Canada's Environmental Voice
Canada is a world-class climate dinosaur. We aren’t the leading per capita GHG emitter (that is Qatar), but we may get there yet. We signed and ratified Kyoto, but ignored it for years, radically exceeded our promised emissions target and then just abandoned the agreement. We are the only nation […]
In the face of decades of environmental, pollution and development stresses on the shorelines, wetlands, river basins, flora and fauna of the Great Lakes, the government of Ontario realized making a difference in the health of these critical water bodies would require all hands on deck. Provincial dollars would be […]
Originally published on the WWF-Canada blog.
The Commission on Conservation, a Canadian government agency, was established in 1909. It was perhaps the earliest forum for business-conservation cooperation. It was a prescient and often thoughtful organization, producing hundreds of reports. Its objectives were mild-mannered enough, fitting for an era when polite society was inclined to civility and […]
By Jeanette Ageson and Rachel Forbes. Originally posted on December 6, 2012 at West Coast Environmental Law.
The UNFCCC COP18 climate change conference has been hailed, by some, as a success. The ‘Doha Gateway’ was celebrated in particular for its success at ensuring a second term of the Kyoto Protocol. After the negotiations went more than twenty-four hours overtime, the president of the conference quickly gaveled through […]
November was an up-and-down month for Ontario’s renewable energy industry. The Minister of Energy released a directive on November 23 to resume accepting applications for the province’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program. It’s good news for a program that has been on hold for review for several months, leaving solar manufacturers […]
Right now, we live in a world that is an average of 0.8 degrees (Celcius) warmer than it was one hundred years ago. This is a profoundly changed planet: one of superstorms, species loss, rising ocean levels, and innumerable other environmental catastrophes.
Canada largely owes its economic development to natural resources, the vast and (theoretically) sustainable resources like lumber, fish, minerals, agriculture and energy in the form of oil and natural gas. Borrowing liberally from Harold Innis’s iconic The Fur Trade in Canada, hewers of wood and drawers of water we were, […]
In June, Ontario’s Minister of the Environment stood at the shoreline of Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto to announce the introduction of Bill 100, the Great Lakes Protection Act, 2012. This broad new legislation would allow ministries to better cooperate on conservation initiatives – water quality, wastewater treatment, algae blooms, […]
