Issued by the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights on December 9, 2025
The Asper Centre condemns Ontario’s recent legislative efforts to deny its Charter-based obligations with respect to climate change.
In sprawling legislation that was passed as part of its Fall Economic Statement, via Bill 68, the Plan to Protect Ontario Act (Budget Measures), 2025, the Ontario government introduced critical amendments to Ontario’s statutory scheme for combatting climate change. These amendments had nothing to do with the budget, the alleged purpose of Bill 68. Instead, the amendments would, among other things, remove a longstanding provision that committed Ontario to setting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets.
The Ontario government’s legislative move comes as the climate crisis is getting worse, not better. It was also the Ford government, in 2018, that passed the legislative provisions and set the GHG emissions caps now being repealed. Why, then, has the Ontario government sought to do away with a self-imposed duty to set GHG emission targets? And why now?
Critically, Ontario’s legislative move comes after Ontario suffered two legal defeats concerning the emissions targets in issue. This is not, however, a routine case of a province passing legislation to respond to a court order. The province is instead attempting to avoid further judicial scrutiny of its GHG emissions targets by simply abdicating its obligations with respect to setting targets altogether. That is, as a result of an Ontario Court of Appeal decision in 2024, Mathur et al. v. Ontario, and the Supreme Court of Canada’s subsequent refusal to hear Ontario’s request to appeal the decision (decided May, 2025), Ontario is currently being forced to proceed to trial on a major climate change issue. The trial would ask whether Ontario’s GHG emissions targets to date have violated the Charter rights of seven youth applicants. By removing its self-imposed GHG emissions targets prior to trial, Ontario’s new legislation attempts to undermine the foundations of the applicants’ legal claim.
As summarized by one of the youth applicants in the case, Zoe Keary-Matzner, Ontario’s actions would attempt to have Ontario, at the last hour, “rewrite the rules” and evade its obligations with respect to climate change:
Less than a week before our day in court, the Ford government blindsided us by stripping away its own climate obligations. It’s deeply disappointing that the government would rather rewrite the rules at the eleventh hour than be accountable to the young people and citizens it’s supposed to serve. By removing these obligations, the government is trying to let itself off the hook for tracking its climate progress. But we are not about to let them get away with it.
Notably, the Mathur applicants have also not been alone in challenging the Ontario government’s failures on climate action. Ontario’s legislative move also comes shortly after the Ontario Auditor General released a report, this October, finding that Ontario was failing to meet basic requirements imposed upon it by the province’s statutory scheme. These failures included Ontario missing its own GHG emissions targets. As summarized in its press release, the Ontario Auditor General found that “Ontario set a legislated target in 2018 to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030,” but Ontario was projected “to miss this target by at least 3.5 megatonnes — and the gap could be even larger.”
Critically, the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Mathur was not a trivial legal outcome. In Mathur, the applicants have specifically alleged that Ontario’s GHG reductions violated the Charter because they constituted discrimination against youth and younger generations and otherwise violated the applicants’ right to life, liberty, and security. The Court of Appeal then found, in a decision of national significance, that because Ontario had passed legislation intended to combat climate change, Ontario had assumed the burden of creating a climate plan and emissions targets that were Charter compliant. As a practical matter, the Court of Appeal decision was in part a critical decision for climate change efforts in Canada because the applicants in Mathur had successfully established, via unchallenged expert evidence in the court below, that Ontario’s emission target was set lower than the one required by scientific consensus to mitigate climate change. The Court of Appeal’s decision ultimately ruled that a new hearing was required to decide whether Ontario had met its Charter-based obligations.
Further to the Court of Appeal’s order, a hearing in Mathur had been set down for December 1. The matter is now temporarily adjourned. The Asper Centre has been an intervener in the case since the initial Ontario Superior Court of Justice proceedings.
It is not necessary to opine on the legal merits of Ontario’s tactics. That is, does a provincial legislature have the power to evade Charter obligations arising from a statutory scheme by attempting to abandon its longstanding commitments wholesale, and amid a deepening crisis the scheme was designed to prevent? Further, may it do so after the statutory scheme has been the subject of six years of ongoing litigation, and in a way that would frustrate the possibility of the applicants obtaining a Charter remedy that had been open to them prior to this abandonment? Regardless of one’s answer to such questions, Ontario’s tactics are bad policy. They are especially bad policy for any observer concerned about the climate crisis or about ensuring that Ontario lives up to its Charter obligations. Indeed, the material facts cannot be genuinely in dispute. The overwhelming evidence is that climate change is having a disproportionate impact on younger generations, including by way imposing upon them a heightened risk of shortened lifespans, climate-change related illnesses, and other serious harms.
Unfortunately, the issues raised by the passage of Bill 68 do not end there. Despite the public importance of the issues raised by Mathur, a public importance evidenced by the Ontario government’s willingness to attempt to appeal the matter all the way up to the Supreme Court, the Ontario government elected to carry out its legislative repeal in a way that would evade parliamentary and public scrutiny. In the first instance, the environmental law amendments were buried in a complex and sweeping omnibus bill. Any hope of scrutiny was then eliminated when the Plan to Protect Ontario Act was made subject to a time-allocation motion (Motion 11), the effect of which was to limit both debate and the possibility of material amendments to the 67-page bill. Suffice it to say, Charter-engaging legislation requires public and legislative scrutiny at the best of times. The Ontario government’s decision not to defend its actions, when the grounds for its departure was of the utmost importance, is a damning detail in a series of problematic decisions.
The Asper Centre opposes Ontario’s efforts to evade its Charter obligations with respect to climate change, including by way of last-minute legislative provisions that have been shielded from public and parliamentary scrutiny.
