In the mid-1990s, the Toronto-based environmental charity Pollution Probe began exploring a campaign to address air quality in Ontario. At the time, climate change was nowhere on the public’s radar. What was on the public’s radar, however, was smog, which Ontario’s coal plants were a primary contributor to. The smog issue in Ontario had been worsening, with Ontario experiencing 14 smog alerts in 1995, rising to 27 by 2002, and leaving many Ontarians worried about the resulting health risks. So the wisdom in the Pollution Probe boardroom was to create a campaign targeting coal but through the lens of health and economic impacts. Such a campaign would necessarily need to draw on a diverse group of advocates.

Emerging from these discussions, in 1997, was the creation of a central command, named Ontario Clean Air Alliance, to be led by Pollution Probe’s Jack Gibbons. Jack immediately went to work assembling the broad coalition that the strategic campaign required. The group, which eventually reached a total of 90 partner organizations, included medical associations and public health watchdogs, legal advocacy groups, green energy proponents, conservation organizations, cottager associations and all sorts of grassroots groups. This broad diversity is credited as being fundamental to the campaign’s eventual success.

Given the public’s chief concern around the health impacts of smog, the campaign also elected to focus on the public health outcomes of burning coal, communicating predominantly through one of the coalition’s members, the Ontario Medical Association. 

According to Bruce Lourie, one of the OCAA’s founders while working with Pollution Probe, the health-first lens was absolutely key to the campaign’s success. “It wasn’t the concern for climate change that drove public alarm about coal,” he notes, “it was the concern for kids with asthma and hospital visits.”

In 1998, the campaign documented these health impacts via a powerful research report released by the Ontario Medical Association. The dramatic image of doctors at a podium warning of the dangerous effects of excess smog, and its linkage to coal-fired plants, was the key ingredient in attracting public attention, and by extension, political attention. “That’s what drove the political will to deal with it,” Lourie confirms. 

Meanwhile, the OCAA and coalition members worked hard to generate a cross-party consensus, such that by the 2003 provincial election the phaseout of coal was a central plank in the platforms of the incumbent Progressive Conservatives as well as the opposition Liberals and the NDP. The only distinguishing feature in their commitments was the promised timelines.  

In the end, it was the Ontario Liberals that won that election, and from 2003 to 2014 the government worked with Ontario’s independent electricity system operator to plan out and carefully implement a complete phase-out of coal-fired power that neither risked the system’s reliability nor electricity’s affordability. In 2014, the Thunder Bay generating station was the last to shutter, completing the journey to zero coal, zero smog days and, let’s not forget, a reduction of more than 30 million tonnes of yearly climate pollution.