Heat waves emerged as the deadliest disasters of the year
This article was written by Alexa St. John of the Associated Press and was published by CBC News on December 30, 2025.
Minister won’t promise bill won’t change
This article was written by Alessia Passafiume and was published in the Toronto Star on January 1, 2026.
With her government under pressure to finally eliminate boilwater advisories in First Nations communities, the federal minister responsible for Indigenous services isn’t committing to bringing back a defunct clean water bill in the new year as written — after two provinces objected to it.
That bill, which died when the last federal election was called, was drafted with input from First Nations and sought to ensure they could protect fresh water sources on their own territories.
Prime Minister Mark Carney promised chiefs at the Assembly of First Nations’ gathering early in December that new clean water legislation would come in the spring.
The bill sought to ensure First Nations could protect fresh water sources on their own territories
Indigenous Services Minister Mandy GullMasty told the Canadian Press last summer she was committed to reintroducing the previous legislation — despite opposition from the provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario, which warned in a media statement that reintroducing the bill as written would “undermine competitiveness and delay project development.”
GullMasty vowed in the summer the new bill would affirm First Nations have a human right to access clean drinking water. She did not explain how that might work after the passage of legislation in June that speeds up the approval timeline for major infrastructure projects and gives cabinet the ability to sidestep some environmental laws.
In a followup interview with the Canadian Press earlier in December, GullMasty would not commit to including the same source water protections in the new bill. She also wouldn’t say if she is pushing for those protections around the cabinet table.
“I don’t want to put aside work that has previously been done. I think that’s foundational. But I do think there has to be a component where you are having that regionalized approach,” she said.
“That bill, while it may not have been perfect, I think has really put a lot of opportunity on the table. When we come back in the spring, we will be announcing what the bill is going to look like.”
Carney promised Canadians during the spring election campaign that his government would move rapidly to materially improve their lives.
But many Indigenous leaders say the government’s progress on addressing their own communities’ critical priorities slowed to a crawl over the past 12 months — that 2025 was a lost year for efforts to repair drinking water systems, reform the child welfare system and eradicate tuberculosis in the North.
In early 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Ottawa’s chronic underfunding of First Nations child welfare services was discriminatory because it meant kids living onreserve were given fewer services than those living offreserve.
The tribunal tasked Canada with reaching an agreement with First Nations to reform the system and compensate those who were torn from their families and put in foster care.
The Trudeau government, following negotiations with the Chiefs of Ontario, Nishnawbe Aski Nation and the Assembly of First Nations, presented a $47.8 billion compensation and reform package in 2024. First Nations chiefs and their proxies voted to reject it that same year; many opposed it because the funding would only be available for 10 years and would be subject to annual reviews.
After the tribunal ordered both sides to present it with new child welfare settlement plans by the end of December, it ended up with two proposals. Ottawa’s would provide $35.5 billion in funding up to 20332034, followed by an ongoing commitment of $4.4 billion annually. The First Nations proposal, meanwhile, calls for the codevelopment of a statutory funding mechanism between First Nations and Ottawa.
GullMasty told the Canadian Press she has spent a lot of time analyzing the file, learning what different groups want and thinking through approaches to reform.
“We’re obliged to respond to the tribunal, but we are also obliged to respond to communities that are asking for their own process,” she said.
Critics decry PCs’ development plan
Province to create `special economic zones’ to offset effects of U.S. tariffs
This article was written by Rob Ferguson and was published in the Toronto Star on January 1, 2026.
Ontario is paving the way for Premier Doug Ford’s controversial “special economic zones” in 2026 amid other changes that include making life tougher for impaired drivers and easier for skilled workers moving here.
Stepping up the push to fasttrack development to offset economic damage from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, new regulations taking effect Thursday let the province bypass local and provincial rules for “trusted proponents and projects.”
But critics are worried protections for the environment, workers, wildlife, endangered species, Indigenous communities and their treaties will be watered down in what they dub “no law” zones.
Ford, who is keen to develop the vast Ring of Fire’s critical mineral deposits in northwestern Ontario for electric vehicles, defence projects and other industries, argued too much red tape would hold projects back at a critical time.
“We need to get moving, folks,” he told reporters when Bill 5, legislation establishing the zones, passed in June.
“We aren’t going to sit back and wait 15 years to get shovels in the ground while the whole world is eating our lunch,” he added, noting that’s how long it can take to open a mine in Ontario.
Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli signalled two weeks ago that the province is working with “interested partners” to designate the first sites.
“Special economic zones will bolster Ontario’s advantage by cutting red tape, accelerating approvals and protecting the jobs and industries that keep our province resilient and competitive,” he said.
The zones will be a “critical tool to accelerate major nationbuilding projects and secure jobcreating investments that deliver lasting prosperity for our workers,” Fedeli said.
He pledged to maintain the province’s standards for environmental protections and to consult with relevant parties — including Indigenous communities, some of which were vigorously opposed to Bill 5.
Opposition parties aren’t buying Fedeli’s assurances about the zones, which can be designated anywhere in the province, such as on prime farmland.
“You cannot trust this government to give themselves unlimited powers,” said New Democrat Leader Marit Stiles, citing the Progressive Conservative government’s $8.28billion Greenbelt land swap scandal now under criminal investigation by the RCMP.
Green Leader Mike Schreiner issued his own warning given that Ford is under fire for his $2.5billion Skills Development Fund that gave hefty payouts to hundreds of groups with lowranked applications — with Labour Minister David Piccini now under investigation by Ontario’s integrity commissioner over it.
“Special economic zones will open the door to backroom deals and insider giveaways, while Indigenous rights, environmental protections, worker rights and local democracy suffer,” Schreiner said.
Under the regulations filed Dec. 16, Fedeli must be convinced projects are “economically significant or strategically important” and that proponents have “a good record of complying with legal requirements” such as health and safety for workers, the environment and financial standards. (The same goes for any subcontractors a corporation or other proponent hires to work on a project.) In addition, Fedeli must be convinced proponents “do not pose a security risk” and he must consent to any change in the control of a company building a project.
Also in regard to Ontario’s economy, the province is now allowing certified professionals — including healthcare workers, architects, engineers, land surveyors and electricians — from other Canadian jurisdictions to start jobs in Ontario shortly after arriving.
They can work on a provisional basis until their certifications are formally recognized by the relevant Ontario regulatory authorities. The change is intended to help employers in Ontario get the skilled workers they need.
Meanwhile, Ontario is also taking aim at drivers who get behind the wheel when they shouldn’t. Amendments to the Highway Traffic Act now impose lifetime suspensions for anyone convicted of impaired driving causing death.
Other measures include mandatory remedial education for drivers after firsttime alcohol and drug occurrences, longer roadside suspensions for driving under the influence, automatic mandatory minimum licence suspensions upon conviction for stunt driving and lifetime licence suspensions upon a third conviction for vehicle theft.
Additionally cracking down on auto theft, a new offence under the Highway Traffic Act provides for fines up to $100,000 and six months in jail for knowingly providing a false vehicle identification number when selling an automobile. That’s in addition to a licence suspension of up to a year. (Further changes proposed in November under “Andrew’s Law,” but not yet passed by the legislature, would impose a lifetime driving ban for anyone convicted of dangerous driving causing death.)
Also taking effect in 2026:
■ For homeowners, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation will now be able to send assessment notices by email.
■ Updates to the Ontario Fire Code require homeowners and landlords to install working carbon monoxide detectors on every floor of a residence. Some detectors monitor for both smoke and carbon monoxide.
■ Parents receiving Canadian Disability Benefits will no long have those payments considered as income when determining eligibility for childcarefee subsidies.
Special economic zones will open the door to backroom deals and insider giveaways, while Indigenous rights, environmental protections, worker rights and local democracy suffer. MIKE SCHREINER ONTARIO GREEN PARTY LEADER
How cheap solar power is transforming economies across Africa
This article was written by Somini Sengupta and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 1, 2026.
Businesses, individuals flock to technology, forcing South African power utility to rethink licensing requirements
Ismet Booley, a dentist in Cape Town, had a serious problem a few years ago. Patients showed up for appointments, only to find the power had gone out.
No power meant no X-rays, no fillings, no root canals. “I just couldn’t work,” Dr. Booley said.
South Africans like Dr. Booley have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese-made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun.
These aren’t the tiny, oldschool solar lanterns that once powered a light bulb or TV in rural communities. Today, solar and battery systems are deployed across a variety of businesses – auto factories and wineries, gold mines and shopping malls. And they are changing everyday life, trade and industry in Africa’s biggest economy.
This has happened at startling speed. Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 per cent of South Africa’s electricity-generating capacity.
No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coalburning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That’s forcing the nation’s already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate.
Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it “a bottom-up movement” to sidestep a generationsold problem. “The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all,” he said. “We’ve been living in this situation forever.”
What’s happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China’s ambition to lead the world in clean energy.
Over the past decade, while the United States ramped up fossil fuel exports, China has focused on dominating renewables. Today, Chinese companies make so many of the world’s solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries that they are slashing prices and scrambling to find buyers.
Tariffs have thwarted them somewhat in the United States and Europe, but they’re finding enormous new markets in Africa, where around 600 million people lack reliable electricity. Across the continent, solar imports from China rose 50 per cent the first 10 months of 2025, continuing a trend, according to a review of Chinese export data by Ember, a British energy-tracking group.
South Africa was the largest destination for Chinese solar, but not the only one. Sierra Leone imported the equivalent of more than half its total current electricity-generating capacity, and Chad, nearly half.
China has much to gain. Not least, new markets and new geopolitical influence. Its companies are doing more than just exporting. State-owned Power China is also building utility-scale solar farms in South Africa, as in other developing economies.
And now China is bidding on contracts from the state-owned utility, Eskom, to add 14,000 kilometres (about 8,700 miles) of transmission lines that South Africa desperately needs to move its increasing supply of solar power around the country.
“Obviously we don’t have money for that,” South Africa’s deputy minister for electricity and energy, Samantha GrahamMaré, said in an interview, referring to the hefty upfront costs of expanding the grid.
Who does? China. Chinese state-owned companies are among several international firms to bid on South Africa’s US$25-billion grid expansion, vying to build the lines and then make money, in part, by operating them. Chinese firms hold similar build-operate contracts in countries including Brazil and the Philippines.
The solar surge does little to address the most pressing social and economic problems of developing countries like South Africa, the need to generate new jobs for millions of young citizens. Installation labour is local, but the panels and batteries are almost all made in China.
“The economic trade-offs are significant,” said Marvellous Ngundu, a researcher with the Institute of Security Studies, a think tank in Pretoria. “Jobs are created elsewhere. South Africa consumes advanced green technologies without capturing the industrial benefits.”
The rapid shift by so many businesses and people to install their own panels and batteries is causing headaches for Eskom, the already troubled utility.
Every kilowatt generated by privately owned solar installations is a hit to its bottom line. Eskom’s coal-burning plants, which provide most of South Africa’s power, are old and in poor shape.
Power cuts have subsided recently, but it wasn’t long ago that Eskom had to turn off electricity to some areas for hours at a time – a practice called “load shedding” that hurt the economy and fed public anger. During the worst days of load shedding, the latest of which came in early 2024, even Ms. Graham-Maré, the deputy electricity minister, installed a solar system in her home. Her energy bill, she said, fell by two-thirds.
Multiply her hack by the thousands and you have what South Africans call Eskom’s “death spiral.” Well-off customers lower their bills with solar, which causes Eskom to lose money, which in turn forces Eskom to raise prices and encourages more people to install solar.
It doesn’t help that some people tap power lines to draw electricity illegally, without paying for it, or that Eskom has suffered years of mismanagement.
In the past five years alone, South Africans installed solar panels representing more than seven gigawatts, or about onetenth of the total installed capacity of 55 gigawatts. Most is privately owned.
Now, unable to beat solar, Eskom is joining solar.
The utility has removed onerous licensing requirements on private installations. It has allowed people to sell power to the grid. And it has tweaked its rates so that customers pay a fixed charge in addition to the cost of any power they consume. Essentially, people pay simply to be connected to the grid, a standard feature in other nations that’s new in South Africa.
Eskom is now planning to erect large solar arrays on the grounds of shuttered coal plants. And by 2040 it intends to shift its predominantly coal-based system to cleaner sources. “That’s where the world is moving,” said Nontokozo Hadebe, Eskom’s sustainability chief.
If the speed of the change is remarkable, it’s still leaving some of South Africa’s most difficult economic problems unresolved, or is making them worse.
The problem, experts said, is that South Africa lacks policies to require local manufacturing. But creating them would drive up costs. The prices of made-in-China panels are by far the lowest in the world.
South Africa’s rapid pivot to Chinese solar gear, as affordable as it is, also doesn’t resolve a basic problem. The country’s poorest citizens still can’t afford to put up their own panels.
They lack the money to buy the gear outright and the ability to get loans.
In Langa township, one of Cape Town’s largest low-income suburbs, one of the rare businesses with solar is Colin Mkosi’s bicycle delivery service, Cloudy Deliveries. His single panel, donated by a charity, powers a few lights and computers. It doesn’t provide nearly enough to charge the electric bikes his business relies on.
The e-bikes are, of course, from China. But his power still comes from South Africa’s unreliable grid. “It’s expensive,” he said, and “we can’t operate without electricity.”
Mr. Mkosi’s wants are part of a broader problem. South Africa buys growing volumes of highvalue technologies from China, while selling it raw materials of limited value. China overtook the U.S. as its biggest trading partner in 2008. With its trade gap rising to more than US$9-billion in 2023, compared with barely US$1-billion in 2000, there are increasing calls to make trade relations with China less unequal.
The difference between South Africa’s trade ties with China and with the U.S. is stark.
U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed a 30-per-cent tariff on South African goods and excluded the government from participating in an international summit of the world’s 20 biggest economies. He has also reversed a Biden administration plan to help the country accelerate its planned closures of its oldest, dirtiest coal plants.
“As relations with the United States have become increasingly strained, Beijing has positioned itself as a reliable and sympathetic partner,” Mr. Ngundu said.
Changes to anti-greenwashing law will increase risk for companies
This opinion was written by Conor Chell and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 1, 2025.
The proposed new amendments to the anti-greenwashing provisions in the federal Competition Act were intended to give businesses some breathing room. But if passed as currently drafted, they may do the opposite and constrain them by creating more legal risk, more uncertainty and a wider gap between what companies say and what they can actually prove.
For the past year, Canada has been home to some of the most stringent and widely discussed anti-greenwashing rules in the world. The original amendments under Bill C-59 required companies making environmental or climaterelated claims about their business to substantiate them using “an internationally recognized methodology.” That language, although imperfect, at least pointed organizations toward established frameworks – the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, science-based target methodologies, and third-party assurance practices.
The government has now proposed removing the “internationally recognized methodology” requirement altogether and that change is expected to pass into law in early 2026. In its place, organizations will fall back on the general due-diligence standard that already exists in competition law: claims must be adequately and properly substantiated. On paper, that may sound flexible. In practice, it will be a problem.
Most organizations are not currently set up to substantiate their sustainability and climate-related representations to the level that Canadian courts and regulators have historically required when assessing “adequate and proper” testing.
That threshold – shaped by decades of misleading advertising cases – is surprisingly high. It often requires objective, measurable evidence that is replicable, independently verifiable and directly linked to the claim being made. Many companies making forward-looking climate statements, high-level environmental, social and governance (ESG) claims, or qualitative sustainability assertions simply do not have that level of evidentiary rigour in place.
This wide disconnect exists despite the public believing that businesses are now under stricter scrutiny. The antigreenwashing debate has been frontpage news for months.
The very idea that companies must be prepared to defend their climate and environmental claims has woven itself into Canada’s collective conscience. But removing the methodological requirement will not lower public expectations – it will raise questions about what substantiation means, and whether companies can credibly meet it.
The problem is even more acute when you look at how organizations assess their own readiness. According to KPMG’s most recent Global CEO Outlook, more than 60 per cent of the 1,350 CEOs polled believe they are on track to meet their net-zero ambitions and the sustainability claims underpinning them, yet fewer than 30 per cent have allocated the capital and resources needed to achieve those goals. This creates what I call a “substantiation gap”: companies feel confident enough to make sweeping climate and sustainability claims, but have not invested enough to credibly meet them.
This gap is already visible in practice. In reviewing Canadian companies’ sustainability disclosures, we continue to find numerous misrepresentations. These issues ranged from minor overstatements to material omissions, but the volume alone demonstrates how far many companies still are from the level of evidence regulators and the courts expect.
Some argue that risk will decrease because the government also removed the new private right of access to the Competition Tribunal, which would have allowed private parties to bring greenwashing complaints. But this change is unlikely to meaningfully reduce exposure. In the months since Bill C-59 passed, no private complaints were filed – likely due to the cost, complexity and the inability for complainants to seek monetary damages. Meanwhile, greenwashing allegations have simply migrated elsewhere.
We have already seen:
■ a complaint to the Alberta Securities Commission alleging misleading climate representations,
■ an enforcement proceeding initiated by the Ontario Securities Commission involving similar issues and
■ a civil lawsuit alleging mismanagement of climate-related risks.
In other words, even without a private right of action under the Competition Act, plaintiffs, investors, activists and regulators have found – and will continue to find – other avenues to advance greenwashing claims.
Taken together, these factors point in one direction: legal risk will increase, not decrease, if the proposed amendments are enacted.
Companies will face higher expectations from the public, stricter scrutiny from regulators, more complex evidentiary standards and a growing substantiation gap between what they say and what they can prove.
The solution is not to avoid sustainability disclosures or retreat from climate commitments. It is to professionalize them. Canadian organizations would be well-served to undertake a formal, comprehensive legal risk assessment of their sustainability disclosures and to understand, in concrete terms, what is actually required to substantiate the claims they make.
Clear, credible sustainability communication is not a regulatory burden – it is a competitive advantage. But only if it can withstand scrutiny.
Oil prices appear set for biggest annual drop since 2020
This article was written by Enes Tunagur and Laila Kearney, and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 1, 2026.
Oil prices were slightly lower on Wednesday, and headed for a fall of more than 15 per cent in 2025, as expectations of oversupply increased in a year marked by wars, higher tariffs, increased OPEC+ output and sanctions on Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Brent crude futures were down over 17 per cent – the most substantial annual percentage decline since 2020 – and were on track for a third straight year of losses, their longest-ever losing streak. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was headed for a near 19-per-cent annual decline.
BNP Paribas commodities analyst Jason Ying anticipates Brent will dip to US$55 a barrel in the first quarter before recovering to US$60 a barrel for the rest of 2026 as supply growth normalizes and demand stays flat.
“The reason why we’re more bearish than the market in the near term is that we think that U.S. shale producers were able to hedge at high levels,” he said.
After rising slightly earlier in the day, Brent futures were down 31 cents at US$61.02 a barrel by Wednesday evening, while U.S. WTI crude was at US$57.59, down 36 cents. The 2025 average prices for both benchmarks are the lowest since 2020, LSEG data showed.
U.S. crude stocks fell last week, but distillate and gasoline inventories grew more than expected, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“It was a modestly supportive report on crude drawdown but the inners of the report are not so great and it will probably be a rough January and February with the holidays in the rear-view mirror,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital Markets.
Crude inventories fell by 1.9 million barrels to 422.9 million barrels in the week ended Dec. 26, the EIA said, compared with analysts’ expectations in a Reuters poll for an 867,000barrel draw.
U.S. gasoline stocks rose by 5.8 million barrels in the week to 234.3 million barrels, the EIA said, compared with analysts’ expectations for a 1.9 million-barrel build. Distillate stockpiles, including diesel and heating oil, rose by five million barrels to 123.7 million barrels, compared with projections of a 2.2-million-barrel rise.
Oil markets had a strong start to 2025 when former president Joe Biden ended his term by imposing tougher sanctions on Russia, disrupting supplies to major buyers China and India. The impact of the war in Ukraine on energy markets intensified when Ukrainian drones damaged Russian infrastructure and disrupted Kazakhstan’s oil exports.
The 12-day Iran-Israel conflict in June added to the threats to supply by disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a major route for global seaborne oil, which fanned oil prices. In recent weeks, OPEC’s biggest producers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have become locked in a crisis over Yemen, and U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered a blockade on Venezuelan oil exports and threatened another strike on Iran.
But prices eased after OPEC+ accelerated its output increases in 2025 and as concerns about the impact of U.S. tariffs weighed on global economic and fuel demand growth.
OPEC+, which groups the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, has paused oil output hikes for the first quarter of 2026 after releasing some 2.9 million barrels a day into the market since April. The next OPEC+ meeting is on Sunday. Most analysts expect supply to exceed demand in 2026, with estimates ranging from the International Energy Agency’s 3.84 million b/d to Goldman Sachs’ 2 million b/d.
“If the price really has a substantial fall, I would imagine you will see some cuts [from OPEC+],” said Martijn Rats, Morgan Stanley’s global oil strategist. “But it probably does need to fall quite a bit further from here on – maybe in the low $50s.”
“If today’s price simply prevails, after the pause in Q1, they’ll probably continue to unwind these cuts.”
For California farmers, agave plant offers hope in parched times
This article was written by Nathan Vanderklippe and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 1, 2026.
As typical crop yields shrink in the face of drought, growing and distilling agave may be a sustainable solution because of its ability to transform dry earth into the fat, sugar-laden piña hearts
Humans have made the agave plant an object of prickly obsession for thousands of years.
For ancient Mesoamericans, it was a civilization-building source of fibre and food. For early European explorers, it was an object of curiosity, transported home and given new places to grow in monastery gardens.
For scientists, it continues to be a source of biological fascination, equipped with three different methods for reproduction and an unusual type of photosynthesis. And for drinkers, it is the plant base for tequila, which has overtaken whisky sales in the U.S. and is now challenging vodka for boozy dominance.
Now, for a small group of California dreamers, farmers and distillers, agave – and its remarkable ability to transform dry earth into the fat, sugar-laden piña hearts at the plant’s core – is a source of hope in parched times. As water shortages force the state’s irrigation-dependent agricultural sector to contemplate the fallowing of up to a 10th of its fields, a hunt is on to find a crop that can flourish without floods of artificial hydration.
In California’s Central Valley, almonds require roughly 125 centimetres of water a year, and pistachios need 100. Agave needs six centimetres – or maybe, even less. It is “crazy water-tolerant and drought-tolerant,” said Stuart Woolf, who farms southwest of Fresno.
Mr. Woolf is the overseer of a generational family operation that, today, extends across 30,000 acres and supplies roughly one in five tomatoes used by ketchup-maker Heinz in the U.S. Its success depends heavily on irrigation supplies that are expected to diminish greatly in the future. Without some major changes, Mr. Woolf will no longer be able to grow crops on thousands of his acres, provoking existential questions.
“We’re on a glide path where we’re only going to be able to farm about 60 per cent of our land. So I have to find what do I do with the other 40 per cent?” he says.
One solution lies in installing solar panels in fields, which can generate revenue without requiring local water. Another option could be growing guayule, a desert shrub that can be used to make rubber. But building a facility to process rubber is unlikely to be a small investment. Besides, “rubber is probably more of a commodity than a nice bottle of tequila,” Mr. Woolf says.
He can’t use the name “tequila” for anything he later chooses to distill from his agave, however – that name is protected in Mexico. So, too, is “mezcal.”
But he can grow the plant, and his state recently designated “California Agave Spirits” as an official label. Mr. Woolf has now planted hundreds of acres, making him California’s largest grower. “For me, looking at a world where I don’t have enough water – this is a natural thing to lean into,” he said.
California has already built itself into a major force in global booze, expanding its wine industry from a small regional producer to the world’s fourth-largest, behind Italy, France and Spain. Its climate and geography brought new character to an established product.
Mr. Woolf hopes agave can tread a similar path.
“I’ve done a lot of research sitting in airport bars talking to people. And honestly, every time there’s this level of enthusiasm – like, this is the greatest idea. You’re growing a drought-tolerant crop. And why wouldn’t we have a spirit that’s different from Mexico?”
Traditionally, tequila is made from Blue Weber agave, while mezcal comes from Espadín agave. Both are plants with established lineages and distinct features: Blue Weber, true to its name, is identifiable by the cobalt hue of its leaves. Espadín distinguishes itself with blood-red tips. The distilled spirit it yields has a flavour, too, that is distinct from tequila.
Then, there is Yolo, the plant with an uncertain pedigree that has become the foundation for California’s nascent industry. Not even Craig Reynolds, the man who is arguably the state’s agave pioneer, can tell you where it came from.
“I got it from a guy in Riverside who said he got it in Mexico and it was Blue Weber. But it turned out not to be,” said Mr. Reynolds.
He dubbed it Yolo for the county where he began growing a test plot in 2014.
The rows of agave there form an unlikely experiment, presided over by an unlikely figure. Mr. Reynolds is an affable former political staffer to California state Democrats. These days, he navigates farm fields in his Toyota Tacoma, several bottles of spirits perched on the backseat for impromptu tasting sessions. He developed an interest in agave by accident, as part of a charity project nearly two decades ago that involved making tequila.
The experience planted a thought that maybe agave was an appropriate crop for the California environment. When a friend offered a plot of land, he decided to try.
He built his own pit to cook piñas – the first step to release their sugars before distillation – the traditional way. He imported basic tools and vocabulary from Mexico, such as the round-headed coa hoe used to chop down plants.
Any road trip through California makes it obvious that agave can grow in the state, where the Mexican community has planted it as a decorative element for years. What Mr. Reynolds didn’t know – and what he and others continue to learn – is how to nurture fields of it.
Full answers have not yet been established to basic questions: What time of year is best to plant? How much water is required? What will happen to plants in low-lying areas susceptible to frost? How long will they take to mature? How much will they yield?
Those uncertainties inform what is likely to be the most important question of all: Is there money to be made in California agave?
Early signs, however, look good. In Mexico, it typically takes seven years to grow a 30-kilogram agave piña. In California, Mr. Woolf harvested an 84-kilogram piña in four years that had 60 per cent more sugar content than what is common in Mexico. That suggests it might be possible to distill four times the bottles per acre in California.
“The technical challenge is how to accelerate growth to become a more profitable enterprise,” said Josué Medellín-Azuara, a University of California, Merced, professor who studies water management and sustainable agro-ecosystems.
Labour costs in California are far higher than those in Mexico and mechanical agave harvesters are not yet commercially available, although work has begun to develop that technology.
“But to me, it looks very promising. I personally would invest in it if I could,” said Prof. Medellín-Azuara.
Interest has already begun to spread outside U.S. borders. Mr. Reynolds said the director of agriculture operations from Jose Cuervo has paid a visit from Guadalajara, Mexico, to see his plants.
Mr. Woolf, meanwhile, has been chatting with Revival Stillworks in Sidney, B.C., which designs distilleries across North America. Revival co-founder Brandon Fry has spent the past year researching tequila, the size and type of equipment required, and how much it might all cost to set up.
Revival is now working on two larger California distilleries, “and then a number of people have contacted us about smaller distilleries,” Mr. Fry said.
“We do believe that it’s going to be fairly popular.”
Those who are optimistic suggest California farmers could plant tens of thousands, or perhaps 100,000, acres of agave. This would be a hugely ambitious expansion, although modest compared with the state’s 710,000 acres of grapes and 1.5 million acres of almonds. (More than 300,000 acres of agave are grown in Mexico for tequila.)
Less clear is what use Californians could find for agave. Current levels of interest suggest a surge in output that could exceed distillation capacity, while relatively limited production capacity would mean “the spirits themselves are going to be very expensive for the foreseeable future,” said Clayton Szczech, a sociologist and author of A Field Guide to Tequila.
That’s not to mention the difficulty of making something people want to drink. “Fermenting agave is very different than fermenting other sugar sources,” Mr. Szczech said, adding that those in California are in a different environment, “where people haven’t been doing this for hundreds of years.”
Other products may also emerge. Agave, like corn, could be used to make biofuels. Its inulin may have value as an additive with the potential to sweeten food and improve mouth-feel.
“If it can be grown, California agribusiness will find a way to make it profitable,” Mr. Szczech said.
Whether the transformation of agave into fuel or booze actually cuts water use remains to be seen.
But there is a historical resonance to a drought-stricken state turning to agave, a plant that has helped humans “live in these rugged environments for 10,000 years,” Mr. Szczech said.
In many ways, though, agave is bringing California into unknown territory. Yolo agave yields a spirit that tastes different from both tequila and mezcal. The plant may, in fact, be a hybrid between Blue Weber and Espadín.
Which creates another question that doesn’t yet have a good answer: “What is a California agave spirit? How is it different? And what does it have to offer to the wider world of spirits?” asks Henry Tarmy, a founder of Ventura Spirits, a California craft distillery.
Ventura has begun to explore some of what that could mean. A penca spirit that is made from agave leaves yields a clear distillation with an intense floral character. A liqueur fashioned from agave aguamiel, the sweetened liquid extracted from cooked piñas, is a coffee-coloured concoction, sweet with notes of caramel and cacao. It’s the farthest thing from a margarita or the tequila-lime-salt combination that most people associate with agave.
“It steers headfirst into adventure,” says Hans Galindo, who works in the Ventura tasting room.
“Because we’re not making tequila, we don’t necessarily have to stay within the standards of tequila.”
Maybe, he says, it’s a taste of what California can do.
What it takes to make that cup of fresh coffee
Climate change, tariffs and more are stirring up java costs
This article was written by Ritika Dubey and was published in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2025.
As a stream of roasted coffee beans drops into a barrel, it fills an Oakville roastery with a smell practically strong enough to caffeinate you.
The roasted beans, now a rich, deep brown, were once small and green, bagged in large burlap sacks and shipped to Canadian ports from the coffeeproducing countries of Ethiopia, Colombia and Brazil.
It’s at Reunion Coffee Roasters where they find their defining character. The strength of your brew and whether it will taste fruity or earthy is methodically decided at the roastery’s lab, where they sample various beans and perfect the taste.
Walking through his roughly 50,000 squarefoot roastery, Reunion president Adam Pesce points out industryscale machines where the green beans are washed, weighed and roasted to get the preferred colour, flavour and aroma.
“Coffee roasting is a lot like baking,” said Pesce, a secondgeneration coffee roaster. It’s all about perfecting the temperature, roast time and airflow.
Each batch of beans, weighing about 460 pounds, is roasted at 450 degrees in a rotating drum for a period of time, usually a little more than 10 minutes, before being dumped into a cooling chamber to preserve their flavour. The roastery processes 37,500 pounds of coffee a week.
While the roasting process hasn’t changed drastically over the years, the coffee industry has.
Import prices for unroasted coffee beans have more than doubled over the past three years, according
to an analysis from KPMG, as a combination of factors led to supply shortages. The rising cost is forcing importers, roasters, retailers and consumers to adapt.
Statistics Canada data shows shoppers paid 27.8 per cent more for coffee at the grocery store in November compared with a year earlier — greatly outpacing overall food inflation, which was 4.7 per cent year over year.
“This is by far the most difficult time that the industry has ever seen,” said Pesce, who said that 20 years ago when he got into the business, a seven or eight per cent price fluctuation would have been considered meaningful.
Put another way, he said, a pack of mediocre coffee today sells for more than the best quality coffee did two years ago.
“Think about how disruptive that can be.”
Coffee is grown in rainforests and handpicked primarily by smallscale farmers. Often, farmers who don’t have an export license sell to collectors by the roadside in small batches, which are then bundled for international buyers.
Beans are sold by smaller operators to processors, importers, roasters and other intermediaries before reaching the consumer, said Ted Salter, executive director of supply chain at KPMG in Canada.
But climate change, drought and crop disease have disrupted the global supply at the source, hurting many small farmers, Salter said.
With limited crops, global demand for coffee has outpaced supply. The trend is expected to continue unless the highly fragmented global farmers’ community is able to implement costly irrigation solutions.
While climate change is a big factor in coffee price increases, importer Jeff Fleming said farmers are dealing with an affordability crisis alongside the high costs of operating small coffee farms. Often, changing government policies on exports in the origin countries also push the prices higher for coffee — something an importer can’t control.
Fleming, founder of Calgarybased Apex Coffee Imports, works directly with farmers and exporters across 11 countries to buy their coffee, which is then shipped to Canada.
The tugofwar between lower crop yields and higher prices is straining many relationships in the supply chain.
Fleming, who deals in specialty coffee from microfarms, saw demand for specialized beans fade as prices went up.
“Any time there’s a price shock through the market that we saw, it’s (been) bad for everybody,” he said.
For example, if a pound of coffee went up from five dollars to eight dollars, a roastery may be hesitant to pass such a significant cost on to its customers immediately. Instead, it might reduce its overall purchase or pivot away from pricier options, which trickles back to the farmer.
Meanwhile, Fleming said demand for less expensive coffee blends has gone up. He said he is constantly communicating with farmers about the demand and whether there are margins that can be adjusted on his end to continue importing the bestquality beans.
“It’s caused us to have to pivot and reevaluate and get a bit more creative than we used to,” he said.
When someone questions Pesce about coffee prices, he pulls up commodities exchange data on his phone and shows where prices are at — and how little control he has over the fluctuations.
It takes about 1318 weeks for coffee beans to get from a farm to grocery store shelves. The price of that packaged coffee was set weeks ago on the publicly traded commodity market for coffee futures, which is a way of measuring prices based on contracts for future delivery. Other resources are also traded this way, including oil, gold and wheat.
Futures trading means a surge in coffee prices today won’t be felt by consumers for at least another three months.
The market has been volatile amid ongoing geopolitical tensions, changing government policies in coffeeproducing countries and tariffs that make the commodity market more uncertain, Salter said.
“The market, especially when you’re trading on a commodity, doesn’t like that unpredictability,” Salter said. So, the high prices compensate for that uncertainty, he added.
As prices went up drastically over the last two years, it became harder to manage.
“Exporters, importers, roasters, retailers — everybody’s shrinking their margin because there’s just so much price pressure on everything,” Pesce said. “The industry as a whole has gotten less profitable.”
Add to that shipping costs, roasting and packaging costs, all of which factor into the cost of coffee served to consumers.
The cost of getting green beans into Canada alone makes up more than 70 per cent of the production costs, according to KPMG.
Pesce said he has been absorbing some costs while passing the rest on to his private label clients. So far, he has raised prices by more than 30 per cent in the past year.
But that often opens a floodgate of questions about why it’s happening.
Reunion started sending out reports or newsletters to its clients explaining price surges, hoping to establish transparency about what can and cannot be controlled.
Many relationships in the coffee supply chain are generations old, Salter said.
“You’ve set up your roasting equipment, you’ve set up your production processes in a certain way that it’s very difficult to switch over from one to another,” he said. “So what you tend to do is to try to improve the situation you’re in, rather than change the situation you’re in.”
A pound of coffee can brew about 40 cups. If the cost of coffee goes up by a dollar, it barely adds a few cents to a cup.
But the surge in prices has been consistent enough that it’s now dripped into the cups at local cafés and even big chains, such as Tim Hortons, which raised prices by an average of three cents per cup earlier this year.
Still, most consumers notice sticker shock when they buy bulk coffee at a grocery store or their local roastery, and experts say this is likely to continue.
“There’s very little actual price gouging going on that I can see at grocery, at cafés,” Pesce said.
“It’s just expensive.”
2025 was one of three hottest years on record
Study also finds heat waves have become the deadliest extreme weather events
This article was written by Alexa St. John and was published in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2025.
Climate change worsened by human behaviour made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists said.
It was also the first time the three year temperature average broke through the threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 C since preindustrial times. Experts say keeping the Earth below that limit could save lives and prevent catastrophic environmental destruction around the globe.
The analysis from World Weather Attribution (WWA) researchers, released Tuesday in Europe, came after a year when people around the world were slammed by the dangerous extremes brought on by a warming planet.
Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Niña, the occasional natural cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that influences weather worldwide. Researchers cited the continued burning of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — that send planetwarming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of warming, Friederike Otto, cofounder of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College London climate scientist, told The Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”
Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars in damage annually.
WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half an area’s population or having a state of emergency declared. Of those, they closely analyzed 22.
That included dangerous heat waves, which the WWA said were the world’s deadliest extreme weather events in 2025. The researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change.
“The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human induced climate change,” Otto said. “It makes a huge difference.”
Meanwhile, prolonged drought contributed to wildfires that scorched Greece and Turkey. Torrential rains and flooding in Mexico killed dozens of people and left many more missing. Super Typhoon Fungwong slammed the Philippines, forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Monsoon rains battered India with floods and landslides.
The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call “limits of adaptation.” The report pointed to Hurricane Melissa as an example: The storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more difficult, and pummelled Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left the small island nations unable to respond to and handle its extreme losses and damage.
This year’s United Nations climate talks in Brazil in November ended without any explicit plan to transition away from fossil fuels, and though more money was pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, they will take more time to do it.
Officials, scientists and analysts have conceded that Earth’s warming will overshoot 1.5 C, though some say reversing that trend remains possible.
Yet different nations are seeing varying levels of progress.
China is rapidly deploying renewable energies including solar and wind power — but it is also continuing to invest in coal. Though increasingly frequent extreme weather has spurred calls for climate action across Europe, some nations say that limits economic growth.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Trump administration has steered the nation away from clean energy policy in favour of measures that support coal, oil and gas.
Focusing on energy might help in fight for climate
This opinion was written by David Olive and was published in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2025.
In Mark Carney’s telling, he is still in the vanguard of fighting climate change.
That assertion is, on the surface, difficult to sustain given the prime minister’s apparent retreat on the climate front.
Carney scrapped the national consumer carbon tax soon after he became prime minister in March.
His “nationbuilding” projects under consideration for fasttracking unveiled this year include fossil fuel developments.
And the highprofile entente Carney negotiated between Ottawa and Alberta in November unwinds major climate change policies of the Trudeau government.
The controversial “memorandum of understanding” between the two governments effectively greenlights a second crude oil pipeline from the Alberta oilpatch to the B.C. coast — a sister to the Trans Mountain oil pipeline (TMX) that began operations in 2024.
The TMX reduces Canada’s reliance on the U.S. market for oil exports. Almost half of its volume in its first year of operation went to nonU.S. markets, notably China.
The starting point for Carney’s energy policy might be an offhand remark he made in one of several revealing yearend television interviews he gave just before Christmas.
“I am a politician, but I’m still a pragmatist,” Carney told the CBC.
Canada continues to fight climate change, Carney asserts, but with a more practical approach.
“Climate change is continuing remorselessly,” Carney said.
In addressing it more effectively, “there is a moral imperative, a moral obligation to future generations,” Carney said. Acting on that imperative, in Carney’s view, requires more comprehensive policies.
They consist, in a nutshell, of ramping up production of both “clean energy,” with major investments in hydroelectricity and nuclear power, and fossil fuels, because “the world is going to use hydrocarbons for coming decades” under every scenario experts put forward, Carney said.
For Carney the question is: “What kind of hydrocarbons are going to be used?” The answer, he said, is “low cost, low risk, low carbon. If Canada is going to continue to supply hydrocarbons, it needs to be low carbon.”
Meanwhile, Carney said, “we’re going to grow clean energy in this country at a scale never seen before.”
Is it possible for Canada to become an energy superpower, a transformation that Carney has promised Canadians, and still meet our netzero emissions targets for greenhouse gases?
In Carney’s vision, squaring that circle is possible with a new approach. That approach is to develop every kind of energy source, and to pair regulations with significant investment.
“We have too much regulation and not enough action,” Carney said of the energy policies he inherited.
And it’s true that with all the regulations, limitations and bans imposed on the energy sector by the Trudeau government, Canada is still far short of meeting its emissions reduction targets.
Carney vowed that his government is “one hundred per cent focused on doing things that are going to reduce emissions.”
Those things are going to cost scores of billions of dollars. They also promise to generate considerable economic activity.
They include lowcarbon liquified natural gas plants (LNG), a new clean electricity grid in B.C., cleanpower interties between provinces, the mininuclear reactors Ontario has under development, the world’s first zerocarbon copper mine in Saskatchewan, and a huge wind farm off the Nova Scotia coast.
Carney expects that most of the money for those transformative projects will come from the private sector and not the public purse, a contrast with the $34billion Ottawa spent building the TMX.
The memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and Alberta is something of a template. Alberta gets favourable Ottawa consideration of a second crude oil pipeline to the B.C. coast; removal of planned Trudeauera caps on oilpatch emissions; and a lifting of the federal oil tanker ban off the B.C. coast.
In return, the Alberta oilpatch builds a multibilliondollar carbon capture and storage facility that removes 16 megatons of carbon from its oil and gas production — roughly equal to taking 90 per cent of Alberta’s cars and trucks off the road.
It also removes about 75 per cent of methane emissions, a more potent contributor to climate change than CO2. And the oilpatch must pay more than six times the current industrial carbon tax — an incentive to decarbonize.
For Canada to pioneer “decarbonized” hydrocarbons is, Carney said, “an enormous opportunity for this country to leapfrog the United States.
“The United States has taken its eye off the ball on this — they’ve really downgraded it.”
So, the goal is to become a cleanenergy superpower, an advantage over rival hydrocarbon producers the U.S., the Middle East and Russia.
Much of the money to transform the Canadian energy sector will come from abroad, Carney believes.
“Virtually everyone wants to do more with Canada,” said Carney, who spent much of 2025 travelling in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.
In addition to Canada’s political stability, “we’re an increasingly confident nation that has ambitions,” Carney said. “So, people want to deal with us.”
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