This article was written by John Lorinc and was published in the Toronto Star on December 18, 2025.
Since we’ve all been talking about floor crossing, here’s my question: why doesn’t Liberal MP, and now former cabinet minister, Steven Guilbeault, cross the floor of the House of Commons to join Elizabeth May’s Green Party, which needs a dose of renewal in the worst way?
Two weeks ago, after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced his rapprochement with Alberta, Guilbeault, then serving as culture minister and Quebec lieutenant, took the principled decision to resign from cabinet, knowing his government’s actions with respect to pipelines and federal climate policy no longer aligned with his beliefs about global warming.
As he wrote in these pages shortly after he resigned, “I view the latest federalprovincial energy deal as a significant step backwards in the fight against climate change — that it is in fact a fire sale rather than a grand bargain. The CanadaAlberta MOU abandons several key measures that were painstakingly modelled, consulted on, negotiated and implemented or proposed over the last decade.”
Guilbeault arrived in national politics after a highprofile career as an environmental activist with Greenpeace, his outlook aligning well with former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s.
As environment and climate change minister from 2021 to 2025, Guilbeault drove an ambitious agenda that included elements such as the clean fuel regulations and Canada’s first longterm emissions reduction plan aimed at reducing Canada’s greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.
He, of course, had to answer for some of the government’s politically unpopular decisions, including the acquisition of the TMX pipeline and the deluge of criticism from the oilpatch about Ottawa’s environmental assessment processes, widely seen in Western Canada as an effort to deter investment in natural resource extraction. Such are the tradeoffs of power.
Once Carney took office, however, it quickly became pretty obvious that a highprofile Trudeauadjacent environmentalist like Guilbeault would not survive for long. Yes, Carney’s nationbuilding agenda gestures at climate policy, and the prime minister himself has a long history of advocating for climate finance in his various post-Bank of Canada roles. But given the fourdimensional chess match that defines politics in 2025 — Trump, Poilievre, a minority Parliament, a highly vulnerable economy, global security spasms etc. — Carney & Co. have opted to kick Ottawa’s climate agenda down the road, citing, repeatedly, the need to start building again as a way of fortifying Canada’s public services and standard of living.
Politics is about choices, and Canadians will have the opportunity to judge whether Carney jumped on the right horse. Yet in his government’s shift to the political middle generally, and the political right when it comes to climate policy, I’d argue there’s a grave risk that voters are not hearing enough about the environmental costs of these decisions.
During the budget debate, Elizabeth May extracted a question period answer from the prime minister about Ottawa’s direction, which seems, well, inadequate. I’d like to hear more pushback and strenuous policy debate, especially when it comes to engaging with Ottawa’s emerging energy policy choices and their longterm consequences for Canada’s economy.
Case in point: a September essay in Foreign Policy Magazine posited a looming “ecological cold war,” in which the winners — China and its satellites/clients — were those nations that had bet hard on the energy transition and renewables. The countries that remained dependent on fossil fuels (the U.S., Russia and their respective satellites), argued Nils Gilman, of the L.A.based think tank Berggruen Institute, would experience economic decline and geopolitical instability. Guess which side we’re on?
This is a view I’d like to have articulated in our national debates, and Guilbeault, by virtue of his expertise and background, is exceptionally wellpositioned to make that case. Except that he can’t, because he’s now a backbencher in a government that has chosen a different path.
From where I sit, he could not only join the Greens but provide a muchneeded boost to a party that should be punching well above its current weight class (one sitting MP). For years, the federal Greens have been mired in a gong show succession process, with the result that their vote share and seat share has shifted into reverse, even as the signs of the climate crisis become more and more difficult to ignore.
Some of this absurd watertreading is due to the party’s weird internal structure and constitution, with its provisions for “coleaders.” But all those insidebaseball shenanigans about selecting leaders have done a huge disservice to the broader voting public, a portion of whom want to see Canada adopt a more robust approach to the climate crisis and the largely untapped economic opportunities afforded by investment in climate action. As long as the federal Greens flounder, those voters have to look elsewhere. For a while, that elsewhere was the Trudeau Liberals. Those days are gone.
Guilbeault is the genuine article — a bona fide climate activist with a seat in Parliament. I’d like to see Guilbeault seize this moment and cast his lot with a party that desperately needs its own energy transition.
This opinion was written by Chris Severson-Baker and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 18, 2025.
Just a week after Alberta signed its MOU with Ottawa committing to strengthening its industrial carbon pricing, it pushed regulatory changes that do the opposite.
Province’s commitment to strengthening its industrial carbon pricing system is at odds with its recent regulatory changes
Executive director of the Pembina Institute
The stakes are high as Alberta and Ottawa sit down to hammer out the contours of their memorandum on energy and climate policy, and negotiations over the next few months will be fraught with complex policies and regulations. Yet the main question is simple: Will Alberta bring genuine good faith to the negotiating table?
Initial signs are not good. Just a week after Alberta signed the memorandum of understanding, which committed it to strengthening its industrial carbon pricing system, the province pushed through regulatory changes that do the opposite.
Alberta’s system only functions if companies are confident the carbon credits they will earn in future (if they reduce their emissions) will hold a reasonable value. If they suspect otherwise, a large component of the business case for their low-carbon investments is lost. This is why achieving, in short order, the much-talked-about $130 credit value that Alberta committed to in the MOU, is vital.
Like any market, supply-anddemand is king: when supply of credits is high, their value decreases. And, once the value of a credit tracks too far away from the price companies must pay for every tonne of carbon they emit – something we call the “headline price” – the credit market starts to bottom out.
Put simply, if companies can meet their emissions obligations by buying cheap credits, they won’t feel compelled to invest in technologies and projects. This has been the case in Alberta for the past couple of years, with credits trading in the low $20s, while the headline price is currently $95 a tonne.
Equally, if credit values stay weak, companies are particularly put off high-cost, multidecade investments – such as the massive Pathways carbon capture and storage project. A common refrain from industry and pundits is that, unlike oil and gas pulled from the ground, carbon capture generates no saleable “product.” Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system is supposed to do away with that concern by putting a value on captured carbon in the form of credits, but the system works only if credit values are strong and predictable.
This is the crux of why Alberta’s recent changes to its system appear in such bad faith. The province has amended its regulation to allow companies to earn credits not when they prove emissions have been reduced (as was previously the case), but at the initial point of investment in a supposedly emissions-reducing project. Companies may therefore opt for the least expensive actions – for example, commissioning an engineering study – and still earn credits, while having no duty to prove emissions are ultimately reduced. As more companies utilize this new option, the credit market is likely to be flooded, pushing credit values even lower.
After all the talk of turning the page on years of federal-Alberta discord over climate policies, it is difficult to imagine a more cynical manoeuvre. At best, it suggests Alberta has misunderstood the fundamentals of its own system – which should not simply incentivize investment for its own sake, but generate actual emissions reductions. At worst, it suggests Alberta is attempting to move the goalposts before negotiations begin. Starting with a weaker industrial carbon pricing system means the federal government has to negotiate harder to reach a reasonable outcome.
Perhaps these regulatory nuances seem like small potatoes compared with the political significance of a Liberal prime minister and Conservative Alberta premier standing together, smiling, signing their MOU. But if industrial carbon pricing is to do much of the heavy lifting in a post-Trudeau Liberal climate plan, then these details matter indeed.
Secondly, and not unrelatedly, Alberta is still pursuing a legal challenge of the federal Clean Electricity Regulations. This is despite the MOU outlining a pathway to those regulations being suspended if Alberta demonstrates a credible way to use its preferred method – you guessed it, industrial carbon pricing – to reduce electricity sector emissions instead.
A legal challenge is a curious thing to have hanging over these talks. If Ottawa doesn’t get what it needs on industrial pricing, and the Clean Electricity Regulations don’t end up suspended, will Alberta get up from the table and simply say “see you in court?” It seems to be keeping its options open. This isn’t something goodfaith negotiators are supposed to do.
It’s true Canada would have a better chance of fighting climate change if its highest-emitting province, home to its highestemitting industry – the oil sands – co-operated. But nothing is final until it is final. Industrial carbon pricing is incredibly important, but it’s also necessarily complex, and that complexity leaves lots of room for gamesmanship. Ottawa must remember that while this may be a season of goodwill with Alberta, strong climate policy must endure.
This article was written by Jeff Gray and Laura Stone, and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 18, 2025.
A helicopter moves fuel between work sites near the Ring of Fire mineral deposit in Northern Ontario in October. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has made a push to extract critical minerals from the Ring of Fire a central theme for years.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford will finalize a deal on Thursday to cut red tape for mines and other major projects − with a side agreement that could allow preliminary work to begin next year on a road to the remote Ring of Fire area.
A draft of the overall deal, unveiled last month, is similar to agreements with Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia, which signed its accord in 2019. The arrangements allow Ottawa to defer to provincial processes for environmental assessments and Indigenous consultations for major projects that fall under the purview of its Impact Assessment Act, with an eye to reducing duplication.
Ottawa and Ontario will also formally unveil a Nov. 24 letter sent to the Ontario government by the head of the federal Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC) that says it could wrap up its reviews of segments of the proposed Ring of Fire road by June, 2026, and allow some preliminary work to start, three years earlier than Queen’s Park had expected.
A provincial government source confirmed that the deals would be formally announced at an event in Ottawa on Thursday. The Globe and Mail is not naming the source, as they were not authorized to speak about the event publicly. Audrey Champoux, a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office, declined to comment on the deal on Wednesday.
Despite the agreements, mining in the Ring of Fire − an expanse of muskeg about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay − remains many years away. A completed environmental assessment for the final segment of the road into the Ring of Fire is still expected to take another three years, and construction could take a decade or more. Ontario has repeatedly asked Ottawa to help with the cost, which could be close to $2-billion.
Mr. Ford has made a push to extract critical minerals from the Ring of Fire a central theme for years. Recently, his government has pitched the Ring of Fire as an economic imperative in the face of U.S. tariffs.
But the plans have faced vocal opposition from some First Nations and environmental groups, lengthy environmental assessments and a federal regional impact assessment on the overall potential effects of mining in the area, which Mr. Ford has demanded be scrapped.
Even with the deals to be announced Thursday, Mr. Ford would not rule out using the new powers his government has granted itself in legislation known as Bill 5. The law, similar to Mr. Carney’s legislation for fast-tracking infrastructure known as Bill C-5, sparked condemnation from First Nations when it was passed earlier this year.
Ontario’s law allows the province to designate temporary “special economic zones,” where it could suspend any provincial or municipal law to speed up a project. The Premier had previously suggested he would designate the Ring of Fire as such a zone “as soon as possible.” He said Wednesday such a zone could still be needed in the region.
“Absolutely, because it moves things along a lot quicker. And we have to cut out red tape and regulations,” he said at an unrelated announcement in Toronto.
Two small First Nations near the Ring of Fire − Marten Falls and Webequie − have signed co-operation agreements with Ontario and support the project. They have led the years-long environmental assessments for segments of the road themselves. Mr. Ford said Wednesday he hoped development in the region would help young people in these communities.
Marten Falls Chief Bruce Achneepineskum said he hoped the latest deal between Ontario and Ottawa would reduce duplication between his own First Nation’s environmental assessments and the federal regional impact assessment, which includes 15 local First Nations, some of which oppose mining in the Ring of Fire.
“For us, it just meant sometimes, a rehashing of the same old studies that we are already doing,” Mr. Achneepineskum said in an interview. “I think that’s what Ontario and the feds are agreeing on.”
But he also said he supports that federal regional assessment, which he said could take another three years, adding that the other First Nations have a right to make their voices heard.
The letter on the Ring of Fire from IAAC, signed by president Terence Hubbard, says this federal regional review will continue but will not affect timelines for the road projects or “create any obligations on Ontario.”
Alvin Fiddler, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, an umbrella group of 49 Northern Ontario Indigenous communities, said it’s disappointing that an agreement was made between Ontario and Canada “regarding our lands, and we had very little input into the process.”
Marten Falls and Webequie are members of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which also includes First Nations that oppose the Ring of Fire push. Mr. Fiddler, a critic of Mr. Ford’s Bill 5, said he respects the autonomy of Webequie and Marten Falls but that the Nishnawbe Aski Nation wants to have its say as well.
“We’re not opposed to streamlining any process, as long as it does not diminish any environmental protections that are there now, or that it does not diminish our rights,” he said.
This article was written by Jeffrey Jones and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 18, 2025.
The federal government has named a coalition of climate and finance experts to put a long-delayed green and transitionary investing guidebook into use with the aim of attracting billions of dollars in private capital to help meet the country’s net-zero targets.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the Canadian Climate Institute think tank will lead the effort to develop the climate-focused investing taxonomy along with an investor-led organization known as Business Future Pathways.
The taxonomy is being developed to give institutional investors comfort that their capital is being directed at projects that meet clear climate objectives, not greenwashing exercises.
As many as 60 other jurisdictions have put taxonomies into force or are planning to. In some cases, they have used Canada’s early work as guidelines.
The group will put together a governance structure to oversee development of criteria for determining which investments are to be certified as green, such as renewable energy, and those that fit into a transitionary category.
The latter would involve technology for decarbonizing high-emitting industrial processes.
As a first step, it will set up a taxonomy council to review and approve investment guidelines, Mr. Champagne said in a statement. The council will comprise representatives from academia, finance, climate science, Indigenous nations and civil society. Working groups made up of industry experts will make recommendations to the council.
Prime Minister Mark Carney sees the effort as key to enticing foreign investors to help finance Canada’s decarbonization commitments, said Ryan Turnbull, parliamentary secretary to the Finance Minister.
Current estimates place required capital for meeting Canada’s net-zero target at $115-million to $125-million. That compares with the current investment of $15-billion to $25billion.
“Capital markets need clarity and consistency, transparency and clear market signals. I think this is a clear market signal,” Mr. Turnbull said in an interview.
Sustainable finance experts formed Business Future Pathways earlier this year to give corporations guidance on international standards that deal with climate risks and the shift to a low-carbon economy. The organization is backed by a number of financial institutions and pension funds.
Barb Zvan, chief executive officer of University Pension Plan Ontario, was a driving force behind BFP. She previously held a senior role at the Sustainable Finance Action Council, an Ottawa-appointed expert panel that developed a taxonomy road map. It presented the government with the document in late 2022, but work toward formalizing it stalled.
“Industries are going to grow as we move to renewable energy or fewer emissions, so how do we get money into Canada from foreign investors? How are they going to understand Canada and what our transition looks like? It’s confusing,” Ms. Zvan told The Globe and Mail.
Most companies today do not disclose how much of their capital spending is directed at navigating the energy transition, she said. And because Canada’s capital markets are dwarfed by those in the United States, many foreign investors won’t make the effort to conduct detailed research into Canadian companies.
The guidebook will improve companies’ access to capital as they plan projects to lower their climate-related risks, she said.
The Canadian Climate Institute will lead the research and technical aspects, building on the work of the Sustainable Finance Action Council and other sources, including taxonomies in place in other countries.
In October, 2024, then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland said she expected a taxonomy would start covering priority industrial sectors within the following 12 months. That timeline was upended by the Liberal leadership race and subsequent federal election in the first part of this year, Mr. Turnbull said.
Now, the taxonomy council is the group expected to establish investment guidelines for three priority sectors by the end of next year, and another three by the end of 2027. Previously, Ottawa listed as priority sectors: electricity, transportation, buildings, agriculture and forestry, manufacturing and extractives (including mineral extraction and processing), and natural gas.
Jonathan Arnold, director of sustainable finance at the Canadian Climate Institute, said the effort is aimed at bolstering Canada’s competitiveness in the race for green capital.
“If you look at the list of trading partners of Canada outside of the U.S., almost all of them have national taxonomies, either fully developed or developing. So, it becomes a question of market access and access to capital in the energy transition,” he said.
Companies pulling back targets amid slowing sales
This article was written by Craig Trudell and was published in the Toronto Star on December 17, 2025.
Ford Motor Co. has announced $19.5 billion (U.S.) in charges tied to the retreat from an electric strategy it vowed to go all in on eight years ago
The global transition to electric vehicles is beginning to unravel the way major changeovers often do: slowly at first, then all at once.
This week brought a cascade of signals that the EV era is entering a more uncertain, more contested phase. The European Commission backed away from what had been the world’s most aggressive timeline for phasing out internalcombustion engines, granting manufacturers and consumers more time to move off gasoline. A day earlier, Ford Motor Co. announced $19.5 billion (all figures U.S.) in charges tied to the retreat from an electric strategy it vowed to go all in on eight years ago.
The pullback is no longer confined to a few laggards or skeptics. From relative newcomers to legacy giants, the signs of reckoning have been mounting for months.
Take Tesla Inc., the U.S. company that did more than any other in the world to kickstart the EV uprising. The Elon Muskled manufacturer was never going to keep up the meteoric rise pulled off at the beginning of the decade, but it’s no longer just slowing down — worldwide vehicle deliveries are poised to drop for the second year in a row. Musk’s interests have wandered from pursuing a $25,000 electric car to developing humanoid robots and driverless taxis.
China’s BYD Co. will become the new No. 1 purveyor of batteryelectric cars in 2025, though it too is now having growing pains, with total sales falling each of the last three months. The company is still producing one plugin hybrid with a gas engine under the hood for every batteryonly EV, and its momentum is stalling in part because authorities in Beijing are increasingly scrutinizing pricing practices.
Ford has had plenty of company in struggling to catch up with the electric leaders.
Its rival General Motors Co. recently incurred $1.6 billion in charges tied to paring EV production capacity, and flagged more such moves may be in the offing. Stellantis NV has scrapped plans for a fully electric Ram pickup and revived gasguzzling V8 engines it will have no trouble selling in a U.S. market that has hollowed out fuel economy and emissions standards.
When Volkswagen AG — Europe’s carmaker that was once most motivated to chase Tesla — ends output of electric ID.3 hatchbacks this month in Dresden, it will be the first time in 88 years the carmaker will have ceased production at a German assembly plant. VW, too, has taken substantial financial blows, booking 4.7 billion euros ($5.5 billion) in charges tied to its subsidiary Porsche AG reversing from EVs.
For all the challenges the industry is having, the transition isn’t being abandoned.
“EVs remain our North Star,” GM CEO Mary Barra told investors recently, and she’s repeatedly stated batteries are fundamentally better than internal combustion engines.
Volvo Car AB, which had lobbied for the EU to keep in place its effective phaseout of ICEpowered cars by 2035, noted EVs are a segment of the car industry that is growing.
But the reality that policymakers in Brussels are bowing to this week is that EV sales aren’t growing at nearly the pace required to reach targets set for a decade from now.
The degree of relief the European Commission is granting is somewhat incremental, with tailpipe emissions still needing to drop 90 per cent by 2035, instead of the previous objective for a 100 per cent reduction. The commission also is conditioning its relief on carmakers compensating for additional pollution by using lowcarbon or renewable fuels, or locally produced green steel.
“It’s probably a win for the consumer more than a win for the industry,” said Philippe Houchois, an automotive equities analyst at Jefferies.
“For carmakers, if you have multiple powertrains, you have more time to make the investments, but you have to spread your investment over multiple technologies.”
For Ford, the eyepopping charges the carmaker expects to record are linked to moves including the cancellation of a planned electric FSeries truck line, shifting production toward gas and hybrid vehicles and repurposing battery plants to produce energy storage systems instead of EVs.
“We’re seeing the same thing around the world,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg Television. “We need to give customers choice, and then use our manufacturing flexibility to go where the customers are.”
Stricter rules target oil and gas sector, landfills in 2028
This article was written by Catherine Morrison and was published in the Toronto Star on December 17, 2025.
The federal government is planning new regulations to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector and landfills.
A federal document says the new rules for oil and gas operators, which expand on regulations introduced in 2018, strengthen leak detection and repair requirements and set new standards on venting.
The new rules apply to upstream production, processing and transmission facilities in Canada’s onshore oil and gas sector, including gas plants and pipelines.
The document says the regulations will be phased in starting Jan. 1, 2028, and will help the Canadian oil and gas industry with producing “lowmethane intensity products and supporting longterm success in a technologically advanced, decarbonizing industry.”
The government estimates that between 2028 and 2040 it will see a cumulative greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 304 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
New landfill methane rules will also require owners and operators of regulated landfills to monitor the landfill surface, landfill gas recovery wells and equipment used to control landfill methane emissions.
The federal government estimates that landfills accounted for 17 per cent of Canada’s methane emissions and three per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. It says the regulations will allow for early detection of methane emissions and leaks that must be repaired within specified timelines.
By 2040, the regulations are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
“This announcement is about building the strong economy of the future,” Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin said in Burnaby, B.C., Tuesday. “One that is cleaner, more competitive and more resilient.”
The government is also announcing nearly $16 million in funding for investment in methane emission reduction technologies across Canada. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20year span, but its lifetime in the atmosphere is up to a dozen years versus centuries for CO2.
This article was written by Pritam Biswas and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 17, 2025.
Insured losses from natural catastrophes top US$100-billion in 2025 for a sixth straight year, with the Palisades Fire in Southern California the costliest wildfire on record globally at US$40-billion, Swiss Re said.
Annual global insured losses from natural catastrophes are expected to hit US$107-billion in 2025, driven by the Los Angeles wildfires and severe convective storms in parts of the United States, a Swiss Re Institute study showed on Tuesday.
The U.S. stood as the most affected market in 2025, accounting for 83 per cent of the global insured losses.
Insured losses from natural catastrophes topped US$100-billion in 2025 for the sixth straight year, according to the report, shifting focus back on tighter underwriting, higher premiums and fresh scrutiny of risk models.
“Reinsurers and the broader insurance sector have a dual role: acting as financial shock absorbers and supporting the development of resilient, risk-informed public policy and private investment that reduce future losses,” said Jérôme Jean Haegeli, Swiss Re’s group chief economist.
However, the figure was below Swiss Re’s earlier forecast of US$150-billion in total insured losses. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes had reached US$80-billion in the first half of 2025, according to a preliminary report issued earlier this year.
The Palisades Fire, which tore through Southern California in early 2025 and burned more than 23,000 acres, destroying homes and businesses and forcing thousands to flee, was the costliest wildfire event on record globally with insured losses of US$40-billion, Swiss Re said.
Rising climate risks are prompting insurers to pull back from high-risk areas across the U.S., widening coverage gaps and increasing financial pressure on vulnerable communities.
“2025 once again reminds us that elevated natural catastrophe losses are no longer outliers but the new baseline. It’s critical we double down on investing in resilience and adaptation so communities can be better prepared for the future,” said Monica Ningen, CEO of U.S. property and casualty at Swiss Re.
Global insured losses from severe convective storms rose to US$50-billion in 2025, making it the third-costliest year after 2023 and 2024, and extending a multiyear upward trend.
However, hurricane losses were low, as none of the storms made landfall on the U.S. coast, for the first time in 10 years, despite an active season, helping keep insured losses below Swiss Re’s pre-season expectations.
This article was written by Emma Graney and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 17, 2025.
Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin, centre, tours the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s High Performance Building Lab with BCIT’s Alex Hebert and Mary McWilliam in Burnaby, B.C., on Tuesday.
Oil and gas producers and operators of large landfills will be subject to new methane regulations come 2028, under federal rules that are more stringent – but also more flexible – than those that previously governed emissions reduction.
Reducing methane pollution is seen by policy-makers as something of a lowhanging fruit to help combat climate change. The gas is potent; it is roughly 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But the technology to abate it is proven to work and is relatively cheap.
The goal of the federal government’s new regulations, released Tuesday, is to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 304 megatonnes between 2028 – when the rules take effect – and 2040. Ottawa estimates doing so will cost industry roughly $14-billion.
Landfill regulations are separate from oil and gas. The government expects them to reduce emissions by around 100 MT by 2040, in part through robust methane monitoring.
Julie Dabrusin, Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature, said Tuesday that Canada has “both a moral imperative and an economic opportunity” to reduce emissions, and the new regulations are “a massive step forward” in doing so.
“It is one of the most important things that we can do and one of the most costeffective things that we can do,” Ms. Dabrusin said at an event in Burnaby, B.C.
The new rules for oil and gas build on those released in 2018, when Canada became one of the first countries to enact regulations to reduce methane emissions from the sector’s new and existing facilities.
They were a key part of Ottawa’s climate-change plan at the time, which included a goal of reducing methane emissions by 40 per cent to 45 per cent from 2012 levels by 2025.
The new regulations contain stronger requirements to reduce methane emissions than the 2018 rules, along with more robust requirements to strengthen leak detection and make repairs.
Operators will have two ways to comply.
They can choose to take action to stop methane venting and establish an inspection schedule to find leaks and repair them. Their other option is to design their own methane-control approaches, though they must meet specific emissions limits.
Ms. Dabrusin said this gives operators flexibility to implement methane-reduction solutions that make the most sense for them.
The regulations will apply to gas processing plants, transmission facilities and onshore oiland-gas production, such as well sites and pipelines. Oil refineries, fuel terminals and municipal gas distribution infrastructure are exempt. The rules will be phased in starting Jan. 1, 2028.
However, Alberta – by far Canada’s largest producer of oil and gas – will have longer to meet any emissions-reduction target, under the memorandum of understanding signed last month by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Canada has a commitment to reduce oil-and-gas methane emissions 75 per cent from 2012 levels by 2030. Under the MOU, Alberta has a 2035 target date – five years later than the rest of the country.
Amanda Bryant, a senior analyst at the Pembina Institute, a think tank, said while the federal methane regulations are well designed, their effect will be decided in Alberta through MOU talks.
The five-year carve-out means “the path forward for these new regulations in Alberta is already unclear,” Ms. Bryant said in a statement.
“We therefore urge the federal government to use these new federal regulations as the yardstick against which it assesses whatever proposed pathway to reducing methane Alberta presents during the forthcoming MOU negotiations.”
Rebecca Schulz, Alberta’s Environment Minister, said the province would “focus on practical and flexible methane reduction solutions that enable our industry to stay competitive” when it develops its plans.
The new regulations are part of Ottawa’s Climate Competitiveness Strategy, contained in the federal government’s 2025 budget.
Ms. Dabrusin said a progress report on Ottawa’s emissions-reductions plan will be released before the end of the year.
As part of Tuesday’s announcement, Ms. Dabrusin also announced nearly $16-million in funding for investment in methane emissions-reduction technologies across Canada.
This article was written by Jenn Thornhill Verma and Ivan Semeniuk, and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 17, 2025.
The permafrost cliffs around Sachs Harbour, NWT, keep inching closer to residents; this is where they were in the summer of 2024. Locals have had to consider relocating or reinforcing the shoreline.
If 2025 was the year that climate change was supposed to take a back seat to more pressing matters, then there’s one part of the planet that didn’t get the memo.
On Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual Arctic Report Card – a collection of concise, peer-reviewed summaries that aims to capture how the climate is behaving at Earth’s northern extremes, including in Canada.
The latest version comes with some big implications for those who live in the Arctic. If efforts to mitigate fossil fuel emissions, the main drivers of climate change, are sidelined, then northern communities will be even further pressed to adapt to a changing environment – and more quickly.
“The Arctic is getting warmer, the Arctic is getting wetter, the Arctic is getting greener,” said Chris Derksen, director of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s climate research division. “Year over year, it may seem like an incremental change, but over 20 years, the body of evidence for the holistic changes to the Arctic – they just become clear.”
A well-known feature of climate change is that the Arctic is warming several times faster than the rest of the planet on average. This year’s Arctic Report Card confirms that the region has just logged its warmest year since 1900 – a new extreme that follows the general trend.
Other broken records in 2025 include the lowest maximum sea ice extent in the 47year satellite record, the warmest fall on record and the highest annual precipitation since tracking began.
Multiyear sea ice – the thick, old ice that once dominated the Arctic – has declined 95 per cent since the 1980s, with what remains now largely confined to coastal areas around Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. That difference alone is set to utterly transform the Arctic.
As the report card notes, “The profound changes in sea ice since 2005 are opening the Arctic to more human activity and bringing to the fore concerns about safety, security and the environment.”
Dr. Derksen added that the report card serves as “an annual checkup on what’s happening in the Arctic.” But increasingly, the ocean and lands it describes are beginning to look like an entirely new sort of patient.
NOAA began issuing its report card in 2006 as a way to highlight Arctic change for a broad audience, including policy makers. Canadian experts are among the 112 scientists from 13 countries that authored this year’s 20th edition of the document.
Notwithstanding its international flavour, the effort has always been organized and led by U.S. researchers and is presented each December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Tuesday’s release comes at an especially fraught time for circumpolar science and collaboration.
Earlier this year, the U.S. administration, guided by President Donald Trump’s open contempt for concerns about climate change, cut hundreds of staff, including scientists, from NOAA’s ranks. Others were blocked from attending international meetings and avoided speaking openly on international calls.
For Canadian scientists, the situation comes with a hint of déjà vu. The last time politics got in the way of U.S. and Canadian climate scientists working together on joint projects such as the Arctic report card, it was prime minister Stephen Harper’s government that furnished the roadblocks.
Yet this year’s report card is surprisingly candid about the barriers, such as “cutbacks in funding and logistical support for Arctic research and spaceborne monitoring capabilities in the United States and the European Union.” Of the 31 observing systems it assesses, 23 depend on U.S. federal support.
Dr. Derksen, whose division works with U.S. counterparts on the report’s snow monitoring, described the impact of entire federal departments in upheaval, compounded by an extended government shutdown.
“You can’t have business as usual when it comes to scientific collaborations when you have disruptions of that scale,” he said.
During a news conference on Tuesday, U.S. authors of the report card acknowledged the challenges they faced.
Twila Moon, a climate scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and an editor of the report card, said international collaboration helped fill the gaps. “Bumps can happen,” she said. “This was another year where we saw people stepping up, making things happen, working extra time and really hustling, because all of us believe that this is incredibly important information.”
Yet political realities cast a shadow on the briefing once it was apparent that participants, in contrast to previous years, could not speak openly about why the Arctic climate is changing so dramatically.
Repeating a phrase uttered by NOAA’s administrator Neil Jacobs during his congressional confirmation hearings, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Steve Thur, merely stated that “there is a human role.”
For Canada, home to a vast Arctic coastline and the planet’s third-largest reserve of glacial ice, the strained relations with its closest research partner highlight the need for more domestic monitoring. The country’s own observing systems and Indigenous-led research networks are becoming more critical.
Globally, emissions-reduction efforts have stalled – last month’s COP30 summit ended without a fossil fuel phase-out road map and with new national climate plans delivering less than 15 per cent of the emissions cuts needed to hold warming to 1.5 C.
“Inuit Nunangat is at the forefront of climate change, and irreversible changes are occurring in our homeland,” said Denise Baikie, manager of policy advancement at Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national representational organization for Inuit in Canada. (Inuit Nunangat refers to the Inuit homeland, spanning four regions and most of Canada’s Arctic coastline.)
“Our adaptation costs and needs will grow whether or not global temperatures remain within 1.5 or 2.0 degrees. ITK is deeply concerned that Canada won’t meet its emissions targets.”
CHANGES BY SEA AND LAND
This year’s report card documents a litany of changes that are reshaping Arctic ecosystems and outpacing the models scientists use to predict them. Among those highlighted are:
Atlantification
This is the intrusion of warm, salty Atlantic water several hundred kilometres into the central Arctic Ocean. It is happening because a cold-water barrier called the halocline, which historically kept heat trapped at depth and protected sea ice from below, has lost roughly 30 per cent of its stability over three decades.
Climate models have projected that atlantification would not reach the western Arctic Ocean this century; yet, the report card documents evidence to the contrary. In the coastal seas north of Europe, August sea surface temperatures were as much as 7 C warmer than the 1991-2020 average. On Canada’s Atlantic side, the cold Labrador Current still acts as a buffer – but the report card suggests this is a delay, not a reprieve.
Borealization
Warming bottom waters, declining sea ice and rising plankton levels are driving the northward expansion of southern marine species and sharp declines in Arctic species – disrupting commercial fisheries, food security and Indigenous subsistence. In the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas, roughly one-third of Arctic species examined are declining; snow crab and Arctic cod are losing ground while walleye pollock and yellowfin sole push north. Plankton productivity has spiked – up 80 per cent in the Eurasian Arctic, 34 per cent in the Barents Sea and 27 per cent in Hudson Bay since 2003. The result has disrupted the food webs on which Arctic communities depend.
Toxic rivers
Across Alaska, iron and toxic metals released by melting permafrost have turned streams in more than 200 watersheds visibly orange over the past decade. The increased acidity and elevated metal levels
have degraded water quality, eroded biodiversity and in some streams exceeded safe drinking water guidelines for cadmium and nickel. Similar chemical processes have been documented in Canada’s Yukon and Mackenzie watersheds, though visible rusting has not yet been reported at the same scale.
Water security
Glaciers in Arctic Scandinavia and Svalbard experienced their largest annual net loss on record between 2023 and 2024; Alaskan glaciers have lost an average of 38 metres of ice since the mid-20th century. In Canada’s northernmost community, Grise Fiord (Ausuittuq) in Nunavut, the pressure is tangible.
“The glaciers here on Ellesmere Island are disappearing faster than we thought they would, or people predicted,” said Meeka Kiguktak, the mayor of Grise Fiord. The hamlet – situated closer to the North Pole than to Southern Canada – relies on glacier runoff and iceberg water as its only sources of freshwater and is now building a new water plant.
“Ausuittuq means the place that never melts,” Ms. Kiguktak said. “It’s melting now, so we gotta change the name of our community soon.”
Melting glaciers are not the only change the community has witnessed: This year, sea ice arrived late and so rough that hunters couldn’t find seal holes, pushing the season back a month; narwhals and belugas stayed until late October, weeks past normal.
A TRADITION OF WATCHFULNESS
While the changes now evident across the Arctic are historically unprecedented, the report card notes that survival in the region has always depended on close observation of the environment. Only recently has the value of this tradition been fully appreciated. “For too long, Arctic research has treated Indigenous peoples as ‘informants’ or ‘stakeholders,’ ” the report card states, adding that Indigenous experts who combine Western and traditional knowledge to care for their lands and waters “have always been scientists.”
Philippe Archambault, a marine scientist at Laval University who leads the research network ArcticNet, said that he and his colleagues have benefited from the realization that Indigenous peoples in the Arctic constitute a permanent community of observers and analysts. By partnering with them, he said, “we’re doing our work in a more effective way.”
In Canada, Inuit Nunangat is on the verge of complete climate strategy coverage. In 2019, ITK released the National Inuit Climate Change Strategy. The Inuvialuit Settlement Region adopted its strategy in 2021; Nunavik published an adaptation plan in 2024; and Nunatsiavut released its climate strategy this year. When Nunavut’s territory-wide strategy is released next year, it will close the loop: co-ordinated climate frameworks across a vast territory, built from the ground up by the communities most affected.
“Inuit know what’s happening and what’s needed,” Ms. Baikie said. “Decisions about our homeland must be inclusive of Inuit as rights holders and knowledge holders.”
This co-operation stands in contrast to the federal picture. Canada’s Climate Competitiveness Strategy, released in November, has been criticized for lacking Indigenous input. That same month, federal cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault resigned over the rollback of climate policies he had championed, including carbon pricing and the oil-and-gas emissions cap. And a report by the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation found Arctic coastlines are eroding by up to 40 metres a year – yet Canada lacks a co-ordinated national framework for shoreline management.
The report card sits alongside a growing ecosystem of Arctic assessments: the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP, the Arctic Council’s scientific arm) produces circumpolar reports; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has its seventh assessment under way, with a synthesis report expected by late 2029; and Canada’s own national assessment, Canada’s Changing Climate, is expected next spring (published every five years, the last was published in 2019). Together, these reports build a layered picture of Arctic change from global to local scales.
But Canada has no equivalent to NOAA’s report card, and federal Arctic science remains fragmented: Natural Resources Canada tracks permafrost and glacier change, Fisheries and Oceans Canada produces Arctic seas reports, while Environment and Climate Change Canada monitors snow and ice.
Dr. Archambault said the situation resembles that of a medical patient who hears only from specialists, without reference to a broader prognosis.
“What we need now is to synthesize, to bring all these different streams of information together in a more cohesive way,” he said.
For John Smol, an ecologist at Queen’s University in Kingston who was just awarded Norway’s Mohn Prize for outstanding Arctic research, the distributed and costly nature of polar science means the region is getting less attention than it should from Canadians over all.
“We’re fickle with the environment,” Dr. Smol said, noting how the country’s vast northern wilderness seems to recede when the national discussion is focused on more immediate matters.
In the long run, however, Canada must prioritize the Arctic and its rapid transformation. Otherwise, he added, “we’re sleepwalking to disaster.”
Study shows value of equipment in protecting the vulnerable, including those in nursing homes
This article was written by Kate Allen and was published in the Toronto Star on December 16, 2025.
Ontario’s decision to mandate air conditioning in all nursing home residents’ room saved dozens of lives, new research estimates — and could have saved more than 130 more had the requirement come a decade earlier.
The study shows how air conditioning has become “lifesaving medical equipment,” experts say, and is relevant well beyond nursing homes as provinces, cities and towns grapple with how to protect vulnerable residents as heat waves intensify in the climate crisis.
“Air conditioning really is no longer a luxury for nursing home residents, but a lifesaving tool,” said Gabrielle Katz, a medical student at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and an author of the study, which was published online Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Residents of nursing homes are particularly vulnerable to heat because they are more likely to have chronic diseases, cognitive impairments, limited mobility and other health issues.
But they also benefit from living in facilities that are staffed by health care professionals and regulated by the government — unlike older adults living in the community, said Dr. Nathan Stall, a clinician scientist and geriatrics lead at Sinai Health, and another of the study’s authors. In the U.S., older adults make up 39 per cent of all heatrelated deaths.
“When you think about all the people who are living in buildings or older homes that don’t have access to air conditioning — it’s something that worries me,” said Stall.
Stall cited a City of Toronto pilot program that distributed roughly 500 air conditioners to lowincome seniors last summer, and another in Portland, Ore., that has installed more than 15,000.
The study is “concrete evidence that shows that investing in air conditioning saves lives,” he said.
The researchers looked at more than 73,000 deaths of people living in licensed Ontario nursing homes, all of which occurred during warm months between 2010 and 2023. They examined whether those deaths happened on or soon after an extremely hot day, and whether or not the residence of the person who died had air conditioning.
Before 2020, more than half of the province’s nursing homes lacked air conditioning in residents’ rooms. In July of that year — amid a blistering heat wave, the COVID19 pandemic and pressure from advocates — Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government announced that all nursing homes would be required to cool residents’ rooms, and gave the facilities two years to comply.
That turned out to be a “tremendous success in public policy,” Stall said.
Residents in nursing homes without air conditioning had eight per cent higher odds of dying on extremely hot days compared to those who did have it, the study found.
The researchers simulated what mortality in nursing homes would have looked like had Ontario never implemented the rule, and estimated that the air conditioning mandate averted 33 deaths that would have occurred on extreme heat days between 2021 and 2023.
They also simulated what mortality would have looked like had the rule been rolled out in 2010 — and estimated there would have been 131 fewer deaths than actually occurred.
Five years after Ontario announced the requirement for nursing homes, it remains the only province in Canada with such a rule, according to the study.
“That really calls into question the safety of other Canadian nursing homes,” Katz said.
“I think our results also raise concerns for other vulnerable populations across Canada who don’t have access to air conditioning,” Katz added, noting that renters and those living on low incomes or in older homes are more likely to lack cooling in their homes.
Dr. Samantha Green, family physician at Unity Health Toronto who was not involved in the study, said the research was “incredible” at showing how effective air conditioning is as a health tool.
The number of lives it saved, according to the data in the paper, is “on par with a lot of medical interventions,” making it clear that air conditioning is itself “lifesaving medical equipment,” Green said.
Researchers found that residents in nursing homes without air conditioning had eight per cent higher odds of dying on extremely hot days compared to those who did have it
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