Help Re-elect Toronto’s Clean 50 Champion 

By: Dianne Saxe, Toronto City Councillor

If you care about climate action in Toronto, you have a stake in the race for City Council in Toronto Danforth. And you personally can make a difference in the result, no matter where you live in Ontario. 

Every Clean50 member knows the basics: 

  • Climate breakdown is here and accelerating.   
  • What’s good for climate is good for affordability, our economy and our sovereignty.  
  • Cities like Toronto are where key consumption decisions are made, eg what gets built, where it goes, and how people get around. 
  • To get good climate decisions made, City Council needs outspoken, effective climate champions. Many decisions depend on a single vote. 

I am Clean50 winner Dianne Saxe. I am Toronto Council’s climate champion, and I need your help to keep doing that work.  

You already know why governments need to take climate breakdown seriously and to take action now. Just this year, over 26 million Canadians suffered direct harm from climate breakdown, whether from floods or fires, heat or drought, wind, smoke or hail. And that’s without counting the impact of rising prices for food and insurance, or of communities becoming uninsurable. Next year’s Super El Niño is giving every indication of even more extraordinary damage. “This El Niño event could have major impacts on communities, infrastructure, and Canada’s economy”. The National Climate Assessment confirms that much worse is ahead in future years. 

So what are our governments doing? Cities around the world typically do more than their federal and provincial governments, partly because cities bear the brunt of much climate damage. And that’s certainly true of Toronto. This year alone, Toronto and Torontonians were hit with huge unexpected and uninsured costs for off-the-charts snow, extreme heat, wildfire smoke and flooding. Then the September 2 storm broke thousands of trees, destroyed personal property and infrastructure and caused power outages for 65,000 people. 

Meanwhile, the Ukraine and Iran wars are making fossil fuels more expensive and unpredictable, while Trump is waging economic war against Canada. What would stop Trump from ordering a mid-winter stop to US exports of methane gas to Canada? It is safer for our economy and for our sovereignty to electrify and strengthen our energy system, to keep our energy dollars here while reducing climate pollution. And to help ordinary citizens to live better without the fossil fuels that pollute their homes, drain their wallets and threaten their children’s future. 

The City of Toronto takes environmental issues seriously. We have adopted a Carbon Budget accounting process, a “Net Zero by 2040” pledge and a significant climate plan, TransformTO. But, despite a great deal of hard work and some important achievements, none of the three is on track. In the last three years, city leadership ducked or deferred three key policies needed to achieve its climate commitments: a commercial parking levy to fund transit; a stormwater area fee to incent and pay for better stormwater management; and the central pillar of TransformTO: Building Emission Performance Standards. Of course, federal rollbacks and provincial interference have made good climate governance harder, but that can’t be an excuse for the city doing nothing. Physics won’t wait, and the city is not powerless. 

But whether Toronto acts depends on who gets elected October 26.  

Only one member of Toronto City Council really understands what’s at stake and where the practical opportunities are. Only one Councillor has consistently worked to implement TransformTO and to seize climate economy opportunities.  

I am that Councillor. Every day, I draw on my deep expertise and experience as an environmental lawyer, as Ontario’s last Environmental Commissioner, as a mediator and as a Councillor to keep putting climate issues on the table and to keep getting things done. For example, I successfully negotiated for greener public and private buildings. I got the pay of top city agency executives (like the CEO of Toronto Hydro) tied to their progress on TransformTO. I helped to clean up Toronto’s fleet and to get appropriate tasks done by staff on bikes. I put in new bike lanes, and got existing ones better ploughed, maintained, enforced and protected during construction. I was influential in keeping OMERS committed to and implementing their Climate Action Plan. I helped to expand EV charging. I put solar panels on affordable housing like 34 Oxford Street and 177 Pendrith. I helped to refocus Toronto Hydro on electrification and on distributed energy resources. I helped to make the TTC safer, less polluting and more reliable. I championed priority for transit vehicles at intersections, at bottlenecks and in RapidTo priority lanes. I got Council to remove zoning obstacles to heat pumps, solar and overcladding. I helped trigger provincial action on plug-in solar. And I led the charge to keep the Building Emission Performance Standards program alive when the administration tried to deep-six them on December 4. 

We regularly hear green business leaders complain that politicians “lack political will” to adopt the laws and policies we need. It’s unfair and ineffective to make such complaints if we don’t step up to re-elect those politicians who do have the will and who have proven they do the work. 

Some Council races are foregone conclusions, but some are highly competitive. I had earned a strong lead in University Rosedale until the mayor’s popular stepson, Mike Layton, made a last-minute entry with overwhelming union and NDP backing. Any good lawyer has to know when to fight and when to pivot. I had to pivot and am now running in Toronto Danforth.  

This is an unpredictable 18-candidate race where the involvement of a committed few can change the result. If the Clean50 community wants to see my strong environmental voice back on Council, please help me get there. 

For more details, see VoteSaxe.ca.