Thanks to our ongoing advocacy and the actions of our supporters, we generated some important victories. First, the federal government announced an end to financing international fossil fuel projects. Then Canada joined other countries to call for a phase out of fossil fuel production. Both these actions are important steps in leading to a cleaner and safer future. But there is a lot more to do.

One important step is an oil and gas emissions cap. As Canada’s largest and fastest-growing source of pollution, oil and gas companies must be forced to do their fair share to meet Canada’s climate goals. We delivered a petition signed by over 80,000 people in Canada asking for a strong and ambitious cap on oil and gas emissions, and the government responded by confirming its commitment that an emissions cap regulation will come.

We also went to the supreme court to defend the Impact Assessment Act, an important environmental law that requires environmental assessments to consider the climate impacts of new projects such as mines, fossil fuel extraction and pipelines. This law was under attack by Alberta.

We also launched our Federal Oil & Gas Lobbying Bot this year as a way to take publicly-available information out of a complicated government website and make it more accessible. The bot’s twitter posts have drawn attention to the incessant lobbying efforts of the oil and gas industry.

As the province of Ontario continued to push for new and expanded fossil gas power plants, we worked with community groups and businesses to push back against gas plant developments at a local level and ran an awareness campaign highlighting how bad “natural” gas is for you, your health and the environment.

In Alberta, trillions of litres of toxic tailings waste from oil production are perched on the shores of the Athabasca River, threatening water, wildlife and Indigenous communities. We launched a report mapping decades of destruction caused by these sprawling tailings, educated the public about our alarming findings, and the ongoing environmental racism in the oil sands.

We further highlighted the threat of these toxic tailings on the international stage alongside Indigenous Nations and allies during the COP15 United Nations Biodiversity Conference.