Dalton James Patrick McGuinty Jr. is a former Canadian politician who served as the 24th premier of Ontario from 2003 to 2013. He was the first Liberal leader to win two majority governments since Mitchell Hepburn nearly 70 years earlier. In 2011, he became the first Liberal premier to secure a third consecutive term since Oliver Mowat after his party was re-elected in that year's provincial election.
The 2003 Ontario general election was held on October 2, 2003, to elect the 103 members of the 38th Legislative Assembly of the Province of Ontario, Canada.
George Smitherman is a former Canadian politician and broadcaster. He represented the provincial riding of Toronto Centre in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1999 to 2010, when he resigned to contest the mayoralty of Toronto in the 2010 municipal election. Smitherman is the first openly gay Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) elected in Ontario, and the province's first openly gay cabinet minister.
Glen Ronald Murray is a Canadian politician and urban issues advocate who served as the 41st Mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba from 1998 to 2004, and was the first openly gay mayor of a large North American city. He subsequently moved to Toronto, Ontario, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as a Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Toronto Centre in 2010, serving until 2017.
John Russell Baird is a Canadian retired politician. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2015 in the cabinet of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He had been a member of the federal cabinet, in various positions, since 2006. Previously he was a provincial cabinet minister in Ontario during the governments of Premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves. Baird resigned from Harper's cabinet on February 3, 2015, and as a Member of Parliament on March 16, 2015.
Enwave Energy Corporation is a Canadian multinational energy company based in Toronto that focuses on sustainable district energy including heating, cooling, hot water, combined heat and power, and geothermal energy systems. It is one of the largest district energy systems in North America and has been referred as the leading energy district system with 17 heating plants, 21 chilled water plants and ice on coil storage tanks. It serves over 700 customers including commercial properties, developers, municipalities, health care, educational centres and residential units.
Laurel C. Broten is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. She was a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 2003 to 2013, who represented the Toronto riding of Etobicoke—Lakeshore. She served in the cabinets of Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGuinty.
The Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks is an Ontario government ministry responsible for protecting and improving the quality of the environment in the Canadian province of Ontario, as well as coordinating Ontario's actions on climate change. This includes administration of government programs, such as Ontario's Drive Clean and Clean Water Act. The ministry headquarters are located inside the Ontario Government Buildings.
The Climate Group is a non-profit organisation that works with businesses and government leaders around the world to address climate change. The Group has programmes focusing on renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Launched in 2004, the organisation operates globally with offices in the UK (headquarters), the United States and India.
The Virgin Earth Challenge was a competition offering a $25 million prize for whoever could demonstrate a commercially viable design which results in the permanent removal of greenhouse gases out of the Earth's atmosphere to contribute materially in global warming avoidance. The prize was conceived by Richard Branson, and was announced in London on 9 February 2007 by Branson and former US Vice President Al Gore.
Earth Hour is a worldwide movement organized by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The event is held annually, encouraging individuals, communities, and businesses to turn off non-essential electric lights, for one hour from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., usually on the last Saturday of March, as a symbol of commitment to the planet. It was started as a lights-off event in Sydney, Australia, in 2007.
A low-carbon diet is a diet with low greenhouse gas emissions. Choosing a low carbon diet is one facet of developing sustainable diets which increase the long-term sustainability of humanity.
The environmental policy of the Stephen Harper government was implemented when Stephen Harper was the Prime Minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015, under two minority governments until 2011 when the Conservative Party of Canada won a majority in the 2011 Canadian federal election. During the term of Stephen Harper, Canada's greenhouse gas emissions decreased from 730 to 723 Mt of carbon dioxide equivalent. In contrast, during the period from 1993 until 2006, under various Liberal governments, Canada's greenhouse gas emissions increased 617 to 730 Mt of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Lawrence Solomon is a Canadian writer on the environment and the executive director of Energy Probe, a Canadian non-governmental environmental policy organization, a member of the advisory board of Rebel News, and a columnist for The Epoch Times. His writing has appeared in a number of newspapers, including the National Post, where he has a column, and he is the author of several books on energy resources, urban sprawl, and global warming, among them The Conserver Solution (1978), Energy Shock (1980), Toronto Sprawls: A History (2007), and The Deniers (2008).
Climate change in Canada has had large impacts on the country's environment and landscapes. These events are likely to become even more frequent and severe in the future due to the continued release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The number of climate change–related events, such as the 2021 British Columbia Floods and an increasing number of forest fires, has become an increasing concern over time. Canada's annual average temperature over land has warmed by 1.7 degrees Celsius since 1948. The rate of warming is even higher in Canada's north, the Prairies, and northern British Columbia. The country's precipitation has increased in recent years and extreme weather events have become more common.
Marianne Meed Ward is an American-born Canadian politician and former journalist who has served as the 29th and current mayor of Burlington since December 3, 2018.
The 2014 Ontario general election was held on June 12, 2014, to elect the members of the 41st Parliament of Ontario. The Liberal Party won a majority of seats in the legislature, allowing its leader, Kathleen Wynne, to continue as premier, moving from a minority to majority government. This was the Liberals' fourth consecutive win since 2003 and an improvement from their performance in the 2011 election. The Progressive Conservatives under Tim Hudak were returned to the official opposition; following the election loss, Hudak announced his resignation as Progressive Conservative leader. The New Democratic Party under Andrea Horwath remained in third place, albeit with an improved share of the popular vote.
The 2013 Ontario Liberal Party leadership election, held on January 26, 2013, at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, elected Kathleen Wynne as the new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, replacing Dalton McGuinty, who announced his resignation on October 15, 2012. With the Liberals forming the Ontario government, Wynne consequently became Premier of Ontario. After leading a minority government for 18 months, she called an election after the defeat of her government's budget and she led her party to a renewed majority government in June 2014.
Carbon pricing in Canada is implemented either as a regulatory fee or tax levied on the carbon content of fuels at the Canadian provincial, territorial or federal level. Provinces and territories of Canada are allowed to create their own system of carbon pricing as long as they comply with the minimum requirements set by the federal government; individual provinces and territories thus may have a higher tax than the federally mandated one but not a lower one. Currently, all provinces and territories are subject to a carbon pricing mechanism, either by an in-province program or by one of two federal programs. As of April 2023 the federal minimum tax is set at CA$65 per tonne of CO2 equivalent, set to increase to CA$170 in 2030.
The Canadian province of Alberta faces a number of environmental issues related to natural resource extraction—including oil and gas industry with its oil sands—endangered species, melting glaciers in banff, floods and droughts, wildfires, and global climate change. While the oil and gas industries generates substantial economic wealth, the Athabasca oil sands, which are situated almost entirely in Alberta, are the "fourth most carbon intensive on the planet behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon" according to an August 8, 2018 article in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's journal Science. This article details some of the environmental issues including past ecological disasters in Alberta and describes some of the efforts at the municipal, provincial and federal level to mitigate the risks and impacts.
