LATEST STORIES:
Ontario to ban coal

Premier Kathleen Wynne was joined by former U.S. Vice-President and environmental activist Al Gore Thursday afternoon to announce plans for a new law that will ban coal-fired electricity in the province. The Liberals have been working to phase out coal for years. And one of the last plants that still burns coal is in Haldimand County, the Nanticoke station. Cindy Csordas has the story.
If the Wynne government is successful in passing this law that will make it illegal to burn coal in Ontario, it will be the first jurisdiction in all of North America to have such a law.
Right now, two Ontario power generation stations are currently fuelled by coal. They are in Nanticoke and Thunder Bay. But Nanticoke is expected to stop burning coal next month. Thunder Bay’s Mission Island station will stop burning coal in the new year and there’s already a plan to burn biomass there instead. At it’s peak, Nanticoke was producing 21 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions which Kathleen Wynne says was destroying the environment. Al Gore says people can’t ignore obvious signs of climate change around the world, like Typhoon Haiyan.
Al Gore: “Tens of thousands of people in the Philippines are still searching for food, water, and shelter. The events that took place there were beyond any norms ever seen it was as if there was a combination of the largest tornado ever seen and a tsunami at the same time.”
Premier Kathleen Wynne: “Becoming a coal free province is equivalent to taking 7 million cars off the road which means we’ll have cleaner air to breath saving Ontario $4.4 billion worth in health, financial and environmental cost. As a by product of this action, energy alternative creates jobs thanks to our green energy act and our world leading tariff program we created 31,000 jobs, 1,300 wind turbines and have the greatest solar power capacity in Canada.”
Kathleen Wynne is expected to introduce legislation next week and is hoping the opposition will support the bill.