Yesterday Mayor Chow and Toronto City Council called on Ontario’s Environment Minister to subject Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) proposal to ramp-up gas burning at its Portlands Generating Station on the Toronto waterfront to a comprehensive environmental assessment.
Clearly, happy talk from OPG about how increased fossil gas burning will have minimal climate and health impacts, failed to impress Mayor Chow & Toronto City Council.
While Premier Ford and OPG both seem oblivious to the growing climate crisis, that is not the case with Toronto Council, which has set the goal of reducing community-wide greenhouse gas emissions in Toronto to net zero by 2040 under its TransformTO strategy. Councillors understand that more fossil gas burning at the Portlands plant is the last thing we need right now, and have twice said no to the expansion.
As we highlighted earlier this week, the Ford Government is on a completely different track with its plans to burn polluting gas to produce 25% of Ontario’s electricity in 2030 (up from 4% in 2017), and by asking the federal government to wait until 2050 to completely phase-out gas power.
To learn more about the need for a comprehensive environmental assessment of OPG’s proposal to ramp up gas burning, read Toronto’s motion here.
What you can do
Please contact Ontario’s Minister of the Environment, Andrea Khanjin, and ask her to subject OPG’s proposal to ramp up gas burning on the Toronto waterfront to a comprehensive environmental assessment.
The Minister can be reached at Minister.MECP@ontario.ca