But what would Ottawa actually do differently? Details were scarce, and traditional business think tanks, dominated by global companies, tended to stay silent.

But one voice made itself heard. Just days after the release of Trump’s National Security Strategy, the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) fired back with a layered plan for building a domestic technology industry that could free the country from foreign tech platforms and build Canadian prosperity.

Founded in 2015 by two energetic tech leaders – former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie and venture capitalist John Ruffolo, then CEO of OMERS Ventures – the CCI provides a voice for more than 150 independent tech companies. Rather than ceding control of Canada’s digital infrastructure to foreign multinationals, CCI aims to build a community of more ambitious homegrown tech firms that put Canada first.

CCI’s letter urged the government to focus on new export markets and embedding value-added innovation into traditional exports such as resources, energy and food. Ottawa should convene industry advisory groups to help guide these new trade negotiations, the letter argued, and promote made-in-Canada tech platforms.

“Canada needs to decide whether we will be strategic participants or a vassal state to global tech giants,” CCI CEO Patrick Searle said in a statement. The new U.S. security strategy, he said, proves that in today’s markets, intellectual property, AI and quantum computing, and new defence technologies aren’t just important business breakthroughs, but “national security assets.”

With the United States adopting a winner-take-all manifesto, Searle says, “Canada needs to respond with urgency, clarity, and a domestic strategy built around sovereign capability.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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And it’s all happening so fast that these energy-guzzling data centres have shattered forecast patterns of energy growth, accelerating demand for fossil fuels at just the wrong time, and requiring untold quantities of scarce, clean water for cooling.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The computer industry has made great strides in reducing the energy required to process data. But then generative AI happened, demanding massive clusters of computing power that run hot and need powerful cooling technologies. A traditional enterprise rack of computing power, sufficient to run major corporations or browse Facebook, could get by on five to 10 kilowatts. By comparison, a rack of AI servers needs 30 to 100 kilowatts. But the real crunch comes from the timing of our new AI era. Where new power infrastructure generally takes five to 10 years to plan and build, AI has taken off in less than three.

Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources. Without rapid transitions toward water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.

– Global Water Bankruptcy report

The result: the rapid growth of AI data centres has created a debilitating free-for-all in crucial energy and water systems. Competition for electricity in some U.S. states has resulted in higher electricity prices, costly upgrading projects, and conflicts over new transmission lines. In West London, the allocation of power to a new cluster of data centres has created an electricity shortage that has delayed new housing and commercial projects by as much as 10 to years.

Many tech firms intended to power their new data centres with renewable energy, but existing wind and solar supplies can’t keep up with demand. So now Microsoft, once a clean-energy leader, is tapping natural gas to fuel its showpiece data centres in Wisconsin, and Meta will use gas-fired turbines at its Hyperion project in Louisiana. The Washington Post recently counted 220 new gas projects in the United States, largely driven by AI.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently announced what it called “landmark agreements” to expand the operation of three nuclear power plants and “boost the development of new advanced nuclear technology.”

Most tellingly, Microsoft is reviving Pennsylvania’s notorious Three Mile Island generating station – mothballed since its 1979 meltdown – to power its AI and cloud computing operations.

AI’s thirst trap

One way to reduce the energy needs of data centres is to use more water – which is 20 times more efficient than air at dissipating heat. But in the heated rivalry over AI, two-thirds of the U.S. data centres built since 2022 have been located in water-stressed areas such as Texas and Arizona. From Phoenix to the Netherlands, authorities are having increasing trouble balancing the needs of data centres, agriculture and new homeowners.

A recent investigation by The Guardian and SourceMaterial, a public-interest journalism project, found that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating 38 data centres in some of the world’s driest settings – including northern Spain and Maricopa County, Arizona – and plan to build 24 more. One Meta data centre in the drought-stricken community of Mesa, Arizona, consumes as much water as 10,000 homes.

While skeptics keep sounding the alarm over a potential AI bubble, Goldman Sachs predicts that investment in new data centres will grow 165% over the next five years. Data centres currently consume 1.5% of all energy on Earth, but by 2035 that share could triple.

A recent CBC report noted that one large AI training run can evaporate hundreds of thousands of litres of water. Unfortunately, data centres compete with people and wildlife for scarce water supplies because they need fresh, filtered water for cooling, and their equipment works best in low-humidity environments.

Even in Canada, water consumption matters. The Alberta government has announced its intention to woo new data centres, even though most of Alberta’s water comes from the seasonal Rocky Mountain snowpack.

Giant investments in data centres are giving renewables an opening to outcompete gas

The Wonder Valley data centre in Alberta would erase two decades of emission reductions

Companies are finding creative ways to use heat from data centres

Some tech companies worsen the situation by shrouding their data operations in mystery. Another recent SourceMaterial investigation found that Amazon globally uses 924 data centres – double most industry estimates. And Microsoft once promised local farmers that a new Netherlands data centre would draw less than 20 million litres of water a year. Dutch journalists later found that plant used 84 million litres in 2021 – even as locals were urged to limit their water use.

A new UN study reminds us that human intelligence has a bad track record of managing its water supply. The report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, says many societies are depleting their water systems, drawing not just from their rivers and lakes, but from longer-term, irreplaceable sources such as aquifers, glaciers and wetlands. “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources,” the report notes. “Without rapid transitions toward water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.”

The authors hope their use of the term “bankruptcy” will provoke real change in water-management patterns. In particular, they encourage countries to reduce their dependence on “water-intensive” industries such as “water-hungry extractive industries and thirsty data centres.” Better, says the report, to embrace “water-dependent sectors, including knowledge-based services, manufacturing with low water footprints, and water-friendly renewable energy technologies.”

As confirmation, we posed a question to ChatGPT: “Which is more important: preserving water supplies, or cooling data centres?” Its response: “Both are important – but preserving water supplies is more fundamental, especially long-term. Water security underpins everything else – including technology infrastructure.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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Engineers promise more dams and more tunnels to bring water from the Amazon side of the Andes – but the accelerated melting of Peru’s tropical glaciers puts even those megaprojects into question. 

Where modern engineering fails, can traditional know-how succeed? The answer is “Si.” A Peruvian non-profit called Aquafondo is rallying high-Andean communities – where ancient knowledge is still preserved – to use nature-based tactics to “sow” new supplies of water. Local people are restoring thousand-year-old trenches high in the mountains to redirect water flow into ancient, stone-lined canals, revitalized wetlands and, eventually, the underground aquifers that supply Lima. They’re also restoring grasslands and forests that increase the mountains’ ability to absorb moisture, reducing runoff and increasing the water supplies available to local communities. 

How meaningful can old ditches be? Studies by The Nature Conservancy in one community, San Pedro de Casta, found that restoring 20 kilometres of pre-Incan canals (known as “amunas”) boosted dry-season river volumes by 50%. Another study found that the cost of “sowing” the aquifers was just a third the cost of saving an equivalent amount of water behind a modern dam. Aquafondo now estimates that its community-based approach is adding more than 13 million square metres of water a year to Lima’s river basin – all while reinforcing traditional knowledge and creating new jobs in remote communities.  

The COP30 climate conference in Brazil recognized this success in November, where Aquafondo won the global “Local Adaptation Champions” award for nature-based solutions. “We have strengthened our unity, our identity and our capacity to adapt without losing our roots,” Aquafondo executive director Mariella Sánchez said after winning the award. “This is not only a nature-based solution. It is a solution grounded in memory, dignity and the leadership of our communities.” 

Rick Spence is editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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U.S. climate researcher Victoria Herrmann has a doctorate in geography and a specialization in polar studies, and she’s an official National Geographic “Explorer.” But when she worked on “America’s Eroding Edges,” a 2017 study of shoreline communities facing rising sea levels, she learned to shut up and just listen. Herrmann was the so-called expert on climate change, but the 350 community leaders interviewed for her study knew their communities best – and they pointed her toward local threats and crises she’d never studied in school.

The story Herrmann most likes to tell is of an activist in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, who showed her how climate change and culture are indelibly linked. He described how high seas, stronger winds and hotter temperatures were pushing more salt water onto agricultural land, reducing taro production. The starchy root vegetable is more than a staple food in Polynesia – it’s a cultural icon, a connection to the spirit, and a symbol of prosperity. To farmers in American Samoa, rising tides threaten not just their land and livelihood, but the meaning of their lives.

“Climate change, at its core, is a story about losing the things that make us who we are,” Herrmann told National Geographic, which helped fund the project. “The way we tell this story and find climate change solutions has to include our history and our culture and these intimate parts of us.”

The realization that the climate crisis is both a global phenomenon and a million different local disasters spurred Herrmann and National Geographic to form a new climate-adaptation initiative called Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past. Founded in 2022 in Washington, D.C., the project aims to help cultural heritage sites around the world – from the ninth-century Angkor temples of Cambodia to the 17th-century Spanish fortress of Cartagena, Colombia, and the wine cellars of France’s Champagne region – counter the destructive threats of climate change by devising their own place-based mitigation plans. (According to UNESCO, one in six cultural heritage sites is at risk of climate-related destruction.)

Preserving Legacies, which is sponsored by Canadian financial giant Manulife, isn’t in the business of telling its clients what to do. Taking a “train the trainers” approach, the initiative uses global climate models to create personalized threat analyses for each site to identify their likeliest risks from climate change, from flooding to crop failures to wildfires. It then offers these local “heritage custodians” a proven format for engaging local stakeholders – including Indigenous people, elders, artists, women and youth – in carefully assessing the risks and most optimal outcomes. In the end, each group prepares its own customized adaptation plan, building community and resilience throughout the process.

With Preserving Legacies active now in 35 countries, Herrmann hopes to extend the program to hundreds of cultural sites on every continent: “That is my big goal – that it reaches everyone.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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In a public letter entitled “Three Tough Truths about Climate,” Gates said that carbon-emission projections are heading down and that climate change will not turn Earth into a fiery hellscape. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote. 

“To be clear: climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved,” he wrote. But “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been,” he added. “Improving lives” is more important than “emissions and temperature change.”

Gates’s assessment turned heads, coming from a man who wrote a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. His true passion is human health. His Gates Foundation has invested US$50 billion to improve global living standards and combat diseases. But when the Trump government is pushing “American energy dominance” through fossil fuels, Gates’s manifesto seemed dangerously counter-productive.

Climate deniers couldn’t wait to mangle Gates’s message. “Huge victory,” Florida lawyer Rogan O’Handley crowed to two million followers on X: “Bill Gates & the climate-change alarmists are finally admitting humans will be just fine.” A Fox News panel responded to Gates’s letter by concluding that “we need abundant fossil fuels, and cheap – that’s how we lift people out of poverty.” 

Climate supporters fought back, noting that health and climate are inextricably linked. We can’t address health without targeting climate. Gates’s memo “redefined the concept of bad timing,” noted U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann, whose co-authored study A Planet on the Brink came out the same day as Gates’s letter. Mann’s warning that we are hurtling toward climate chaos got scant attention. 

But there could be another force at work: a cycle of confirmation bias. In 2024, Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie published a book called Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. On page 1 Ritchie writes, “It has become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change.” Her alternative message is that fixing the climate will be hard, but it’s doable. Gates called the book “eye-opening and essential.” In November, he named Ritchie’s latest book, Clearing the Air, one of his top five books of the year. 

Veteran U.K. climate activist Jonathon Porritt questions the work of both Gates and Ritchie. In a 2024 article, he ripped into Not the End of the World for Ritchie’s selective use of statistics and her “banal evocation of ‘hope’ as our best tool in the fight against climate change.” Her naïveté, he said, “is quite staggering.”

Still, Gates was hardly the first voice to dial down the climate emergency in 2025. In April, former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair fronted a  report called The Climate Paradox in which he wrote that “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” And in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney – the UN’s former special envoy for climate action and finance – is touting Canada’s energy resources to the world – including oil and gas, and maybe a new oil pipeline. These debates will likely heat up in 2026. 

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The RV industry, which is dominated by three manufacturers, is the largest U.S. consumer of tropical wood. NGOs operating in Indonesia claim the industry devours 500 giant trees every day. Its preferred hardwood is lauan, which makes light, moisture-resistant floors and cabinets. Lauan is plentiful on the island of Borneo, but activists have found that price-conscious RV manufacturers regularly buy the wood from unethical suppliers who bulldoze forests rather than manage them sustainably. 

Ford’s new ‘Model T’ moment is all about EVs

Last fall, Washington, D.C.–based Mighty Earth and London-based Earthsight invited a team from The New York Times on an investigative mission to Borneo’s interior, home of the Dayak people. They found drained wetlands, ruined landscapes and communities displaced. According to Mighty Earth’s forest commodities director, Amanda Hurowitz, the probe “exposed the destruction of 100,000 acres of orangutan habitat and Indigenous Dayak forest, fueled by Winnebago and other RV companies.”

Most RV makers and suppliers contacted by The Times chose not to comment on the issue. The largest RV company, Thor Industries, which makes Jayco and Airstream products, said it was “not aware” of any deforested wood in its supply chain. 

Hurowitz wants the RV industry to insist on transparency and sustainability in its supply chain. Mighty Earth estimates that buying from responsible lauan suppliers would cost the industry less than US$20 per vehicle. She says Indonesian authorities have worked hard to reduce commercial deforestation, although “a handful of unprincipled companies have attempted to evade forest protections.”

Hurowitz challenges RV owners to demand change from the industry. It shouldn’t be too hard, as the RV industry purports to revere the environment. Jayco, for instance, offers tips on “Making Your Next RV Trip More Green,” such as separating trash, turning down the thermostat and making your own cleaning products. Now it’s time for RV owners to ask the manufacturers to clean up their act.

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Those questions go to the heart of this week’s court action by four young Canadians against the world’s sixth-largest pension fund manager, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. CPP Investments manages the retirement savings of 22 million Canadians, an ever-growing money pot currently worth more than $750 billion. With a licence to invest those funds into high-return opportunities anywhere in the world, the CPPIB doesn’t just invest in the future – its decisions help shape the future.

The primary duty of any pension manager is to serve the interests of contributors, whether they’re near retirement age of just starting in the workforce. On October 27, four young people who will be retiring after 2050 (the year by which the United Nations hoped to achieve net-zero emissions) announced they are suing the CPPIB for mismanagement of climate risks. They claim that the fund’s continuing investment in fossil-fuel companies delays the energy transition and risks their financial futures.

According to the Toronto not-for-profit Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health, the CPPIB may have breached its legal duties “by subjecting pension contributions to undue risk of loss from poorly managed climate risk.” The proponents aren’t suing for compensation; their goal is to nail down the meaning of “undue risk” and ensure that the board “does a better job of managing the long-term financial risks of climate.”

Underestimating the risks

Toronto-based Ecojustice, which is representing the four applicants along with Goldblatt Partners, has published a critique of CPP Investments’ “transition risks” model that claims that the pension fund is not accounting for all the long-term negative effects of climate change, “including irreparable loss.” The CPPIB’s worst-case scenario estimates that a “hothouse” world in 2050 would reduce investment returns by just 4%.

“That looks like a wild under-estimate to me,” says Shift senior manager Patrick DeRochie. “You can’t diversify your way out of three degrees of warming. It will become impossible for pension funds to create returns if we fail to get the climate crisis under control.”

“The way CPP Investments is assuming climate risks is not in line with their fiduciary duties. Fossil fuels are a very short-term investment vehicle. By the time I retire, those investments will either be outdated, or the whole economy will have tanked.

 – Travis Olson, plaintiff

One applicant in the suit puts things in simpler language. “Every payday, CPP Investments is using our mandatory pension contributions to fund fossil fuels and worsen the climate crisis,” alleges Aliya Hirji, a 20-year-old self-described community activist who has engaged with climate issues for six years. “By underestimating climate-related financial risks, CPP Investments risks exposing us to reduced retirement benefits, higher contribution rates – or both. We could end up paying more than previous generations and getting less back when it’s our turn to retire.” (Hirji was recognized by Corporate Knights in 2021 as one of Canada’s 30 Under 30 sustainability leaders.)

The four applicants – Hirji, from Vancouver; Rav Singh and Chloe Tse, from Ontario; and Travis Olson, from Alberta – met for the first time this month just prior to filing the lawsuit. Their filing alleges that CPP Investments lacks adequate measures to manage climate-related financial risks.

CPPIB’s commitment to oil and gas

At a time when the Trump administration is working hard to discredit green energy and revive the lagging prospects of the oil, gas and coal sectors, CPP Investments has been surprisingly willing to follow Trump’s lead. In recent months, it has promoted its investment in Canada’s largest oil and gas producer, Canadian Natural Resources, as a model of “long-term partnership and value creation”; it has supported investee companies’ plans for new gas plants and pipelines; and its 11%-owned California Resources Corp. has pushed for looser climate and environmental regulations so it can do more drilling.

Most importantly, last May CPP Investments quietly backed off its 2022 commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. “Forcing alignment with rigid milestones could lead to investment decisions that are misaligned with our investment strategy,” the board claims. It prefers to focus “on delivering results, not managing legal uncertainty.”

Here’s how Shift reported on that reversal: “This unacceptable abdication of responsibility by CPPIB stands in stark contrast to other Canadian pension giants, six of which released annual reports this year that unambiguously confirmed that they remain committed to net-zero by 2050.”

The authentic risks from climate change

Scientific consensus maintains that a failure to hold the rise of global average temperatures to below 1.5°C by 2050 will result in significant climate disruptions, reducing crop production and turning arable and forest lands into deserts. “Our case is alleging that CPP Investments is mismanaging our pension fund by failing to adequately respond to climate change,” says applicant Singh. “We should all be concerned that our CPP benefits may not be as dependable as we’d like to think.”

Indeed, CPP Investments may not be the only pension fund underestimating climate risks. A January 2025 report on Planetary Solvency by risk-management experts at the United Kingdom’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries found that most policy-making organizations are using analytical methodologies that understate the economic risks of climate change. By ignoring “tipping points” such as soil degradation or the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets, “they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and do not recognize there is a risk of ruin.”

The report’s own findings point to a 50% contraction in economic activity between 2070 and 2090, “unless an alternative course is [charted].”

Ironically, the four youths’ suit was announced on October 27, the same day UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged world nations to “recognize our failure” to hit the 1.5°C target. “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible,” he told The Guardian. “We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

CPPIB plays hardball

Reacting to the suit, CPP Investments wrapped itself in the flag. “An action against CPP Investments and its efforts to maintain the sustainability of the CPP is an action against the retirement security of 22 million Canadians,” the fund wrote in a note following the announcement of the lawsuit. “We intend to do whatever is needed to uphold their interests.”

Applicant Travis Olson, a 22-year-old retail worker and labour activist in Alberta, was surprised to see CPP Investments play hardball. “It’s really disappointing to be sent a response like that to such a serious case.” He says the four are acting in the long-term interests of Canadians – not against them.

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“The way CPP Investments is assuming climate risks is not in line with their fiduciary duties,” Olson alleges. Given the increasing cost-effectiveness of renewables, “fossil fuels are a very short-term investment vehicle. By the time I retire, those investments will either be outdated, or the whole economy will have tanked.”

Advisers to the group of four declined to discuss how the youths were selected for this ambitious test case. Karine Peloffy, Ecojustice’s sustainable finance lead, would only discuss the applicants to say, “They’re lovely individuals. They’re passionate, dedicated, and they’re asking good questions.”

For his part, Olson insists that he and his colleagues are more than just a front for activist Toronto lawyers. “Yes, we’re working with them. But we’re the ones in the driver’s seat.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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In September, General Motors cut output at its EV plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, following on the delayed opening of a new truck plant last fall. Last summer, Ford scrapped plans for a big electric SUV and cut EV spending. And this past winter, Stellantis paused manufacturing of some EVs while putting new emphasis on hybrid vehicles.

But from this pit of sagging expectations, one North American automaker is springing back. In August, Ford unveiled its “Universal EV Platform,” a new concept in affordable production that it labelled “a Model T moment,” in a nod to its origin story. Ford’s iconic Model T motor buggy was a breakthrough in mass production and simple design that launched the modern automotive industry – and today’s car-based society – by reducing the cost of the family car from $825 in 1909 to $260 by 1925.

Ford CEO Jim Farley says the novel production process – combining a new, US$3-billion battery plant in Michigan with a $2-billion assembly system in Kentucky – will bring the price of EV pickups and crossover vehicles down to US$30,000, or roughly half the average cost of new EVs today in the United States.

Farley says the breakthrough comes from charging a small, elite innovation team in California – led by Tesla veteran Alan Clarke – to reimagine the way cars are made. “We locked the doors and kept the project secret,” said Ford EV chief Doug Field. “It had permission to question everything.”

The new system replaces an assembly line with an “assembly tree,” on which the front, back and floor of the vehicle will be assembled separately, and then brought together at the end of the line. The vehicles – a midsized pickup at first – will feature 20% fewer parts and a floor that’s actually an economical, 400-volt lithium iron phosphate battery. “Our target is a five-year cost of ownership that will be lower than buying a three-year-old Tesla Model Y, and they are pretty cheap right now,” Field said.

Industry watchers were quick to note that many of Ford’s innovations resemble systems already developed by Tesla and also employed by Chinese competitors. “That was a watershed moment,” Terry Woychowski, a former auto executive, told Yahoo Finance. “Before you can beat somebody, you better catch up with them, so that’s a huge step.”

“We’re only in the second inning of this EV transformation,” Farley told The Detroit News earlier this month. “I don’t take anything for granted about the continuous improvement we have to make.”

But car-buyers continue to be spooked by high prices. A recent survey found that 73% of consumers report holding off from buying a new vehicle for budget reasons. While Ford’s plans for a $30,000 electric pickup might not be affordable enough for many buyers, other carmakers are also rushing to bring entry-level EVs to market: Chevrolet, Jeep and Honda all have sub-$30,000 EVs on the horizon.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, has abandoned his pledge to produce a $25,000 Tesla (the low-priced Model 3 sells for $42,500 in the United States), so critics are granting Ford the win for building North American–made EVs that just may compete with low-cost Chinese automakers.

With files from Mark Mann.

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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Miller ended up sending some of his staff to London to share Toronto’s success stories, launching a partnership that eventually inspired the creation of C40 Cities, a network that now includes 100 cities around the planet committed to climate action. Those were heady days, said Miller, who chaired the C40 following his second term as mayor. But, he told the Toronto Climate Week crowd, “I think we’ve faded a bit since then. We’ve been resting on our laurels, and it’s time to reassert our leadership.”

Everything vulnerable in our world is most at risk. But the biggest gap is creating a space for synergy, where people can come together and learn what each other is doing, and amplify it. We need this multiplier effect.

– Joannah Lawson, Brian & Joannah Lawson Family Foundation

Founded four months ago by Becky Park-Romanovsky, an HR specialist turned social entrepreneur, Toronto Climate Week aims to restore the city’s environmental swagger. As Park-Romanovsky watched Donald Trump’s administration renege on its climate commitments, she realized this could be an opportunity for Canada to sprint in the other direction. “When the U.S. broke up with us, I realized Canada has to be economically self-sufficient, and climate has to be part of that,” she says. “We need our own connections, we need to retain talent, and we need a platform where Canadians can work together and get to know each other.”

A template for a transformative gathering

Having already founded Climate North, an event series bringing together 1,500 activists and innovators dedicated to rooting out carbon, Park-Romanovsky decided Toronto’s environmental community needed a confidence-building big event to rally around. Her model: official Climate Week programs in New York and San Francisco, ambitious and inclusive public events featuring leaders in business, government and civil society. New York’s latest Climate Week, held just last week, included more than 1,000 different events and attracted 100,000 participants.

Working with like-minded supporters and mentors over the summer, Park-Romanovsky laid out a plan for an inaugural one-day Climate Week program this fall, building to a full week next June. But she found so much support that the “soft launch” became a three-day event with more than 100 events, ranging from the everyday lectures and panels to technology demonstrations and guided tours, musical performances, webinars, craft fairs, start-up pitch competitions, a ravine walk and a “solar-punk” fashion show. The overarching goal: to turn Toronto into the next global hub for climate innovation.

Opening day featured an all-day conference, affordably priced for entrepreneurs and activists, and kicked off with in-person greetings from Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Julie Dabrusin. While attendees later criticized both politicians for their lack of action on climate issues, Dabrusin –  a Toronto MP – won points for acknowledging that “the solutions to climate change aren’t going to come from government, but from business leaders like you in this room.”

A test for Canadian innovation

For its part, corporate Canada was distinguished by its absence. Some big names were involved in the programming, including BDC, EY, PwC and Salesforce. But when a conference’s title sponsor is a University of Toronto research institute, you know the private sector is keeping its powder dry. While disappointed with the lack of support, Park-Romanovsky noted that Climate Week’s brief time frame didn’t match many corporations’ planning cycles, so she hopes for more support next spring.

Climate Week’s success will be judged over time, on how it catalyzes new ideas and projects based on bringing people together. Several first-day attendees told Corporate Knights they believe the opening-day session did just that. A former banker said she met five people with whom she will be following up, to advise them or explore common interests. An architect said he met several possible collaborators, and two colleagues from a municipal agency who work from home pointed out how rarely they get to meet like-minded people in person.

Two of the biggest fans of Climate Week are also, indirectly, among its biggest sponsors. Brian Lawson, vice-chair of investment giant Brookfield, and his wife, Joannah, a nutritionist and former senior manager at Nortel, donated $60 million this year to a University of Toronto climate centre (now the Lawson Climate Institute), to spur innovative climate solutions and train the next generation of climate leaders.

In endowing the institute, Joannah says, they ensured that it had the discretionary resources to help lead new initiatives, such as Climate Week. “Climate action is not a luxury,” she says. “Everything vulnerable in our world is most at risk. But the biggest gap is creating a space for synergy, where people can come together and learn what each other is doing, and amplify it. We need this multiplier effect.”

To close the first day’s proceedings, David Miller found another way to measure the potential of projects like Climate Week. “Seventy-four percent of Canadians want climate action,” he said. “But they think that their neighbours don’t. And when you overestimate your opponent, that’s a recipe for political inaction. That’s why Climate Week is so important – to get together, tell these stories and build this culture.”

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also an editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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On that day, Steyer changed, too. The company he’d founded, Farallon Capital, had long invested in fossil fuels. But Steyer realized climate change was “happening much faster than most of us imagined,” he wrote of the experience. He started speaking out, lobbied politicians and established a family foundation to support alternative systems, such as organic agriculture. Tom and his wife, Kathryn, also endowed the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford University, where young entrepreneurs are developing innovations such as hydrogen-fuel systems for heavy trucks, safer and more powerful lithium batteries, and fertilizers made of almond shells. 

In 2012, Steyer stepped down from Farallon. “I have a passion to push for what I believe is the right thing,” he told The Globe and Mail. Soon after, he founded NextGen America, a political action committee that mobilizes young people to vote. Steyer himself became the biggest donor in Democratic party history and helped convince Barack Obama to veto the northern section of the Keystone oil-sands pipeline. Disillusioned by politicians’ reluctance to act, he ran for president in 2020, promising to use executive power to enact a green new deal.

Steyer had little impact on the campaign and dropped out after focusing all his attention on delegates in South Carolina – who voted for Joe Biden. At that point, he might have vanished into the limbo that awaits most independent presidential candidates. But Steyer returned to his roots and founded Galvanize Climate Solutions, to use the power of finance to accelerate new climate technologies. The firm has raised more than US$1 billion. 

But Steyer still worries that Americans aren’t listening. Last year, he released a book, Cheaper, Faster, Better, that reframes this crisis as an opportunity. With renewable energy now cheaper than fossil fuels, he says, climate solutions aren’t just a last hope but our best bet. The journey to net-zero will give us cleaner air, more energy at a lower cost, better products for less money and improvements in just about every aspect of society, he writes. “It’s a fight we’re already starting to win.” 

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