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.

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In the 1960s, David Crawford was boating in his backyard on Nipigon Bay when he thought he spotted raw sewage floating in the once-pristine waters of Lake Superior. Years later, he realized the “turds,” as Crawford describes them, were craft paper deposits from the nearby pulp mill in Red Rock, Ont. The mill was also known to billow a harmful smoke into the air and release a hot, foamy plume of effluent into the lake. If the noxious smell wasn’t enough, log drives filled the bay with floating timber and bark, meaning Crawford didn’t often tempt the tumultuous waters of Nipigon Bay.

Along with the pulp mill, raw sewage actually was poisoning the clear bay, coming from two inadequate municipal wastewater treatment plants, but trouble didn’t stop there. The unnatural rise and fall of the water level, due to four hydroelectric dams upstream on the Nipigon River, were causing riverbanks to erode, adding silt to the water, while simultaneously washing out fish spawning habitat.

The reality, Crawford said, was haunting: Nipigon Bay was on the verge of dying.

But in late August, as fishing boats glided across calm, turquoise water behind a podium set up at the Red Rock marina, it was easy to forget about the bay’s past.

A small crowd was gathered as federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin visited Red Rock, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, to celebrate those very waters. The air was fresh with the smell of wild mint and Canada geese migrating in undulating waves, stopping to feast in and by the water, honking their approval. Dabrusin spoke into the quiet space left by the calm waters, about “a bay that was heavily polluted and is healthy again. The fish came back, the habitat was rebuilt, and water that people once could not trust, they can trust again.”

Gone are fish with tumours, unnaturally fluctuating water levels, noxious odours, effluent foam barriers, mill plumes and drifting timber. Nipigon Bay is a success story that stretches beyond the Canadian border. It’s one worth noting at a time when the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is strained by President Donald Trump’s trade war and moves to rename another Great Lake — Lake Ontario — to Lake America.

In 1972, Canada and the United States agreed upon their mutual role in polluting a portion of the Great Lakes, which contain 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. The two countries joined forces to create the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In 1987, the agreement listed 43 official areas of concern where this industrial pollution was the most deleterious. Twelve of those were in Canada, including Nipigon Bay. 

It was a time when the countries were friendly neighbours, the type that could agree to clean up their backyards and prioritize clean drinking water for millions of people. Remedial action plans were created for the affected areas to create a pathway for healthy environments to thrive.

Which brings us to Nipigon Bay, on Aug. 28, 2026. Four decades after being identified as an area of concern, the federal government announced it was officially delisted at the small celebration beside the still waters of Lake Superior. It was attended by ministers, government officials, local First Nations and Crawford, who chairs a public advisory committee made up of local residents who help to monitor the remediation work.

For Crawford, witnessing the bay heal over his lifetime is a cup of water he’s happy to enjoy. He still worries about the pressures of a rapidly changing world. Currently, there’s a proposal to build a lithium processing plant on the shores of Nipigon Bay in Red Rock, talk of further dams being built upstream on Lake Nipigon and geopolitical tensions straining longstanding bilateral agreements. All the while, climate change has created greater pressure on fresh water and how humans interact with it, from floods to drought and invasive species. 

But for now, Nipigon Bay is one of four areas of concern in Canada that have been delisted. To Crawford, that’s worth celebrating.

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When the heat becomes unbearable inside Nicole Darlaston’s Brampton apartment, her son would get into the shower — and stay there.

“He would spend hours in there just trying to be comfortable,” Darlaston says.

Darlaston has lived for about 14 years in a high-rise near Bramalea City Centre. The building has central cooling, she says, but it is often turned on late in the season and does little to make her apartment comfortable. On a good day, her unit might stay around 23 C. More often, she says, it reaches 28 C. She has recorded temperatures as high as 35 C, with high humidity.

Darlaston and her son both have asthma. She says the heat has aggravated their symptoms and reshaped their summers. She saves vacation time so she can leave the apartment during the hottest weeks, sometimes staying with family in northern Ontario.

Cooking adds more heat. Cleaning becomes exhausting. Even opening a window offers little relief when the building has been warming for days, she says.

“It just continues to build and build and build.”

Her son is 20 now, but Darlaston says he has been dealing with the heat since he was about six. And it didn’t always end when he left home.

“He had that problem in his schools as well,” she says.

For children who live and learn in hot buildings, there can be little opportunity for their bodies to cool down. Researchers have warned the effects can accumulate when children spend a hot day at school only to return to a home without adequate cooling.

As students return to classrooms across Peel Region this month and summer weather remains longer than it has in previous years, that raises a basic question: where does a child go when neither school nor home offers reliable relief from the heat?

Inside Peel’s overheated classrooms

Jill Promoli has seen that problem as both a parent and a Peel District School Board trustee representing wards six and 11 in Mississauga, which includes Mavis-Erindale, Creditview, Erindale, Meadowvale Village and Streetsville.

On hot days, she says, some of the classrooms she visits become unbearable, including her son’s.

One of those visits was to her son’s elementary-school portable classroom in Mississauga, which became too hot to use in May 2025, she says. Students from two portables were moved into the school library, the same room meant to serve as a cooling station for everyone else.

“When you are using the cooling station for two classrooms, then that cooling station becomes unavailable for the rest of the school. But if the rest of the school is also hot, then there’s no more space available to give kids that break either,” Promoli says.

Then came two days of extreme heat in June 2025. Promoli says she brought a thermometer with her as she visited the schools she represents, asking principals to show her their hottest classrooms.

“Some of the classrooms were getting up to 39 C, and that’s not manageable,” she says.

Her son still had to attend school for his Grade 5 graduation practice. When Promoli arrived to pick him up, the blinds were closed and the lights were off.

“It was still so hot in the cooling centre that the kids were literally lying on the floor with the lights off, and they were just doing nothing because it was so hot in there. This is not functional,” she says.

Promoli says she heard from other families whose children left school early, stayed home the following day or sought medical care after feeling sick during the heat.

Peel District School Board did not provide the requested breakdown of how many schools or classrooms are air conditioned, or respond to detailed questions from The Narwhal. On its website, the board says every school has a designated cooling station, while some older buildings do not have air conditioning at all. Hot weather measures can include opening windows and doors, using fans, closing blinds, turning off lights and other heat-producing equipment, rotating students and staff through cooler areas and reducing strenuous or outdoor activities.

Heat isn’t only uncomfortable

Children are among the people Peel Public Health considers particularly vulnerable to extreme heat.

Alexa Caturay, the region’s medical officer of health, says young bodies do not regulate temperature in the same way adult bodies do. Chronic respiratory and heart conditions can make it harder to cope with heat as well.

As exposure increases, what begins as discomfort and thirst can progress to dehydration, faintness, a rapid heartbeat and difficulty breathing. In more serious cases, people can become dehydrated enough to require hospital treatment, Caturay says.

Health Canada similarly warns that children with asthma, heart or kidney problems, disabilities, developmental disorders or who take certain medications can face greater risks in extreme heat. Warning signs can include dizziness, nausea, headache, changes in behaviour, rapid breathing or heartbeat and extreme thirst. Confusion, unconsciousness or a high body temperature accompanied by a loss of sweating can signal heat stroke — a medical emergency.

The effect can show up in the classroom in many ways.

A recent U.S. report from a network of school-climate researchers convened with the American Psychological Association found younger children acclimatize to heat more slowly and may be less able to recognize when they need water or should reduce physical activity. It also points to evidence connecting poorly cooled and ventilated schools with increased absences and poorer learning outcomes.

Studies cited in that report found classroom temperatures around 20 C to 23 C were associated with better cognitive performance, while hotter conditions reduced the speed and accuracy of cognitive tasks. Other research found students performed worse on standardized tests on hotter days, with air conditioning reducing some of that effect.

The Peel school board’s plan for heat is tied up in Ontario’s Education Ministry

What Promoli saw that June in her son’s classroom eventually pushed her to take the issue to the Peel District School Board.

Her original motion asked the board to work with Peel Public Health to establish an upper temperature threshold for extreme heat days. It pointed to the board’s existing response to extreme cold and noted that many classrooms in the Peel region lacked air conditioning or other ways to substantially lower the temperature.

Promoli says the goal was to know when a hot classroom crossed from uncomfortable to unsafe.

“If we are hitting a point where it’s no longer safe to be operating, we have to know what those numbers look like and what we should be doing to properly meet the needs of our staff and students,” she says.

In August 2025, they passed an amended motion directing the Peel District School Board to work with Peel Public Health on a plan for extreme heat days, but without the proposed temperature threshold. In general, the health unit’s role is to issue heat alerts to municipalities, hospitals, schools and school boards, which can then activate their own response plans.

Promoli says she has not been aware of updates on that work since the Ministry of Education took control of the board earlier this year. The Ontario ministries of Education and Health did not respond to requests for comment.

Trying to stay cool at home

Tanya Burkart hears the same dilemma repeatedly from renters.

Burkart, chair of the Brampton Centre chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), says members report hot apartments, older inefficient buildings and landlords charging additional fees for air conditioning.

She pointed, in particular, to older rental buildings and says tenants can face another problem when upgrades finally happen: landlords may seek above-guideline rent increases to recover the cost of major work.

The association’s “beat the heat” campaign is pushing municipalities to require landlords to keep rental buildings at no more than 26 C and to help low-income tenants obtain air conditioners. It has also called for cooling rooms inside buildings, free transit to cooling locations on extreme heat days and more transparent tracking of heat-related illness.

At the provincial level, the group wants greater support for electricity costs and broader access to air conditioning.

Without those supports, Burkart says some renters are “being forced to either choose between air conditioning or paying the rent or putting food on the table.”

Yet, heat is already considered one of the top five climate-related health hazards affecting Peel residents, according to the region. The Public Health Agency of Canada says the largely urban region is particularly vulnerable to the urban heat island effect, with that risk shaped by factors such as income, housing, age and outdoor work.

Income can shape how much choice a family has when temperatures climb.

The U.S. schools report specifically notes lower-income families face extra hurdles including lacking air conditioning, nearby cooling spaces or flexible schedules that allow children to avoid the hottest parts of the day.

In Peel, the help available depends partly on where someone lives and what kind of housing they are in.

Unlike Toronto, which provides portable air conditioners to low-income pregnant residents and families with infants, the Peel Region does not provide direct financial assistance to buy air conditioners.

Peel Housing Corporation, which has 75 sites, operates cooling rooms during extreme heat in buildings that do not have central air conditioning and provides tenants with heat-safety information.

The City of Brampton says it has no current plan to provide free air conditioners to low-income residents either. During heat events, it directs residents toward public facilities such as its nine library branches and 27 community centres as well as its pools and splash pads.

In Mississauga, about 57 per cent of low-income children live in areas where additional investment in green space would improve equity, according to Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium data cited in a 2025 Canadian Environmental Law Association report.

At the July 29 council meeting, Mississauga council approved a motion brought forward by Ward 7 Coun. Dipika Damerla, which asked staff to look at more ways to protect residents of purpose-built rental apartments during hot weather. 

Mississauga council has directed staff to review its current adequate temperature by-law and consider stronger cooling protections for renters, including access to cooling devices, building retrofits and other heat-mitigation measures. Staff are also looking at requiring apartment buildings to provide accessible common cooling spaces kept at or below 26 C, with recommendations expected before next summer.

Currently, the city’s by-law requires landlords who provide air conditioning to maintain indoor temperatures at or below 26 C but buildings without air conditioning are not subject to a maximum indoor temperature requirement.

“We have to recognize that climate patterns have changed in southern GTA at least, and our summers are hotter than ever before. Traditionally, we’ve built our homes and our condos and our apartment buildings around cold weather, because hot weather was rare and that was reasonable,” Damerla says. 

“But I think it’s changed now, and so it’s time for us to look at what are the other cooling options that we can provide for in purpose-built rentals.”

When does hot become too hot in schools?

Ontario does not currently set a maximum indoor temperature for schools.

The Education Act does require principals to pay attention to the “health and comfort” of students, including school temperature and ventilation. But without a maximum standard or equipment capable of cooling a building, advocates argue there is little clarity about when a classroom has become too hot to safely use.

The shortage of broader cooling infrastructure is not small. Ontario’s school repair backlog was estimated at $16.8 billion in 2022, even as the province committed billions toward school construction, repair and renewal.

The Canadian Environmental Law Association has recommended a 26 C maximum temperature for schools, more mechanical cooling and changes to the building code so new schools and major retrofits are designed with hotter conditions in mind. The group says 26 C should be treated as a starting point and revisited as more research emerges, specifically about children’s heat exposure.

There may be relief on the horizon. Ontario’s NDP put forward Bill 123, the Fighting Extreme Heat in Schools Act, which received first reading on May 26, 2026, and was ordered for second reading. If passed, it would require school buildings and school buses to remain at or below 26 C while students and workers are present.

School boards would also have to create annual heat-mitigation strategies and extreme-temperature emergency plans. The education minister would review those plans for gaps and inequities at least once every three years. Ontario’s legislature will return in late October and will likely continue debating this bill.

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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Five days before Ontario’s new, weaker species-at-risk law took effect in March, members of the Environment Ministry team tasked with enforcing it were thinking about bats. In particular, a delayed permit that was keeping a developer from clearing trees before at-risk bats returned to them for the season. 

The permit had been delayed because staff were waiting to learn what the government’s new rules for endangered species protections were going to look like. By the time they did, officials feared it was too late. 

“I know those bats are in those trees,” one government biologist said during a March 25 meeting of the species at risk branch. “I just know those bats won’t survive.”

“We’ve lost our impact on the process,” a senior official replied.

The meeting was one of the last chances for staff in Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, to express concerns about the Species Conservation Act, which replaced the province’s Endangered Species Act — once considered a gold standard for at-risk species laws. 

The change, introduced under Bill 5 in June 2025, stripped provincial protection from several species and narrowed habitat protection for others — 106 species lost protections, a July 2026 report by Ontario Nature found. It also introduced a new model for environmental assessments that is “proponent-led,” leaving developers largely responsible for assessing their own environmental impact and cutting government biologists out of the process almost entirely.

A recording of the meeting, which involved about 25 staff members in the species at risk branch of the Ministry of Environment, was shared with The Narwhal by one participant and independently verified by two others. The Narwhal is not naming the officials who led the meeting or participated in it, to protect their privacy as public sector workers with limited authority.

At the meeting, staff voiced concerns about fielding calls from “angry clients” — developers who had spent weeks working through permits and mitigation measures, only to have that process nullified overnight, with no new guidelines in place. Senior officials leading the meeting told staff Environment Minister Todd McCarthy’s office had provided “questions and answers” they could use to address developers’ concerns. 

“Our jobs were changing quickly from being biologists and scientific experts to being administrative staff,” one former staffer told The Narwhal, speaking under the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. “We were no longer allowed to give our recommendations.”

The Narwhal spoke with and verified five current or former ministry employees, who agreed to speak confidentially as they feared repercussions. Three spoke on background, while two agreed to be quoted without their names being used, as did one outside expert who has worked closely with government biologists on permit applications. The Narwhal also tracked staffing changes through LinkedIn and the government’s public directory, INFO-GO, as well as WayBack Machine, a digital archive that allowed us to access past versions of government websites. 

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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Together, these sources reveal the new act has had a significant impact on the people tasked with protecting Ontario’s most vulnerable species — reducing them from experts to rubber stamps, if anything at all, for the industries they once held to account.

They also show that, more than a year after the Species Conservation Act was proposed, a wave of departures has hit the ministry’s species at risk branch, as biologists leave for the private sector or other government roles. The Narwhal counted more than a dozen people who have moved on since February 2025, though some may have retired or wrapped up short-term contracts. The Narwhal could not confirm the exact number of positions that have been vacated since the Species Conservation Act passed, but sources suggest it has been a notable amount, and that the loss of people and expertise is palpable within the ministry.

“There were lots of opportunities to improve the Endangered Species Act,” a former official said, “but this rollback is way too far, and it just diminishes protection that is promised to Ontarians.”

Sources say the policy changes and departures weakened the scientific expertise Ontario’s Ministry of Environment once valued, reducing the ministry’s ability to protect the environment in an evidence-backed way.

“Yes, it hurts the species,” the first former ministry staffer said. “But it hurt all of us too.” 

“We were essentially silenced,” they said. “And it’s not fair.” 

The Narwhal sent an extensive list of questions to Environment Minister McCarthy’s office, the ministry’s communications department and the species at risk branch, which redirected our questions to the communications department. None responded by publication time.

‘Our jobs stopped feeling meaningful’: government biologists were kept out of the creation of the Species Conservation Act

Under the previous Endangered Species Act, ministry experts helped project proponents, such as developers, homeowners and industry, figure out a plan to avoid impacts to at-risk species and their habitat. If harm couldn’t be avoided, biologists and ministry staff helped to minimize that impact or offset it — for example, by requiring proponents to establish new habitat elsewhere. This process required a lot of government review and back and forth. 

The Species Conservation Act changed all of this. The new act only asks the proponent to submit a conservation plan that “should” include how it will minimize or offset harm to at-risk species. That plan is to be written by an expert — hired by the proponent, and very loosely defined — but the regulations don’t specify what exactly it needs to include. Once submitted, these plans are automatically accepted and greenlit. 

In the recording of the meeting before the act was finalized, staff are told clearly that they “can’t review” proponent-led plans. They can’t ask questions or ask for more information. 

“Once they’re in the system, we don’t check them unless there’s a complaint,” the former official told The Narwhal in an interview. “We had to accept what clients were proposing.” 

Former and current ministry officials told The Narwhal they were shut out of the process to create the Species Conservation Act. They say it was announced in a hybrid meeting, with staff both in the ministry’s various offices and online. “It was so quiet,” a second former official said. “Morale dropped right away.” 

According to the ministry sources, all of the new regulations were decided in the environment minister’s office with a few senior officials. Three people told The Narwhal that staff were not given a timeline for when the new act would come into force, what to tell proponents or how to update online guidelines.

One internal communication, reviewed by The Narwhal, outlines how branch staff were not shown the final draft regulations before they were finalized. When staff tried to push back and make recommendations, they were told “there’s no appetite for that,” the first source said. 

“It was a very heavy-hearted time,” the second former official said. “On one hand, there could have been so many improvements but, as we learned in hindsight, there were very few ways to do any good.”“Our jobs stopped feeling meaningful.” 

Laura Bowman, an environmental and Indigenous Rights lawyer with Macpherson Law, told The Narwhal that, for ministry experts, “there’s nothing to be done under an automatic registration scheme.”

“Once the proponent has filed the paperwork, however flawed, the registration is approved,” Bowman said. “I can definitely understand why people with deep technical expertise would want to use it somewhere else.”

“If technical staff are leaving the ministry, that’s extremely concerning,” Bowman said. “What you’re left with is a hollow shell when that happens.”

With “nobody watching,” she said, the quality of the work being done to protect and mitigate harm to at-risk species is likely to decline.

‘They didn’t want to do anything wrong’: project proponents valued ministry expertise

As questions started trickling in about how to get a permit under the new law, ministry sources who spoke to The Narwhal said they were given language to copy and paste. 

“A lot of the language was very ambiguous, non-committal and unhelpful to our clients,” the first official said. “To be fair, clients wanted our recommendations. They didn’t want to do anything wrong and many were frustrated that we couldn’t tell them anything.”

The Narwhal spoke with one biologist who has long worked with private industry to make sure projects are compliant with species at risk law, creating plans for species management and harm mitigation. She also raised concerns about the lack of input from ministry staff. “I’ve had no correspondence with [the ministry] on any of my files,” she said about the months since the new act passed. “I’m just kind of doing it on my own now, and hoping that I’m doing it right.” 

She said when replies do come, they are weeks later and often “stock text” that does not answer site-specific, nuanced questions.

As the ministry continues to shed technical expertise, there appear to be fewer people left to answer those questions — if they were even allowed.

“I think that staff are very bound in what they can and cannot share,” the source told The Narwhal.

And, given the lack of feedback from the ministry and guardrails of enforcement, she said some of her own clients have been increasingly aggressive about removing species at risk protections.

“We always will have clients that want to push that envelope as far as they can, and we used to have [the Ministry of Environment] come in and say, ‘Nope, this is the way it’s got to be,’ and then that was the end of the story.”

“But now that that doesn’t happen, we get a lot more pushback. Like, ‘What is stopping us from doing it this way?’ ”  

This source expressed concern that the current lack of oversight creates an incentive to do the bare minimum to remain competitive. 

The effects of these changes will reverberate for generations, former government staffers told The Narwhal. 

“Across the government around the environment, the first approach is to avoid harm, and then mitigate and find ways to work around. The very last resort is to fix harms,” the second former official said. “Now, due diligence has changed. They’re going to have a lot of long-term consequences to deal with.”

One of those will be the loss of decades of expertise. “You will just not have the quality of staff you need at the ministry to deliver oversight and protection,” the first official said. “The sense we get is they don’t want us anyways.”

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When the temperature climbs in Toronto’s Oakwood Village neighbourhood, the bottom floor of a former school-turned-community-centre becomes a hive of activity.

Split between a child care centre and community space, it’s where people gather to play music, garden, eat together or simply sit and talk. That includes members of the Oakwood Vaughan Community Organization, which is made up of residents who live in the area, many of whom are seniors, who invited The Narwhal to sit down with them for a gathering in late August.

The seniors describe building their days around the temperature. Some avoid cooking full meals and use toaster ovens instead. They wear cotton and linen, even switching their bedsheets to lighter fabrics. They seek out areas with more trees, stay indoors on particularly hot days and sometimes get on the subway simply because it is air conditioned.

Sharon Wyatt doesn’t have air conditioning in her two-storey house. During extended stretches of heat, the upper floor can become almost unusable.

“It’s like an Easy Bake Oven in very, very hot extended periods,” she says.

Instead, Wyatt moves downstairs and uses fans. 

Barbara Geiger has developed an even more precise routine: “I look at my weather app at least 20 times a day in the summer,” she says.

She checks a digital thermometer inside her bungalow nearly as often, deciding when to open the windows and when to close them before the outdoor temperature rises. When several hot days pile up and the house stops cooling overnight, she heads to the basement, where she has a guest bedroom and craft room. The temperature dictates where she sleeps, where she works and where she spends her day.

But not everyone has another floor to retreat to.

Angelo, another member of the group who asked to be identified only by his first name, says many people in the area live in apartments. The City of Toronto is working on a bylaw to limit maximum indoor temperatures in rentals, but it’s still a ways away from being enacted. 

And the scale of the problem goes well beyond a handful of buildings. City staff estimate about 54 per cent of private-market rental units and 67 per cent of non-market rental units in Toronto do not have landlord-provided air conditioning.

Angelo recalled one member whose building posted a notice saying residents who wanted air conditioning would have to pay an additional $400 a year. After residents contacted their local councillor, he says, the amount dropped to $200.

The tenant still didn’t install one. Angelo says they feared doing anything that could affect their original lease. “It’s not just the cost of the air conditioning, it’s the fear about being unhoused,” he says.

For older adults without a cool place to retreat to, the consequences can go far beyond discomfort — with extreme weather events across the country showing us just how far.

A deadly warning from B.C.

In June 2021, British Columbia showed how deadly the combination of age, health, isolation and inadequate cooling can become. Over one week, a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, pushing temperatures above 40 C in many parts of the province.

B.C.’s chief coroner later identified 619 heat-related deaths. Ninety-eight per cent occurred indoors. Sixty-seven per cent of those who died were 70 or older, while more than half lived alone.

The deaths demonstrated something experts and advocates in Toronto are now trying to prepare for: the danger isn’t determined by the temperature outside alone, but by what happens when someone closes their front door.

And Toronto is expected to face more dangerously hot days.

The city projects the number of days each year with temperatures above 30 C could rise from an average of 10 days between 1971 and 2000 to between 36 and 44 days by the 2050s. By the 2080s, Toronto could experience between 46 and 78 days above 30 C annually, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions.

Kimber-lee Wargalla, the centre’s community outreach coordinator, says another problem in Ontario is knowing the full toll extreme heat is currently taking. The Advocacy Centre for the Elderly has pushed for better tracking of heat-related deaths.

“Without those numbers, how do you prove how big the issue is, other than the anecdotal conversations with the people who are suffering,” Wargalla says. 

Extreme heat can quickly move from uncomfortable to dangerous for an older adult, Stephanie Hatzifilalithis, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, says. Part of the reason is physiological.

As people age, the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature can decline, Hatzifilalithis, whose work focuses on extreme heat’s impact on older adults, says. People may not sweat as effectively, blood flow to the skin can change and the body’s ability to recognize thirst and respond to heat may become weaker, she explains.

That means the same temperature can put greater strain on an older body than a younger one, causing dehydration, dizziness, fainting and heat stroke, Hatzifilalithis says. It can also worsen existing cardiovascular, respiratory and kidney problems.

A Toronto community thinking about heat

Oakwood Village sits just south of Eglinton Avenue West in midtown Toronto, next to Little Jamaica. It is a culturally diverse neighbourhood anchored by residential streets, independent businesses and community organizations that have long helped shape daily life in the area.

The city is now studying how the broader Little Jamaica and Oakwood-Vaughan area should grow. Residents consulted as part of the city’s draft planning framework have asked for more trees, public benches and seating, additional green space, greener schoolyards and better community access to school buildings outside school hours.

Eglinton Avenue West, a busy commercial corridor, runs through the Oakwood-Vaughan and Little Jamaica area. The street is lined with shops, restaurants and services, where long stretches of pavement and relatively sparse tree cover leave little relief from the heat. The Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium’s data shows trees cover less than one-fifth of the total area.

This creates what is known as the urban heat island effect.

For the seniors at Vaughan Road Academy, an air-conditioned school building, a patch of shade or a tree-lined street aren’t simply neighbourhood amenities. They can become part of an improved cooling network.

‘They’re stuck in these small boxes cooking’

For the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly, a legal clinic working with seniors in particular, those stories point to a much larger problem.

Wargalla says the people most likely to fall through the cracks include low-income seniors, newcomers living alone, renters, people in subsidized or seniors housing and those without family or community members checking in on them.

The Advocacy Centre for the Elderly was one of the groups pushing for a maximum indoor temperature standard that would require landlords to provide cooling when temperatures reach 26 C or higher. 

While the City of Toronto’s bylaw is at least a year away, the Ontario government hasn’t committed to introducing one at all. The Ontario Ministry for Seniors and Accessibility did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Wargalla says people with mobility limitations or chronic health conditions may not be able to walk to a cooling space in extreme temperatures. “It makes people suffer in silence, and unfortunately, with extreme heat, the suffering in silence can mean death,” Wargalla says. “They’re stuck in these small boxes, cooking.”

Even someone who can access a cooling space eventually has to leave because they aren’t open 24 hours a day.

“Cooling rooms are not a substitute for safe housing,” Wargalla says. “People need cooling in their own homes, and vulnerable seniors cannot spend entire heat waves sitting in common areas or on public transit or at the library.”

Zamani Ra, executive director of CEED Canada, works on climate issues in social housing communities and sees some of those challenges where she works. For residents on higher floors, coming downstairs can itself be cumbersome. And when they arrive, she says, there may be little to do other than sit in the room. Often, the coolest area is the lobby, she says, but there is limited space for people to gather. So residents improvise.

“Some people actually get on the bus and go to the mall,” Ra says. Others go grocery shopping or visit family members with air conditioning. “But for the most part, people stay in place,” she says.

Ra says programs also need to recognize that receiving an air conditioner may not be enough. Some older adults may not be comfortable navigating online applications. Some don’t have family members who can help install or replace a unit. Even the size and type of windows in an apartment can determine what cooling equipment is usable. She says governments should consider providing quality air conditioners, professional installation and potentially vouchers that allow seniors or their families to choose a unit appropriate for their home.

The consequences of failing to address extreme heat have already been seen elsewhere in Canada.

“This is not a marginal problem,” Wargalla says. “This is a housing system problem.”

When heat becomes an emergency — financial and otherwise

Sarah Sanford, a researcher at the Wellesley Institute, recently led a study examining provincial emergency benefits in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec.

Residents eligible for the Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program can receive up to $400 every four years to purchase a cooling device. Other programs in the province can provide electricity credits, emergency help with utility arrears or energy-saving upgrades for qualifying households.

But the study found emergency benefit programs were often fragmented, narrowly targeted or difficult to access. 

“Staying safe can mean paying for air conditioning. It can mean paying for higher electricity bills, transportation to a cool place, food, medical expenses and then any other costs that might be associated with an unanticipated climate-related emergency,” Sanford says. “A senior who’s living on a low income might have to make really difficult choices about whether or not they cool their space or if they’re able to afford to purchase other necessities.”

The City of Toronto has started expanding its response, piloting an Air Conditioner Assistance Program in 2025. The city distributed close to 500 free portable units to low-income seniors with health-related cooling needs living in multi-unit residential buildings.

In 2026, the program expanded to approximately 1,500 portable air conditioners and broadened eligibility to include pregnant people and families with infants, while continuing to serve eligible seniors.

Council voted in May this year to make the program permanent, increasing funding from $200,000 in 2025 to $1 million to expand the program as part of the 2026 budget. This funding covers all costs for the program including program administration, delivery and installation.

Another new effort in west Toronto is trying to identify vulnerable residents before a heat emergency happens.

The West Toronto Ontario Health Team, a network of 44 health and social service agencies, launched a voluntary heat wave registry this summer. Health team director Kashtin Fitzsimons says the idea traces back to the wildfire season of 2023. 

“We realized that we didn’t have a coordinated response as a health system for how to respond to wildfire smoke,” Fitzsimons says. “The more we thought about it, we didn’t have much of one on the topic of extreme heat either.”

That fall, the health team began asking people across west Toronto what the health system could do to help communities respond to climate change. Fitzsimons says Paris, France, helped inspire the registry through a similar, voluntary system that contacts residents during periods of extreme heat and other dangerous weather. 

In west Toronto, people who register by themselves, or through a community group or primary care provider, receive a call from a volunteer when the city issues an extreme heat or air quality warning. Volunteers ask how they are doing, provide information about nearby cooling locations, answer heat safety questions and can connect people with health services. There are no restrictions on who can register, though organizations serving older adults, people living with chronic illness and others more vulnerable to extreme heat are encouraged to share the service.

Because the registry launched in 2026, full data on its impact has not yet been analyzed, but Fitzsimons says the calls are having a great impact and would like to see the approach grow beyond individual neighbourhood programs.

“The dream is to see a coordinated city response where no matter where you live in the city, you know what you can do,” he says. 

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.

The smell of decomposing garbage hits before the building comes into view — a sour, earthy odour that stings your teeth. Hidden by a curving driveway, large bright green trees and a set of lawn chairs, the entrance almost makes you forget that beyond it lies a waste-burning facility that is set to become one of North America’s largest incinerators.

The Emerald Energy from Waste incinerator sits on roughly six hectares of industrial land, tucked between Bramalea Road and Highway 407 in Brampton, Ont. Behind its rusting metal walls and towering smokestacks, transport trucks arrive throughout the day carrying loads of non-hazardous waste from across Ontario. Inside, garbage is unloaded, sorted and fed into combustion units, where the waste is burned to generate electricity for neighbouring businesses and homes.

The facility began operating in spring 1992, on former agricultural land that had become home to a rapidly developing industrial sector. Today, warehouses, manufacturing plants and trucking dominate the area immediately around the incinerator. But beyond this industrial zone are neighbourhoods that have expanded alongside one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities. Just a few kilometres southwest of the plant, cricket and soccer matches fill Emancipation Park on summer evenings. Minutes away, homes, recreation centres and places of worship serve a population transformed by decades of immigration, particularly from South Asia. What was once a facility close to the edge of Brampton now sits near communities where tens of thousands of people live, work and raise families.

Last year, the province approved the Environmental Assessment Screening Report which clears the path to a major expansion of the Emerald incinerator. The facility would process up to 900,000 tonnes of waste annually — roughly six-fold what it’s processing today, bringing even more garbage from various Ontario municipalities to Brampton. The Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks has not responded to The Local’s request for comment.

Emerald Energy from Waste argues that the expansion is needed to address Ontario’s looming landfill capacity crisis. According to Waste to Resource Ontario, an environmental services association, Ontario generated approximately 16.88 million tonnes of waste in 2024, with 12.75 million tonnes disposed in landfills; the province is projected to run out of landfill space by 2037.

“Ontario has a crisis in that we don’t have enough waste management capacity infrastructure in the province,” Joe Lyng, president of Emerald Energy from Waste, says. An expansion in Brampton, he argues, is the answer to multiple problems — diverting more garbage from landfills while also increasing the incinerator’s energy recovery rate, creating more power for an energy-starved province.

While that argument may be convincing for the province, locals feel differently. The incinerator expansion — which Emerald anticipates will begin in 2027 — has become one of Brampton’s most contentious environmental issues. Many residents question the province’s approval process. They worry about the potential health effects on nearby communities. And they wonder if anyone is looking out for the good of the people of Brampton, a city of racialized immigrants at the edge of Canada’s biggest metropolis.

“It’s a sacrifice zone,” Linda Gasser, co-founder of the advocacy group Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning, says. That’s the term for an area in which low-income and minority groups shoulder the environmental harms of clustered polluting industrial sites. For locals, the placement of the largest incinerator in Canada right in their community sends a message: that somewhere like Brampton won’t, or can’t, object to housing the region’s industry and waste. “One more polluting facility, what’s the big deal, right?” Gasser says. It’s a mindset that some residents are committed to fighting.

Incinerator’s English-only consultations create barriers in largely Punjabi-speaking neighbourhoods

There’s a misconception that Bramptonians don’t care about the environment. Once proudly known as The Flower City, Brampton is now grappling with a new online reputation as a “garbage city.” It’s a stereotype that has frustrated many residents — including those working to prove the opposite.

Born and raised in Brampton, Rajbalinder Ghatoura is an environmental activist dedicated to improving life in his community. When he was 12 years old, Ghatoura won an international environmental photography competition for a photo of a Tim Horton’s cup seemingly dissolving into its surroundings. It sparked a lifelong commitment to protecting the environment. Today, at 25, that commitment still shapes his activism. Environmental problems, Ghatoura says, often become hardest to confront when people can’t see them, which he believes goes beyond roadside litter.

In 2023, Ghatoura co-founded Kudrat Di Rakhia, a community organization based in Brampton. They’re members of the Brampton Environmental Alliance, and focus on advocacy and education.

To reach the South Asian population in Brampton, Ghatoura works with local gurdwaras. Raising awareness about environmental sustainability, starting with places of worship, Kudrat Di Rakhia has engaged with the Sikh community to participate in initiatives like tree planting and city cleanups.

Communicating directly with Punjabi-speaking residents is one of Kudrat Di Rakhia’s greatest strengths. By bridging the language barrier, the organization is able to connect with a broader diaspora of Brampton’s South Asian community that can be overlooked in environmental advocacy efforts. According to the 2021 census, Punjabi is the second most spoken language after English in Brampton. “It’s important for this information to be shared with the population, the demographics, and to be shared in a language that they understand,” says Ghatoura.

He says this wasn’t the case with the incinerator expansion. In 2022, the company took out a half-page ad in the Brampton Guardian, an English–only newspaper, to inform the public of their proposed expansion project. Informing the public of an undertaking like the proposed expansion is required under the Environmental Assessment Act. But despite the surrounding area being home to many immigrants and residents whose first language is not English, no information was provided in Punjabi or any other language.

Lyng says he looked into the demographics in Brampton and found that approximately 95 to 97 per cent were English-speaking residents. (While census data shows that approximately 95 per cent of Brampton residents have “knowledge” of English, it’s the mother tongue for roughly 42 per cent of the population.)

“We’re not going to reach out to, you know, the two or three per cent. It’s at our discretion and we didn’t see that as something that was necessary,” Lyng says.

Ghatoura himself only came to know of the proposed expansion a year ago, reading about it online, after much of the screening process had already been completed.

What he learned alarmed him.

Company president says incinerator expansion is safe, but won’t commit to publicly sharing real-time emission data

Energy-from-waste facilities, like the one in Brampton, are incinerators that recover energy during combustion. Heat is used to generate steam, powering a turbine to produce electricity. Although incinerators reduce the volume of garbage, they don’t completely eliminate it. After the waste is burned, the ash that remains in the stacks is typically disposed of in a landfill.

Expansion at the proposed scale would typically require a full environmental assessment. Because Emerald Energy from Waste has been a long-term operation, however, the project went through a streamlined environmental screening process. Lyng says that the process they conducted included technical studies as well as public consultations such as open houses and public liaison meetings. “We went above and beyond,” Lyng says.

For many — including anti-incineration activists, health officials, the region of Peel and concerned residents like Ghatoura — these assurances aren’t nearly enough. They insist that the incinerator do an individual environmental assessment, which would enable a public review of emission data and determine risks to the environment and public health.

Brampton resident Stacey Wilson has noticed an unsettling odour in the air for more than two decades. “When it’s a nice day, and I step out the door to go for a walk, and the first thing I notice is the smell of burning tires or burning plastic, that’s really upsetting to me,” she says. She’s filed multiple reports with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks.

Wilson’s worried about the increased traffic that will come with the expansion. According to the incinerator’s website, the facility is currently licensed to process 500 metric tonnes of garbage per day, which Lyng says is unloaded by 30 to 35 trucks. The expanded incinerator, the website says, will process 2,500 tonnes a day, roughly five times the current amount. This could mean many more vehicles. But Wilson’s biggest concern is the uncertainty about what pollutants are being released: “How do we know what we’re breathing in now?” If there are any damaging health effects, she says, they won’t become apparent until years from now.

Lyng says that the incinerator’s emissions are carefully monitored. The facility’s annual stack tests, which measure air quality directly from the its exhaust stacks, show that every pollutant tested by the company remained within Ontario’s regulatory limits between 2020 to 2025. However, known pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride, have at times spiked to the edge of allowable limits.

“We have real-time emission monitoring,” Lyng says, referring to the meters that continuously monitor certain pollutants. If there are any issues with operations or emissions, they report it to the ministry and follow up with an action report.

Linda Gasser, of Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning, and Wendy Bracken, of the Durham Environment Watch, say that these monitoring efforts aren’t enough. Bracken says that while incinerator operators emphasize their continuous monitoring — with the implication being that if something is wrong they can shut things down — many pollutants are in fact only tested once a year.

Lyng confirms that the Emerald incinerator does not have a meter to continuously monitor all pollutants; instead, the facility conducts annual testing to measure their levels. He says the expansion will include a meter to conduct continuous monitoring for sulphur dioxide, unlike the current facility.

Since the emissions are self-monitored, the results cannot be viewed by residents remotely. Opponents of the incinerator contrast that with the monitoring done at the Durham York Energy Centre, an incinerator on the other side of the GTA owned by the Regions of Durham and York. There, emissions data is made public, through a real-time portal on their website. In addition to their continuous monitoring, the Durham York Energy Centre undergoes stack testing twice a year.

Lyng says that Emerald will not be publishing its emissions data online. “The public can come in and see the data at the plant,” Lyng says. “We can come and bring you up to the control room, show you this is what we do. It’s not some mystical process.”

It’s difficult to imagine members of the public taking Lyng up on his offer. The control room sits on the second floor of the facility, accessible by a narrow metal staircase. Operating data is displayed across multiple monitors running the facility’s original 1992 control system. During a recent tour, the room’s temperature exceeded 40 C.

Incinerator’s neighbourhood is populated by vulnerable communities, health unit says

Beyond data from the incinerator’s stacks, opponents of the expansion have another concern: how burning five times the waste it does today will affect a community that already grapples with pollution.

Last spring, Peel Public Health officials submitted a report to the regional council outlining their concerns about the incinerator project. Additional emissions from the expansion, they wrote, “results in an overall increase in cumulative exposure to air pollutants and can result in an increased risk of negative health effects to the surrounding community.”

The health unit found that some pollutants already exceed provincial and federal air quality limits, even before the expansion. In an email to The Local, Peel Public Health said they’d found that local background levels of benzo(a)pyrene — a toxic chemical that’s often the result of incomplete combustion of organic material — currently exceeds the air quality limits for both short and long-term exposures. Modeling under worst-case emission conditions, the health unit found that with the expansion, benzo(a)pyrene and nitrogen dioxide are estimated to exceed the short-term exposure limits set by the province by 115 per cent.

The proposed expansion is also predicated on collecting enough waste to generate profitable energy from incineration. That’s an approach that Peel Public Health’s report says is “counter to the promotion and sustainability of robust circular economy markets, which are crucial for minimizing waste, pollution and resource consumption.”

To fully understand the emissions and their impact on air quality in the surrounding community, Peel Public Health told The Local they need to know more about the pollution control technology at the expanded facility — information that will come in the next step of the approval process. Emerald Energy from Waste is required to include this information in their Environmental Compliance Approval application to the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks.

What’s clear is that the expanded incinerator will be surrounded by existing vulnerable communities. Peel Region health status data shows that roughly 70 per cent of the people in the data zone containing the incinerator are racialized individuals. According to the Peel Public Health report, compared to Peel as a whole, residents in the communities living closest to the facility have more one-parent families, and a higher percentage of residents who didn’t complete high-school and are unemployed. They also have “higher rates of certain health conditions … that may be worsened by exposure to increased air pollution.”

Peel Public Health noted in its report that it hasn’t heard directly from residents about the proposed expansion. But the lack of inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of concern. The socio-economic realities flagged in the report are the very same ones that make it unlikely for community members to step forward. In order to oppose the expansion, residents first need to know about it.

Municipal councillors call for more scrutiny of incinerator proposal

For long-time Brampton resident Susan Colbert Wright, the fight over the incinerator is about more than the impact of a single industrial project. She raises larger questions about who gets to shape the future of Brampton and who bears the costs of development decisions. As plans move ahead to create Canada’s largest waste incinerator, Wright keeps returning to the most basic question: “How is more pollution okay?”

Wright has lived in Brampton since the 1960s. She’s witnessed Brampton become Canada’s fastest growing, multicultural municipality — one she and her family call home. She’s also watched Brampton become home to a disproportionate share of the region’s industrial footprint, with power plants, warehouses and trucking hubs, among other facilities that are reshaping the city’s environmental future.

One of the major barriers to public engagement, as Wright sees it, is a lack of easily accessible information, with reports and correspondence scattered across government websites. To address this gap, she’s building a website that will consolidate all records and resources. “It’s the one place where you can go to get the history, the information, rather than having to search all over the place,” Wright says.

Her primary goal is for the website to act as a conduit between residents and elected officials, making it easier for concerned residents to directly email MPs, submit public feedback and participate in opposition action.

Although Emerald aimed to start construction this fall, Lyng told The Local that because they haven’t finalized the design of the project, they won’t be able to begin until spring or summer of 2027. In the meantime, the planned expansion has become a political issue for local councillors.

Wards nine and 10 councillor Gurpartap Singh Toor, who sits on Brampton’s Environment Advisory Committee, says he received an influx of calls after provincial approval was announced.

Those calls, Toor says, are almost entirely from people strongly opposing the incinerator expansion and voicing their concerns for public health. “Our communities here in the City of Brampton are heavily racialized communities that are typically more prone to heart and lung diseases,” Toor says. “A lot of them live in very close proximity to where this project is getting built, and those are the communities that will face the more immediate effect.”

In a recent regional council meeting, wards seven and eight councillor Pat Fortini and councillor Toor passed a motion to submit new technological research presented by a local resident to MPs, to emphasize that there needs to be further environmental compliance ahead of the construction of the expansion.

“I definitely don’t want the Region of Peel or the City of Brampton to be the garbage burning capital of Canada,” Toor said during that meeting. He requested the region submit the motion to both the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks and Health in order to push them to review the expansion proposal once again.

‘This is our home’: Bamptonians love their city, and say they’ll fight to keep it clean and healthy

As the incinerator expansion moves forward, Ghatoura is still dedicating himself to making sure his community isn’t seen as a “sacrifice zone.”

This April, he says his organization brought their message directly to residents, setting up booths at Earth Month and Sikh Heritage Month events across the city, to lead discussions about various environmental issues, including the proposed expansion of the incinerator. “It’s surprising that when we talk to people, they have no idea that a waste incinerator exists there, and that they have plans for expansion,” says Ghatoura. “That is very concerning, because this is going to impact them every single day.”

As Ghatoura and other organizers spark those conversations in Brampton, he’s been heartened to see different age groups advocating for their communities. “Especially this issue with the waste incinerator, we’re getting a lot more youth involvement, which is amazing, we haven’t really seen that before,” he says.

On a summer evening this July, Ghatoura led a group of senior citizens — all South Asian men over 70 — to participate in a community cleanup, picking up empty coffee cups, plastic wrappers and old weathered flyers. They met at Luongo Park in western Brampton, and walked through the neighbourhood with trash picks, garbage bags and latex gloves, picking up garbage from people’s driveways, lawns and the street.

“This is our home,” says Sri Bansilal Singh, a 70-year-old man who rode his bicycle for two kilometres to join his friends for the cleanup. “Brampton is very beautiful, and because we’re grateful to live here, we’re happy to contribute to the community and want to help maintain its beauty.”

As they went about the cleanup, residents came out to pay their respects to the seniors. “People really love these guys, and have great respect for what they’re doing,” Ghatoura says. It’s one of the many reasons he questions why the incinerator is being built in Brampton. Historically, he says, environmental racism has meant that the burden of development often falls on the shoulders of the marginalized. But this only motivates him more — to educate and mobilize his community, to prove that Brampton deserves 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.

For over a decade, Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 has been the centre of a political and environmental battle in Michigan. The legal conflict included state officials, federal agencies, tribal nations, environmental groups and the Canadian energy company fighting over what the future of the aging pipeline should look like.  

But, in recent weeks, that debate has only become more complicated. 

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy issued a key environmental permit for a proposed tunnel on July 15, appearing to move the project closer to construction. 

Two weeks later, the construction timeline moved farther away after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the Michigan Public Service Commission did not adequately consider the tunnel’s environmental consequences when giving the project its own permit. The court sent the case back to the commission for further review.

The decision added another layer to a dispute that already involved state and federal courts, multiple government agencies and competing arguments about Michigan’s energy needs, the Great Lakes and tribal Treaty Rights.

“We’re still in a state of limbo,” Mike Shriberg, director of the University of Michigan Water Center, said. “The decisions in the last few weeks, rather than clarify, have probably muddied the waters more and extended the lifetime of the conversation and the decisions about the future of Line 5.”

And on Aug. 12, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a long-desired permit for Enbridge for the construction of the tunnel. The next steps are securing the remaining permits and approvals needed for construction.

A long history

In 1953, Line 5 was built running 1,038 kilometres from Superior, Wisconsin, through Lake Michigan and Sarnia, Ont. Initially, the pipeline’s lifespan was supposed to be around 50 years. Its 50th birthday was 23 years ago. 

Most of the pipe is about 75 centimetres, with the exception of the position beneath the Straits of Mackinac. There, the pipe splits into two 50-centimetre lines that sit on the lake-bed for about seven kilometres.

That section has become the main bearer of controversy, with the central focus being a possible rupture that could release oil into the Great Lakes.

Safety concerns heightened after an approximately two-metre rupture in another Enbridge line, near Marshall, Michigan, in July 2010. The break released more than three million litres of heavy Canadian crude oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River.

In 2018, due to human error, a ship’s anchor hit Line 5 causing minor dents, but no oil was spilled. 

The proposed Great Lakes Tunnel Project would run beneath the lake-bed. Enbridge says the pipeline would sit about 30 metres below the lake-bed, protecting it from ship anchors. 

But the tunnel has yet to be built.

Why the debate is still ongoing

The newly proposed tunnel is only one piece of the larger Line 5 dispute.

In 2019, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued Enbridge in hopes of shutting down the existing pipelines in the Mackinac straits. She argued that Enbridge did not have a valid agreement to operate the pipeline under the straits — mainly that Line 5 was violating Michigan environmental laws.

This year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Nessel’s lawsuit belongs in state court after Enbridge attempted to move it to federal court.

Separately, a federal judge ruled in December that Michigan could not enforce its 2020 order to shut down Line 5 — saying the federal pipeline safety laws overruled the state’s order. Since then, Michigan has appealed the decision.

The result is a series of overlapping cases moving through different courts.

“I think it’s mostly because the legal system that we have is set up to make it easier to delay than to move forward,” Shriberg said. “It’s pretty easy in our legal system to draw things out, to appeal, to stop things from happening.”

That’s why Line 5’s problems are difficult to summarize in a single legal storyline.

“It’s a complicated array of things going on that’s very hard to explain in a straightforward manner,” Shriberg said.

Enbridge’s case for keeping the pipeline

Through the last decade of controversy, Enbridge has maintained that Line 5 is an important part of the region’s energy infrastructure.

Ryan Duffy, an Enbridge spokesperson, said the pipeline carries light crude oil and natural gas liquids, with about 80 per cent of the products being light crude oil and 20 per cent natural gas liquids.

The company says Line 5 transports as much as 540,000 barrels of product each day, a figure also cited by the Michigan Public Service Commission. The company estimates that Line 5 supplies 65 per cent of propane demand in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and 55 per cent of the state’s overall propane needs.

“A lot of people still heat their homes with propane in [Michigan’s Upper Peninsula],” Duffy said.

Line 5 is “at or near capacity,” Duffy said, adding that the only other pipeline moving product toward Sarnia is Line 78 which is also at or near capacity.

“There is really no viable alternative to transporting the product that Line 5 carries,” Duffy said.

Enbridge’s proposed solution to safety concerns is the tunnel.

According to Duffy, the tunnel was determined to be the best solution for protecting Line 5 in the Straits. He said the project would eliminate the possibility of oil or other products escaping into the Straits. 

Enbridge also points to the pipeline’s operating history. 

The company says the straits crossing has never leaked during more than 65 years of operation and is subject to continuous monitoring and maintenance.

Yet, Line 5 has experienced spills elsewhere along its route. In 2017, a National Wildlife Federation analysis identified 29 known spills, busts and equipment failures along the pipeline since 1968. Between those spills, more than three million litres of oil and natural gas have been released.

Concerns beyond safety

“The tunnel is really the common-sense solution going forward because it both protects the environment and makes sure that the product that people need continues to be delivered safely and reliably and affordably,” Duffy said.

For Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle, located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Line 5 is not a question of safety or energy supply.

“For my tribal nation specifically, Line 5 is a threat to our way of life, to our tribal Treaty Rights, to our cultural resources,” Gravelle said.  

Line 5 crosses territory included in the 1836 Treaty of Washington, where tribal nations yielded millions of acres of property to the United States while retaining certain rights, including what the treaty describes as the “usual privileges of occupancy.”

Gravelle said those rights depend on the health of the natural resources around them.

“You can’t have a treaty right to fish without clean water for fish to spawn,” she said. “And you can’t have a treaty right to hunt if you’re cutting down forests and filling wetlands.”

Protecting the Great Lakes is inseparable from protecting the tribe’s culture for Bay Mills. 

“We cannot be Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, without the Great Lakes,” Gravelle said. “Our entire being, our culture, our language is interwoven into the Great Lakes.”

She says the tribe opposes the tunnel because it believes moving Line 5 underground would extend the pipeline’s operation rather than eliminate the threat. 

“We’re only focused on these four miles in the straits without looking at the 645 miles that Line 5 traverses and asking ourselves, 100 years from now, do we still want Line 5 in the state of Michigan?” Gravelle said. “Because that’s what the tunnel would do. It would cement Line 5’s existence for the rest of time.”

Others have raised similar concerns.

Jeffrey Insko, an English professor at Oakland University who writes a newsletter on Line 5, said the tunnel could lock in fossil fuel transportation for decades.

“What the tunnel really means is locking in fossil fuel transport for another 100 years,” Insko said.

For the tunnel, he said he is also concerned about whether the project would adequately protect the Great Lakes from environmental harm during construction.

“We need to be thinking about ways and investing in ways to reduce fossil fuel consumption rather than investing in prolonging the lives of fossil fuel consumption,” Insko said.

How needed is the pipeline?

At the heart of the disagreement is a key question: does Michigan need Line 5?

“The one thing that people haven’t looked into or covered enough is: What’s the need for Line 5?” said Shriberg of the University of Michigan. “There’s extremely good information out there that shows that Line 5 is not needed for use in the U.S.”

Enbridge says it is. Opponents say alternatives exist.

Gravelle said Enbridge should decommission Line 5 and instead use alternatives like using Line 78, which runs through southern Michigan from Indiana to Sarnia. She argues Michigan could continue getting energy supplies without Line 5. 

“This ultimately is about Enbridge’s profits. It’s not about energy infrastructure,” Gravelle said.

Over the years, the state should have used the time to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, she said. 

“What could we have done in those 10 years to actually reduce our reliance on those issues?” Gravelle said. 

Enbridge disputes any claims that there could be other ways to supply what the line holds, saying there are no viable alternatives capable of replacing everything Line 5 currently carries.

What’s next

The immediate future of the Great Lakes tunnel is uncertain.

The Michigan Supreme Court’s July 31 decision requires the Michigan Public Service Commission to revisit its analysis of Enbridge’s tunnel proposal — which includes the environmental impacts that the court said were not adequately considered.

“The Great Lakes tunnel is on sort of an indefinite hold right now,” Shriberg said. “There’s not going to be any dirt moving in the near future.”

Duffy said the decision is disappointing and delays a project the company has spent years planning and permitting.

“We view that as disappointing because that is going to be an additional delay,” Duffy said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has also issued a federal permit for the tunnel project, adding another approval to the project’s permitting process.

At the same time, the legal battle over whether the existing Line 5 pipelines can continue operating in the Straits remains separate from the tunnel permitting process.

“They’re on separate tracks,” Shriberg said.

The goal remains clear for Enbridge: keep Line 5 in operation and move the straits crossing into an underground tunnel.

After more than seven decades, the pipeline remains in operation. And after years of lawsuits, reviews and political battles, the question of what happens to Line 5 is still unsettled.

“I would not expect any final decisions on a Great Lakes tunnel until 2027 at the earliest,” Shriberg said.

For now, the pipeline continues to carry petroleum through the straits while the courts and regulators decide whether its future lies beneath the water, inside a tunnel, or somewhere else entirely.

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Amid worsening U.S.-Canada relations, Ontario Premier Doug Ford is once again threatening to cut off electricity to 1.5 million homes and businesses across three neighbouring American states: Minnesota, Michigan and New York. 

The move comes as Canada tries to stave off the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to charge “far WORSE” tariffs after the federal government decided to walk away from trade negotiations on Aug. 21. Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a “dollar-for-dollar” retaliation beginning September.

But Ford is pitching a more aggressive approach. “Everything’s on the table,” he told reporters on Aug. 24. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” 

On Ford’s table are critical minerals, uranium, potash, oil and, significantly, electricity. 

“We power 1.5 million homes and businesses,” Ford said. “What I find ironic about this is we’re actually giving electricity to companies that make products that compete against us. That needs to stop, and we’re going to address that.” 

Ford emphasized that Ontario isn’t the only province that sends electricity to the U.S. Others include New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia. “So we need to get together and decide if we’re going to put surcharges on the electricity,” he said. “How can we let them take really inexpensive electricity to make goods to compete and take jobs from Canadians? You can’t square that circle.” 

Ford’s plan wouldn’t just affect Ontario or its bordering states; it could have repercussions for affordable, reliable electricity across both countries.

Ontario has been trying to stave off these effects by proposing new and massive energy projects across the province — investments that Energy Minister Stephen Lecce deems “tariff-proof, recession-proof.” But these projects are far from being operational.

Here’s everything you need to know about this developing situation.

How did we get here?

For more than a century, America and Canada have bought and sold power between provinces and states. At any given moment, electricity is flowing in either direction across a shared and massive transmission grid, with the goal of keeping electricity affordable and available, especially when it’s most needed. Both countries have helped the other during cold snaps, heat waves, droughts and floods. 

While our shared systems have made us susceptible to each other’s energy failures — 50 million people lost power when overgrown trees in Cleveland caused North America’s largest blackout ever, in 2003 — for the most part, this relationship has been seamless. 

But for the second time in almost two years, all of this is under threat. 

The first major threat to the two countries’ shared electricity grid came in November 2024, when Trump threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian and Mexican imports — unless the two countries improve security along their borders. 

In response, Ford imposed a 25 per cent tax on electricity exports and threatened to shut down electricity exports entirely should the tariffs remain on the table. The surcharge was in effect for one day last year and made the province $260,000.

Both options — which Ford once described as options of “last resort”— are being pitched once more. 

The federal government has not officially weighed in on Ford’s proposal yet. Neither have other provinces that send electricity south of the border. 

Which Canadian provinces send America electricity?

Canada began sending electricity to the U.S. in 1909, when the first transmission line was built connecting the two countries. Today — 117 years later — every Canadian province along the border is electrically interconnected with at least one U.S. state. There are more than 31 cross-border transmission lines across both countries. 

That means the countries can easily work together to balance out fluctuations in energy needs. For example, during extreme winter weather in the U.S. in 2021, Canadian electricity companies sent increased electricity to those that needed it — an act that wasn’t just friendly, but kept the heat on as temperatures plummeted to less than -20 C in most parts of the central and southern U.S. (That’s less than -4 F for any Americans reading this.)

Ontario is the largest electricity-exporting province, followed by Quebec, while Michigan, New York and Minnesota are the largest electricity importers.

Why has Canada integrated its electricity system with America’s? 

Simply put: we produce too much! And the U.S. population is much, much bigger. 

Ontario’s very large nuclear supply, hydro plants and renewable energy sources collectively produce more electricity than the province of less than 17 million people uses on a regular basis. Nuclear facilities aren’t easily turned on and off, so Ontario sells largely emissions-free electricity to the U.S. overnight for cheap. (The alternative is letting that surplus electricity go to waste.) 

Quebec also produces more hydroelectric power than it uses. That’s why it has long-term export contracts to supply electricity to New York state — home to 20 million people. It’s also a major source of revenue for the provincial government. 

In total, Canada exports enough electricity to power 4.5 million U.S. homes.

Does America sell electricity to Canada? 

Yes, and we might need more of it soon. 

Ontario’s nuclear production has shrunk as aging plants are shut down or refurbished, while drought conditions have made hydroelectricity less reliable in British Columbia and Quebec. Meanwhile, a growing population and energy-hungry technology has put greater demands on Canada’s supply. 

The Independent Electricity System Operator, which manages supply and demand in Ontario, reported in 2024 the province may have to consider increasing the amount of electricity it imports from the U.S., even as it rushes to build new power plants and find new sources of power. 

The balance is already shifting: by fall 2023, monthly average U.S. electricity exports to Canada increased by 70 per cent, and imports decreased by 36 per cent. 

British Columbia has been a net importer of electricity for three years in a row; 25 per cent of the province’s electricity came from America.

In the Prairies, imports and exports are minimal, and the one line connecting Alberta to Montana has been at the centre of a legal battle with Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.

How has politics affected the Canada-U.S. electricity relationship before? 

On the whole, the shared grid has operated with relatively few discussions of tariffs or trade barriers. The disputes have more frequently been between jurisdictions or electricity producers and utilities. Communities have sometimes opposed electricity projects on the other side of the border when they fear it might affect their local environments. 

Premier Doug Ford has been threatening to cut American states like New York and Michigan off from Ontario’s power. Could he do that?

He could. 

The Ontario government has the power to instruct the Independent Electricity System Operator to limit electricity exports, which would theoretically impact the amount of energy neighbouring American states can access. 

There’s one snag. To both increase the price of electricity exports and shut them down, the government would need to table legislation directing Ontario’s electricity utilities and operators. The government is currently on an extended summer break until Oct. 27. Ford is resisting the Ontario NDP’s call to return sooner to pass emergency relief measures for workers in tariff-exposed sectors and business.

If Ontario reduced or eliminated electricity sales to American states, what would be the impact there and at home?

The electricity grid really is one big machine, so it won’t function nearly as well if we cut it in half. 

Two energy experts previously told The Narwhal the immediate impact would likely be marginal in American states, which could make up for lost Ontario electricity by tapping into local sources of power kept in reserve, mostly fossil fuels. The result would be a grid that was more expensive to operate, much dirtier and less reliable on both sides of the border. Plus, Ontario’s electricity producers would see a financial loss, which might increase costs for domestic users. 

If Ontario was in an emergency situation during a charged political battle, like a winter storm, it wouldn’t be able to rely immediately on U.S. electricity, as it can now. It would have to work more closely with Manitoba and Quebec.

All of this is hypothetical, though. Ford has yet to provide details of his plan.

How will Ontario mitigate the impacts of the trade war on electricity?

By building big, new energy projects — or so they say.

On Aug. 25, Energy Minister Stephen Lecce was in St. Clair Township, at the border between the U.S. and Canada, to announce his government is planning to revive the long-shuttered Lambton coal-generating station into either a new nuclear or gas facility. This proposal joins a long list of massive energy projects — including new generating facilities in Nanticoke and Port Hope — the Ford government believes will make the province and the country energy-independent.

“Energy independence has always been vital,” Lecce said. “Today, it’s more than just keeping the lights on. It is about our national security and sovereignty. It’s about making power and having the power to make our own decisions, build our own industries and fuel our economy right here at home.”

But these projects are far away from being built, let alone being operational. In the short term, a trade war with electricity caught in the centre will have some impact on residents across both countries.

—With files from Drew Anderson

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My parents were farmers before they came to Canada in the late 1980s. So were my grandparents. I grew up here, never farming, but also never entirely distant from it.

Some of my strongest connections to my family’s history in Punjab came from the back seat of my parents’ car. I remember trips to farms in and around Brampton, Ont., to find vegetables my parents grew up eating in India: okra, bitter gourd, fenugreek, coriander and other produce that would later be cooked into sabzi, a lightly sautéed vegetable dish eaten with flatbreads like roti.

For me, those trips meant getting a taste of a country I hadn’t grown up in.

For my parents, they meant something different.

They brought back memories of working alongside their parents and siblings. After immigrating to Canada, their family members eventually scattered to different countries and continents and those experiences became harder to return to.

Going to the farm offered a small piece of it.

Thousands of people now experience this nostalgia through their phones. In the past few years, several farmers in the Brampton area have taken to social media to share their crops, farming practices and the knowledge behind how they grow food. There’s King Subzi Farm (@kingsubzifarm) northwest of the city, in Caledon, Ont., along with Balle Balle Heritage Farm (@balleballeheritagefarm).

Sarbat Farm (@sarbatfarm), northeast of Brampton, has just over 5,000 followers on TikTok alone, watching reel after reel of daily life on the farm and chickens roaming the land. Driving there, in early August, I got to see it in person, this time from the front seat: fields filled with fresh garlic and serrano chilli peppers, tractors moving through the land and families arriving to buy produce — and a taste of home.

South Asians were farming in Canada in the early 1900s

The connection between farming, food and migration has existed in Canada for more than a century. Tarlok Singh Sahota is the director of the Lakehead University’s agricultural research station in Thunder Bay, Ont., and studied agronomy at Punjab Agricultural University in India. He says Punjabi farmers have been involved in Canadian agriculture for generations, particularly in British Columbia.

Historical records compiled by the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley show that by 1909, 35 South Asians were working on farms in Mission and Matsqui in B.C.’s Lower Fraser Valley. By 1923, records listed 25 farms among businesses owned or operated by the province’s relatively small South Asian community. The earliest record in Ontario is 1914, when a group of Sikh men worked as farmhands on an estate near Pickering, east of Toronto.

Today, Statistics Canada data shows 8,960 Sikh people worked in agriculture in Canada in 2021, representing about 2.1 per cent of people working in the industry. By comparison, 771,790 Sikhs live in Canada, making up 2.1 per cent of the country’s total population.

“Farming is in our blood, so they started owning farms or farming as soon as possible so they could do it,” Sahota says.

In places such as Brampton, which 340,000 South Asians call home, that history of farming is meeting a growing market for vegetables that are everyday ingredients in Punjabi kitchens, Sahota says, but less common on conventional Ontario farms.

Many of these vegetables can require intensive watering and care to ensure a controlled and reliable moisture supply, separate from natural rainfall throughout the growing season, he says.

There is also the knowledge that comes from understanding the crop itself, what it looks like, how it grows and when it should be harvested.

“That’s why most of these things are grown by Punjabis or Asian communities,” Sahota says.“For most people here, this is a specialized cultivation, specialized farming. It is what you call high-value crops in a way.” 

Whether farmers can grow those crops commercially ultimately comes down to demand.

“Because there’s a big population, then there’s a demand,” Sahota says of Brampton. “Whatever you grow, if there is no demand, you won’t grow that.”

Family, friends and farming outside Brampton, Ont.

Jaswinder Singh Sran came to Canada in 2008. His 19-year-old son, Gurveer Singh Sran, says his father grew up farming in India and had long dreamed of doing it again.

Gurveer remembers hearing stories about his father operating a combine — the machine used to harvest a variety of crops from oats to rice and more — when he was about 18 and travelling to other parts of India where farmers would pay him to harvest their crops.

“My dad always had a dream to farm in Canada,” Gurveer says. But it would be years before that opportunity arrived.

The family started farming the 400-acre property in 2020. There is a whole team behind Sarbat Farm, from those tending and harvesting the vegetables that sprawl across tree-lined fields, to the people selling the goods at a farmstand on the property. When I visit on a Sunday, it’s teeming with customers, filling bags of green chickpeas and pattypan squash, under a big, white tent. 

Balkaran Dhillon is also a part of that team. He bought land in 2017 that became the site of Sarbat Farm.

Dhillon, too, grew up farming in India. “When I was three years old, I always went with my parents to sit with the tractors and grow vegetables and other crops like wheat, mustard, chickpeas and cotton,” Dhillon says.

He moved to Canada in 2001. Dhillon met Jaswinder, who was doing general contracting work, in 2020. They set about starting the farm together.

The name Sarbat derives from the phrase “Sarbat da bhala” in the Punjabi language, Dhillon says, which translates to “blessings or welfare for all.” They chose the name to reflect their desire to help feed everyone.

Adapting farming practices for the climate and environment

While much of the team at Sarbat brought knowledge of farming from India to Ontario, it has required adaptation.

The biggest difference, Dhillion says, is the weather.

“It is hard, especially because of the very small [growing] season and winter,” Dhillon says.

But they have found ways to stretch the growing season and learned some of the local norms for seasonal planting. Garlic is planted in the fall, Dhillon says, whereas in India bulbs could be buried into the winter months. Some plants are started in greenhouses in February, allowing them to be transplanted soon after temperatures rise in the spring.

A couple years after starting the farm, the owners converted to organic farming practices, Sarjeet Singh Jhabelwali, another family friend who oversees some of the farming operations, explains.

“We want to prove that farming can be done without chemicals and fertilizers. Farming can be done without tampering with nature,” he says in an interview, conducted in Punjabi.

For Jhabelwali, the approach is part of a broader vision for agriculture that he wants the community to understand, particularly younger generations.

“We are polluting the environment. Species are disappearing,” he says. He attributes this, in part, to the use of pesticides. Health Canada studies and regulates pesticide use – what is allowed and how much – but generally recognizes that pesticides are one of several factors contributing to the loss of pollinators and other impacts on humans and the environment.

Dhillon says avoiding pesticides makes the work more labour-intensive because weeds have to be removed by hand rather than sprayed, but it’s better for the environment and creates jobs.

He estimates the operation employs about 40 to 50 people, many of them relatives, friends and older workers who already know how to farm.

For Gurveer, who helps during the summer and around his school schedule, the fields represent both his father’s past and something his family could carry forward.

“Everything is hand-cultivated, so just seeing the fields itself, without any weeds, without using pesticides, that’s a big achievement,” he says.

Passing farming knowledge to a new generation

The farming knowledge at Sarbat, and other farms in the area, may be coming from an older generation, but the way the farm reaches customers is distinctly modern.

Sarbat Farm began using TikTok to promote its produce in 2024. At first, the family simply experimented with posting videos. Then one went viral.

“Our main message is to attract people toward pesticide-safe food produce because there’s definitely a taste difference,” Gurveer says. 

But Jhabelwali sees the social media presence as more than advertising. He says about 50,000 people visited the farm last year and expects that number to double this year. The more people who see the farm online and visit in person, he says, the more opportunities there are to show people how their food is grown.

“The people who visit will come and see how the vegetables are being grown. The new youth who come will gain awareness,” Jhabelwali says.

He believes younger generations are particularly well-positioned to seek out that information. “Our new youth have good language skills and command. They read and write. They use ChatGPT and search for everything we’re talking about,” he says.

The farming tradition once passed primarily through generation to generation can now reach thousands of people through a phone screen. And those screens are, perhaps surprisingly, bringing people back onto the land, Jhabelwali says.

“The community is what supports us,” Gurveer says.

Dhillon notices it most among older visitors. They come to see the tractors. They walk through the fields. Some want to pick their own vegetables — an experience the farm has been considering expanding.

“A lot of people come here to refresh their memory,” Dhillon says.

Gurveer hears it directly from visitors.

“People feel connected with their roots here,” he says. 

“You don’t get to feel that a lot in Canada.”

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 story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

It’s the summer of data centre controversies in Ontario.

In a season where city council chambers are usually quiet, residents of Hamilton, Oakville, Mississauga, Burlington and Toronto have shown up to public meetings in droves. Many are there to resist proposals for massive new data centres in their backyards, worried about noise, water use and energy bills.

By mid-August, Oakville and Mississauga moved to freeze new data centre construction for a year. Hamilton came within an inch of doing the same.

On Aug. 13, Ontario Premier Doug Ford weighed in. 

Standing in front of a wall of servers at a government-owned data centre in Guelph, Ford unveiled the province’s new “data centre playbook” — and made clear he had little patience for local revolt against the boom he wants to usher in. 

“This is the way of the future,” he said. “Either we do it or Donald Trump’s going to do it, and I’m not giving Donald Trump nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Pushback is also happening in Fergus, Sault Ste. Marie and Armour Township, where a project was cancelled in June in the face of public opposition. Ford calls data centre skeptics “hypocritical,” suggesting residents fighting these projects were “misinformed.”“It just doesn’t add up,” he said, arguing that people can’t rely on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud storage while also refusing the infrastructure that enables them. 

It was a blunt, campaign-style pitch for a $122-billion industry that has been lobbying hard to take root in Ontario, attracted by its clean electricity grid, temperate weather and proximity to the Great Lakes (four of the five count shorelines in the province). But the data centre push has sparked real concerns about the very few rules governing these massive facilities, and the resources needed to run them.

It’s a story with chapters being written across Canada — including Alberta, where more than 40 are proposed, and New Brunswick, stirring worries about the impacts on old-growth forests and wetlands. Around the world, communities are making it clear they view the centres and the technologies they enable with increasing caution.

And now Ontario is making moves. The province’s playbook has been posted online for public consultation until Sept. 12. It’s currently just a draft, not yet in force — and the legislature won’t be back to debate it until Oct. 27, after an extended summer break.

Here’s everything you need to know.

What are data centres — and why do they matter so much right now?

Strip away the technical jargon and a data centre is just a warehouse full of computers — racks and racks of servers that store and crunch the data behind everything from your email to chatbots to this very story. 

Whether you like them or not, data centres have become the backbone of the modern economy: cloud storage, artificial intelligence, banking systems, health care and government services all run on them. 

They’re not new — Ontario already has dozens — but artificial intelligence has supercharged their scale and size. Today’s data centres are requesting hundreds of megawatts of power, dwarfing older facilities that ran on less power and used less water to cool their servers. While artificial intelligence has its own tension points (which we won’t get into here, but feel free to check out our AI policy), resource use is the root cause of local concerns around the physical space occupied by data centres.

How does a data centre get built in Ontario?

Energy Minister Stephen Lecce has said the province “welcome[s] data centre entrants” — but that welcome comes with strings attached and an approval process that can take up to three years, maybe more. 

The groundwork for this process was laid out first in Bill 40, formally the Protect Ontario by Securing Affordable Energy for Generations Act — the first law governing data centres among provinces — and further in the new playbook.Between the two, it’s clear that data centres need to prove two things to be able to connect to Ontario’s grid.The first is to prove they will be able to cover the full cost of their own electricity connections and use — something other businesses aren’t required to do — so regular households aren’t stuck covering the cost. To enforce that, Ontario wants to create a new, higher electricity rate for any data centre over one megawatt. Quebec’s version of this rate kicks in at five megawatts, so Ontario’s lower bar would catch a lot more projects.

The second is to show the centre will be good for Ontario’s economy. The playbook lays out a three-part criteria to determine this: what jobs, investments and tax revenue it could bring to Ontario; whether it would keep local data in the province; and whether benefits to the host community outweigh the financial and environmental costs. If a data centre can’t satisfy these criteria, Bill 40 gives the energy minister the power to reject its grid connection request. 

“The bottom line is, if a data centre wants to come to Ontario, it is not your right,” Lecce said in a July press conference as the criteria were unveiled. “We now have the right to say no.”

Data centres also have to get approval from municipalities, which determine zoning and building permits. However, most Ontario municipalities don’t yet have zoning rules that specifically address data centres. This means projects can often move ahead on land already zoned for general industrial use, leaving councils with limited power to say no. 

Notably, data centres in Ontario do not have to go through a full environmental assessment, according to analysis from law firm McCarthy Tétrault. It’s also unclear if the province will enforce the constitutional duty to consult Indigenous communities on proposed data centre projects. 

But the province is ensuring other things. The playbook says the government will favour centres that use quieter equipment. It’s also encouraging companies to build their own power supply instead of relying entirely on the public grid, since that can get them running faster than waiting in line for a grid connection. Doing so would exempt a data centre from the process outlined in the playbook. It may also see data centre projects proposed with on-site natural gas plants, as we’re seeing in Alberta. 

One thing neither the playbook nor Bill 40 makes clear is what size of data centre the new process applies to.

How will data centres impact Ontario’s electricity demand?

Significantly — and the numbers keep increasing with every new forecast. 

In 2024, the system operator forecast Ontario’s overall electricity demand will grow 75 per cent by 2050 — a sharper jump than previously projected, driven largely by factories and data centres. The centres are expected to account for about 13 per cent of that new demand by 2035.

A more recent forecast suggested data centres could eventually make up close to nine per cent of all electricity used in Ontario by 2050.

What are data centres using all that electricity for? To stay running all the time; servers never sleep, constantly processing web traffic and requests. 

The province says it’s already fielding interest in data centre builds that would add up to roughly 30 per cent of Ontario’s current peak electricity demand. 

That’s a lot of energy demand — and brings us to the supply challenge ahead.

Will this increase in data centre energy demand result in Ontario using more natural gas?

Possibly, at least in the short-term future.Most of Ontario’s electricity comes from low-emissions sources like nuclear and hydro power. But when demand spikes, like during a heat wave when those who have air conditioners turn them on, natural gas plants are usually what fills the gap, since they can be switched on and off quickly.

That matters for data centres, which run around the clock. If a facility is drawing heavily during one of those peak moments, it could be leaning on gas power to do it. And that fossil fuel is primarily made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas driving climate change and the worsened wildfire seasons, floods and other severe weather we’ve experienced as a result.

How will data centres impact Ontario’s water usage?

We don’t know yet. 

Existing large data centres use water-based cooling systems to keep servers from overheating. That means that all the water pulled into a centre absorbs the heat from the servers and evaporates into the air. Any water that doesn’t evaporate is reused and then sent to a local plant as wastewater. In closed-loop systems, water just circulates in pipes that cool the servers, so there is little lost to the air. 

According to one estimate, a single one-megawatt data centre can use up to 25.5 million litres of water a year just for cooling — about what all of the homes in the city of Mississauga use in a day. Many of the data centres being proposed in Ontario are larger than that, which means, depending on their cooling system, they could also be using a lot more water. 

Microsoft is building three data centres in Ontario, which share an estimated total demand of approximately 200 megawatts. One planned in Toronto’s Etobicoke area was approved to use up to about 40 litres of water every second for cooling — that’s about five bathtubs full every five seconds, and 1.2 billion litres a year. A separate Microsoft complex in Vaughan is expected to use about 730 million litres of municipal water a year.

The province’s playbook says Ontario will favour data centres that use water-free or closed-loop cooling and reuse waste heat — for instance, to help warm nearby buildings.

What are Ontario municipalities doing about data centres?

On Aug. 11, Oakville became the first Ontario municipality to pass a one-year pause on building new data centres. Mississauga is set to follow suit. Both were facing major AI data centre proposals, or at least land acquisitions that suggested them.

Other municipalities are taking different approaches. Hamilton voted down a proposed pause. Burlington and Waterloo Region have asked staff to review existing rules and impacts. Both, along with Toronto, have asked the province for clearer regulations. Centre Wellington and Sault Ste. Marie are sussing whether they can pass temporary bans.

Ford has resisted calls for a province-wide ban, saying local councils will still have a say and that he’d “rather go to a willing host.” While Ontario law requires municipalities to indicate their support before a wind or solar farm can be developed (usually through a council motion or resolution), no such formal rule was proposed in the data centre playbook.

What does Doug Ford mean when he says Ontario needs data centres to address ‘data sovereignty’?

Both Ford and various companies aspiring to build data centres in Ontario have framed this push as a matter of national security: keep the servers here or risk losing control of Canadians’ data to countries like the United States. 

But it’s harder said than done. Yes, building data centres would mean Ontarians’ data is kept in Ontario physically. But what actually determines control over data isn’t the building’s location — it’s who owns the company running it, and which country’s courts and laws they’re accountable to.

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.

Starting next month, Ontario hunters will have a shot at sandhill cranes — for the first time in a century.

The long-legged, grey birds with a nearly two-metre wingspan are widespread across Ontario from the Great Lakes as far north as southern James Bay — nesting in wetlands and swampy areas after migrating up from the southern United States and Mexico in the spring.

Mark Peck recalls waking up at 4 a.m. to see thousands of sandhill cranes fly over the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where 80 per cent of the species migrate to rest and eat before flying back south for the winter. 

Like Peck, many of them travel from Canada, while others make the journey from Alaska and Siberia.

“It was an incredible experience. … There were about 10,000 sandhill cranes, all on the river,” Peck, president of Ontario Field Ornithologists, said. “As the sun was coming up, the birds were slowly leaving, but they were dancing and bugling, and it was just an awesome experience. … I think it would be hard to hunt after witnessing that.”

Sandhill cranes have a distinct, rattling bugle call that can be heard up to four kilometres away. To Peck, it’s akin to the call of a common loon or the howl of a wolf, a “beautiful sound of nature.” Their distinctive mating dance — wings flapping, beak pecking and legs strutting — have been widely captured and shared online.

While birders love them, sandhill cranes have a long and complex history in Ontario. 

In the early 20th century, the species was hunted to near-extirpation in the province, meaning they were almost locally extinct. In the last few decades, thanks to increased protection from unregulated hunting and more sources of food from agriculture, they have surpassed population expectations. To some, this is a huge success.

“It really is a wonderful, good news story,” Peck said. “They’ve made a remarkable comeback. I’m 67. When I was growing up, it was unusual to see a sandhill crane in southern Ontario. Now, they breed across the province.”

Not everyone sees it as good news, though. Farmers in Algoma, Timmins and as far as Thunder Bay have advocated for an open hunting season in northern Ontario. They say sandhill cranes have caused extensive damage to their crops, wreaking havoc in the spring by pulling up freshly planted seedlings, and again in the fall before harvest.

“It is very discouraging to certain farmers that they’re planting their spring crops, and these birds are coming in and just annihilating it,” Bill Groenheide, Northern Ontario director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, said. “Farmers are having an increase of up to 30 per cent loss in their crops.”

Birgit Martin, who farms on Manitoulin Island, told Ontario Grain Farmer Magazine she has had to replant 25 per cent of her corn acres due to sandhill crane damage. 

Sandhill cranes are omnivores and eat a wide variety of food including insects, plant roots, small animals like rodents and frogs, berries, seeds and even other small birds. But when they find themselves in agricultural areas during the fall migration, the crops hit the hardest are corn, soybeans and potatoes, Groenheide said — some of the most common, and profitable, crops for Ontario farmers.

“When so many birds come into one area and totally destroy your livelihood, there’s got to be compensation somewhere,” Groenheide said. The province’s wildlife damage compensation program focuses on livestock, and doesn’t cover crop losses to migratory birds. “There’s got to be something done about it.”

Ontario sandhill crane hunt allows for one bird per hunter per day

Ontario farmers have been asking the government to open a hunt for years. Environment and Climate Change Canada assessed the status of sandhill cranes earlier this year and found that a “conservative” hunt would have a “minimal impact” on the population of sandhill cranes — which is currently more than 103,000 strong, and considered to have a large, increasing population size. It proposed a hunt running for 14 days, with a “small bag limit” of one bird per day that will allow the federal government to carefully monitor the harvest in the first four years of implementation.

While Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources determines harvesting regulations for most wildlife in the province, the federal environment department oversees migratory birds, like sandhill cranes.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s population objective for the cranes sits between 30,000 and 60,000, and explains on its website that a “managed harvest” could slow or stabilize population growth and potentially minimize crop damage.

The federal agency told The Narwhal in an email that the primary goal of this open season is to provide additional hunting opportunity, adding that “while the intent of the season is not to significantly decrease the sandhill crane population in Ontario and Quebec,” the season may also provide “some direct relief of conflicts.” They also said there may be some indirect reduction of conflicts as hunted sandhill cranes may respond better to scare techniques used by farmers to protect their crops, such as propane cannons that make loud noises.

“Obviously that’s great from a recovery perspective … that this population was able to rebound to that extent,” Matthew Robbins, a fish and wildlife biologist at Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, said. “It also means that, based on the modelling that exists, they can certainly handle some sustainable use.” 

The current hunt will allow Canadian residents to hunt one sandhill crane per person per day in the area around Hudson and James Bay, from Sept. 1 through 14, and on farmland only in other parts of northern and central Ontario including Algoma, Nipissing and Temiskaming, on Sept. 12 through 25. A similarly limited hunt is being opened in Quebec this September as well. 

This new season creates opportunity for hunters and gourmets — sandhill cranes are known to some as “ribeye of the sky” for their rich, red meat — that the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters says is appropriately limited to start.

“The proposal is a very conservative approach,” Robbins said. He doesn’t anticipate a significant hit to the population as a result of the hunt, but says slowing the population growth by some amount may help those farm conflicts.

“It would be worth exploring expanding it in some capacity as long as we can ensure that that’s going to be sustainable,” Robbins said. “From a conservation perspective, it definitely makes sense to start this off from a fairly cautious position, and then go from there.”

Peck is also optimistic about the conservative nature of the hunt’s parameters. But conservation organizations like Ontario Nature have argued reinstating a sandhill crane hunt is a “controversial and concerning proposal.” The birds can live up to 30 years in the wild, meaning they take a long time to mature, while very few of their young survive to adulthood. This makes it more difficult for populations to replenish quickly if adults are killed off.  

The federal government said it received opposing comments from an animal welfare organization, ornithology and naturalist groups, birdwatchers, an unnamed First Nation and individuals during the public comment period last winter.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says on its website that the current strategy accounts for sandhill crane life history and low productivity by allowing only a very limited harvest. It argues the “daily bag limit is intentionally set below” the level the population can sustainably support, and that the population is still expected to grow, though more slowly than if there were no hunt.

At the same time, Groenheide from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture worries the plan for the hunt is not enough to protect farmers, but Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it does not anticipate making changes to the proposed harvest framework until the end of the 2029-30 hunting season.

“In Canada, they want to regulate it because they want to drop the amount of birds [killed], and I do understand that,” Groenheide said. “But on the flip side, how do we protect the farmers?”

Farmers organization wants higher sandhill crane harvest and in more areas

In early 2024, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture released a statement recommending Environment and Climate Change Canada alter its plans. The organization wants farmers to be allowed to defend their crops from sandhill cranes at any point during the year, as well as increased hunting limits, more hunting areas and an earlier season. 

While changes have not been reflected in the final regulations, Groenheide said this year’s hunt is a good first step.

“It’s great to see these birds in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong,” Groenheide said. “But there has to be a playing field. Farmers are out there and the value of their crops is in big demand. There’s a lot of money put into this. They’re losing it all. They’re getting nothing for it. So there has to be a trade-off somewhere.”

He said the way this species is managed represents part of a larger picture related to expanding agriculture in northern Ontario, proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness in April 2026.

“We have ministers now wanting to expand the north, wanting the great clay belt to be opened up and all that,” Groenheide said. “I always call it the great frontier of the north.”

“It’s great land,” Groenheide said, but farming new areas comes with new challenges. Wildlife like deer, bear, moose and elk can conflict with agriculture as farming expands northward, he said.

“It’s their territory, so how do we work around it? How do we compensate farmers if we are inviting them out there?” Groenheide said. “There’s got to be a plan.”

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.