If you read climate news, 2025 was a bad year. But the headlines of denial and neglect risk drowning out a different, encouraging, story.
By Marco Chown Oved, Toronto Star
Canadians can be forgiven for thinking the fight against climate change has stalled, or is even backsliding.
After all, U.S. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” renewable energy a “scam,” and has seemingly done everything within his power to encourage the production and combustion of planet-warming fossil fuels.
Canada is stuck on an island with the only country in the world that doesn’t want to electrify, said Rachel Doran, the executive director of Clean Energy Canada, a climate think-tank based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
“Canada has been trying to find a balance — the federal government articulates it as a conventional and clean energy superpower — but I think the stats are showing globally that electricity is winning because of its efficiency and affordability,” she said.
“The Prairies get so much sun, they’re on par with equatorial countries,” [Phil McKay, Senior Director of Member Programs at CanREA] said. “It’s so clear and the sky is cloud-free for much of the year. And in Windsor, we’re hitting similar latitudes to Barcelona. It’s not well understood, but solar is a huge opportunity for Canada,” he said.
While Alberta’s 2023 moratorium on new wind and solar stopped much of the country’s renewable momentum in its tracks, McKay says there’s now a healthy number of announced projects set to come online in the coming years, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.
“It’s sometimes frustrating to hear the argument that when you get up into the Arctic, there’s no sun during the winter. Yeah, but there’s 23 hours of daylight during the summer, so that’s a lot of energy that could displace diesel.”
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