “still doesn’t involve Indigenous nations as nation-to-nation partners.”

Megan Garner is the Canadian co-chair of the International Rainy-Lake of the Woods Watershed Board, the regional organization that operates under the International Joint Commission.

She said the board is “aware of the termination of the mineral leasing moratorium … and is watching this issue closely.” The board is determining next steps, she said, and is committed to “balanced and representative input.” 

Garner later confirmed that, as of Aug. 19, the board “has not been in touch” with the Rainy River District Municipal Association or Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, and “has not requested input or information from any outside parties” on the mining issue, despite being aware, through its advisory groups, of a range of local perspectives.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, John Babcock, said, “Canada continues to work closely with the United States through existing bilateral mechanisms, including those established under the Boundary Waters Treaty, in support of our shared stewardship of transboundary waters.” He said they would continue to do this “as we take up the environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

Asked whether Canada had raised any new concerns with the U.S. administration specifically about the 2026 reversal, Babcock said in an emailed statement that the department continues “to monitor the ongoing developments in the region and to advocate that any increased mining activity be properly assessed and managed,” and that “the joint stewardship of the environment is a cornerstone of Canada-U.S. relations.”

Babcock did not respond to a follow-up question on whether or not Canada has requested the International Joint Commission review the issue of mine pollution leaching into the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

Canada’s caution here, Strube said, may have less to do with the technical question of jurisdiction than with the state of U.S.-Canada relations more broadly. Whether the Trump administration would feel bound by a 116-year-old water treaty, Strube said, is an open question.

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.

Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, which produces ten per cent of Ontario’s energy supply, will go fully offline next week.

Nicolle Butcher, president and CEO of Ontario Power Generation, told the gathering of investors, CEOs and politicians at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit on Monday that the plant, which has operated for 50 years, “will come out of service next week and we’ll start its refurbishment.” Butcher said it would be off-grid for five to seven years. 

The shutdown was expected this fall, with plans to begin repairs early next year, pending regulatory approval. The refurbishment is expected to last until the mid-2030s, enabling the plant to provide enough energy to power more than two million homes for an additional 30 years. Ontario has had two other nuclear facilities undergoing similar repairs: the update at Darlington just wrapped up, while the one at Bruce Power is ongoing. 

In the interim, the province will maintain its electricity supply largely by relying on natural gas — a fossil fuel composed mainly of the greenhouse gas methane. This is not a surprise. In 2021, the Independent Electricity System Operator cited aging nuclear facilities coupled with increasing demand as driving an increase in gas generation in the province.

Not everyone thinks the Pickering project is worth it. “The real question that Ontarians should be asking is: does the refurbishment of this plant make any sense?” Keith Brooks, a program director with a focus on energy at the advocacy group Environmental Defence, told The Narwhal. “It’s going to be more expensive than the Darlington and Bruce refurbishments” — themselves years-long, multibillion-dollar projects already pushing rates higher — “and meanwhile, wind and solar and batteries have come of age and come so far down in cost that a cheap, clean energy future is within our grasp, if only we’d reach for it.”

The Narwhal sent questions to Ontario Power Generation, a Crown corporation of the province, and Energy Minister Stephen Lecce’s office. Neither provided answer by publication time. Lecce’s office has not answered emailed questions from The Narwhal or granted requests for interviews since he took on the role in June 2024.

Here’s what you need to know.

Why is Pickering Nuclear Generating Station shutting down?

Simply, because it’s very old. 

Located just east of Toronto, Pickering Nuclear Generating Station has already been operating for an extended lifetime. It was originally slated to close in the early 2020s. Instead, since taking office, the Doug Ford government has extended its life. The plant became increasingly vital in closing a tightening energy supply gap fuelled by a growing population, and more recently data centres and electric vehicles. 

In 2022, the Ford government announced it would push Pickering’s youngest four reactors — Units 5 through 8, known as Pickering B — to run through September 2026, while Units 1 through 4, known as Pickering A, were permanently shut down. 

In October 2024, following public hearings that drew submissions from Ontario Power Generation, experts from the the federal Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and 54 intervenors, the plant was granted a further extension until Dec. 31, 2026. Around the same time, the province instructed Ontario Power Generation to begin planning a full refurbishment of Pickering B, rather than let those four reactors retire.

How does the Pickering refurbishment fit into Ontario’s broader energy plans?

Pickering’s refurbishment isn’t happening in isolation — it’s one piece of a much larger provincial rebuild that touches all three of Ontario’s major nuclear sites. Darlington, outside Bowmanville, Ont., just wrapped up its own years-long refurbishment — “on time and under budget,” according to the government and Ontario Power Generation. At the investment conference panel, Butcher said such efficiency “is not usual for a nuclear project.”

Bruce Power, in Kincardine, Ont., is mid-refurbishment right now, with a timeline that overlaps Pickering.

Ontario is also pursuing new nuclear construction. The province is advancing Canada’s first small modular reactor project at Darlington, and is separately looking at building an entirely new nuclear site at Wesleyville. But the timelines on those projects fan out over the next two decades, with the first of four small modular reactors expected to come online in 2030.

Bruce Power has also proposed four large new reactors at its site, which would be Canada’s first large-scale nuclear build in more than 30 years. And the Ontario government has already agreed to share the costs of the impact assessment with the company.

How much will the Pickering refurbishment cost Ontario taxpayers?

The government has approved a $26.8-billion budget for the Pickering refurbishment — more than double the $12.8 billion spent rebuilding Darlington. The government and Ontario Power Generation attribute the higher cost to Pickering’s age, which demands a heavier rebuild, plus inflation.

For Ontarians, the cost will show up most directly on power bills. Last year, Ontario Power Generation filed an application with the provincial energy regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, to roughly double the cost of nuclear-generated electricity. If approved, the increase would add an average of $3.50 to monthly household bills each year for the next five years, according to the Crown corporation. 

These rising costs come with a tradeoff: nuclear’s size and dependability versus its cost. Brooks is right about renewables — the International Energy Agency says solar, especially, is growing faster than any other energy source globally, becoming cheaper and more effective. 

Yet while Ontario does have some renewable projects in the works, overall, the Independent Electricity System Operator projects renewables will make up roughly the same share of Ontario’s electricity mix 25 years from now as they do today. This reflects the province’s bet on nuclear, rather than renewables, as the backbone of its energy plan.

What will replace the power provided by the Pickering nuclear plant?

A combination of natural gas, battery storage and electricity imports.

There is no nuclear facility that can make up the shortfall from Pickering’s shutdown. Darlington already provides 20 per cent of Ontario’s energy supply and, according to figures from the Independent Electricity System Operator, it doesn’t have any additional capacity to make up for the loss of Pickering. Neither does Bruce during its refurbishment. 

So the province’s electricity operator has been putting callouts for more natural gas generation to maintain a reliable power grid.

Battery storage is also playing a growing role. The Oneida Energy Storage Project, a 250-megawatt facility near Six Nations of the Grand River that opened in 2025, doubled Ontario’s battery storage capacity to 475 megawatts on its own, and the province has procured close to 1,800 megawatts more storage across other projects, expected online by 2028. Battery projects are able to store excess power when demand is low and deploy it when demand is high, helping to balance out the grid and its power sources.

The operator has projected the Pickering retirement and refurbishment outages will make Ontario a net importer of power for the first time since 2005 — with imports largely coming from the United States, a complicated prospect amid a tariff war. The system operator expects that balance of trade to return to exports once the nuclear refurbishments wrap up in the 2030s.

What happens next?

Canada’s nuclear regulator told The Narwhal it will be holding the second half of a public hearing starting Oct. 6 to decide whether to renew Pickering’s operating licences — for both the power plant and its waste storage facility — for another 10 years, and whether to approve the planned refurbishment. The hearing will be in Ajax, Ont., and last a week. 

Once the hearing wraps up and the regulator has all the input it needs, it’ll issue a decision, typically within four months.

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.