Canadian ministers commit to new air quality standards

Canada’s environment ministers say they are endorsing new national air quality standards after a Friday meeting in Yellowknife.

The standards – which measure fine particulate matter in the air – will be more stringent than before, officials said.

However, what stricter standards will mean in practice is not clear, particularly for Canadians now coping with an annual onslaught of wildfire smoke and the toxic matter it contains.

“These new standards will help all jurisdictions better protect communities from the growing health impacts of wildfire smoke and other air pollution sources,” said NWT environment minister Jay Macdonald, who chaired Friday’s meeting in the territorial capital.

“Air quality in the Northwest Territories is generally very good, but climate change is increasing wildfire risk and affecting all these regions. Strong, science-based national standards help ensure we’re prepared for these challenges and support long-term health and resilience.”

Asked what the new air quality standards would actually deliver in terms of actions, Macdonald said they would be a “tool” to support work done by jurisdictions like the NWT since 2023, the territory’s worst fire season on record.

“At the end of the day, Mother Nature is the one that really determines the amount of smoke that’s in the air from the fires we’ve experienced over the last number of years,” said Macdonald, noting the territory’s installation of air quality sensors in communities over the past two years.

“Several of the communities have created healthy air space facilities to support folks that have medical conditions or Elders or younger folks,” he said.

“As we work toward looking at the implementation of those standards and how they can impact life in the NWT, I think we’re certainly trying to be proactive.”

The broad agenda for the Yellowknife meeting was said to feature air quality alongside contaminated sites, climate change and reconciliation. The precise details were confidential, reporters were told.

Leadership of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, or CCME, rotates on an annual basis. Macdonald is the outgoing CCME president, handing over to Alberta’s Rebecca Schulz.

The new air quality standard – which the CCME had already published, but which ministers say they have now formally endorsed – moves Canada from a daily average figure of 27 micrograms of fine particulate matter per cubic metre of air, agreed in 2020, to a new standard of 23 micrograms per cubic metre. (A yearly average target will move from 8.8 micrograms per cubic metre to 8.0.)

Federal environment minister Julie Dabrusin said she was “very pleased we’ve been able to work together to approve stricter air quality standards for fine particulate matter.”

“It’s improving air quality across Canada through comprehensive, collaborative actions that can provide significant health and environmental benefits to Canadians,” she said, without detailing those actions.

“Canadians want to be assured that they have clean air in their communities and together, as a group, we’ve been able to take action so we can make sure that happens.”

Earlier, Dabrusin told Cabin Radio she, as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s newly appointed environment minister, had spent the past few days in Yellowknife to “get advice from leadership” on issues like the North’s energy crisis.

Northerners spend up to four times as much as southern Canadians on their energy bills, while many of the NWT’s communities remain powered by diesel generators.

Meanwhile, the territory’s power infrastructure – a series of micro-grids, with no territorial grid or connection south – is in some cases more than half a century old.

Dabrusin acknowledged the provinces and territories “have different approaches” to the environment. She characterized her job as “to make sure we’re all moving to net zero by 2050.”

Below, read a transcript of the conversation, broadcast live on Mornings at the Cabin.

This interview was broadcast on July 4, 2025. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: What are ministers meeting in Yellowknife to talk about?

Julie Dabrusin: I’m a new minister of environment federally, so this is a chance for me to sit down with all of the ministers of environment from all the different provinces and territories and talk about the issues that are facing our communities – but also how we’re going to work together to be able to build forward for Canada. So it’s a good chance for us to all get together and talk.

Working together can be tricky on the environment file. When I look across Canada, not everybody seems to see things the same way, and yet now we have the United States seemingly helping Canadians figure out ways to work together. What do you think the vibe is going to be?

Actually, just coming out of Canada Day, it’s a really big moment to recognize it was a different Canada Day this year – I felt, at least, in my own home community – than it was in past years. Those people definitely strongly coming out with all their Canadian flags and their shirts.

What I heard in my community – because I was back home, I only came here on July 2 – was they very much want to see us all stand together and fight together for our country and for our sovereignty. I think that message is being heard across the country.

So all of us, we may have different approaches to how we’re going to do things, but we all know that what our own home communities want from us is to see us working together.

When it comes to energy and the environment, I think different Canadians might define fighting for the country quite differently. This week, you committed just under $5 million to Inuvialuit cabins and solar. You committed a couple of million to essentially an energy efficiency biomass refurb project at an apartment building here in Yellowknife. The Mark Carney government, I think, has tried to portray itself as friendly to all forms of energy right now, whether that’s renewable or fossil fuel. At a time when the United States is torpedoing a lot of its investment in clean energy, is your government racing ahead with clean energy as the main priority here?

What we’re doing is making sure that when we’re looking at Canada moving forward, I think – if I was going to quote the prime minister and how he said it – Canada has the potential to be an energy superpower and, to do that, we need to be low-cost, low-risk and low-carbon.

The low-carbon piece is absolutely an essential part of how we look forward to what we do for building out our energy security for ourselves, but also our exports. And we have so many great opportunities right across our country on how we can build that out.

Going forward, I’ve been able to see projects right across our country that show we can be really innovative and at the front edge of what we can produce for what other countries are looking for. And so that’s what we will keep on working towards.

Are we looking at a future where the Canadian government says, ‘Well, we can do a little bit of everything here. We’re going to do as much as we can on the low-carbon front, but we’ve also got this great stuff that we need to export that’s going to bring in a bunch of money. Great. We’ll do it all.’ Or are we eventually building to one option here in terms of where we want to be by, say, 2030?

In some ways, my role as minister of environment isn’t to decide for different provinces and territories what they produce, and most of it actually falls within their jurisdictions.

What my job is, is to make sure we’re all moving to net zero by 2050. So my job is to make sure that in everything we do, we’re looking at how we decarbonize our economy. And honestly, that’s what I hear – when I’m talking with industry from other countries – they’re looking for. So as we look at the International Energy Agency, for example, when they talk about where global investments are going. they’re actually saying that people are looking worldwide for different forms of cleaner energy, and Canada can definitely provide that.

But I’m not the one to make the decisions. I’m only there to make sure that we help to actually build towards the net zero economy.

Provinces do like to point fingers at the environment minister federally, every now and again. They maybe don’t see that quite the same way. There is also one very large country that doesn’t quite see things the way you just outlined there. You have got the United States to deal with. How much does that put a stick in the spokes of Canada’s environment and energy policy?

There’s no question that what’s been happening south of the border since the beginning of this year has changed the impact on our economy here and with tariffs, and the impact of tariffs in some communities, that’s felt in a much harder way than others.

Do you think it’ll change the impact on our environment?

I don’t think so. And the reason why is because I think if we’re going to be looking at how are we energy secure, and if we’re going to look at what Canadians value about our country, then really, people picture our natural spaces. The strength of our country is often viewed as our nature, too. So I think in some ways, it gives everybody a chance to re-evaluate what we see as ourselves, as Canadians.

We in the North obviously lived with the carbon tax for the last few years, of which I think people understood the merits environmentally but struggled economically, because it penalized many people in the North when they didn’t really have a choice about where they got their energy from. We’ve now got wildfires ripping up and down the country again. We’ve got an energy crisis in the North, where we’ve got infrastructure that in some cases is practically a century old. Electricity costs consumers four times here what it does in the south. How are you going to guide your government, as environment minister, in terms of adapting to climate change while helping northerners onto affordable energy?

There’s an interesting question, because I will say that even in the conversations I’ve had over the past couple days up here, one of the things that keeps coming back to me – from people I’m meeting here in Yellowknife and around – is that climate change isn’t just a concept. It’s actually here in the Northwest Territories. It’s something that is felt through the wildfires and through the reduced water levels, and that’s also impacting affordability. So I am definitely hearing that the people in the North want to see action on climate change.

How do we help? Well, I think those two projects that you referred to are part of the way that we can help. And I think the most important part is both those projects are guided from the community, because I am not the one – living in Toronto – to be able to decide how it best lands in the Northwest Territories, so seeking guidance from leadership here is an important part of it.

And don’t get me wrong, I understand the merits of those projects, but some solar panels on Inuvialuit cabins and a biomass boiler in Denendeh Manor isn’t alone going to solve those much, much bigger problems. There is a scale issue going on there, where there is only one government that has the money to invest in anything transformative here, and it’s yours. What are you imagining?

I mean, to not understate, though, that when we were at Denendeh Manor and they were talking about it, it’s $40,000 a year in energy cost savings, right? So just there. What they were saying is that that, actually, was going to help them to build out the model, to be able to show other buildings how to do it, and to prove the point that it can save money.

If you’ve got $5 million from the federal government to do it, right? If you’re going to give us all a grant to install a biomass boiler, I think we’ll all sign up. That’s great. But it’s going to take something like that, isn’t it?

Well, it’s going to take continuing to get that advice from leadership. And obviously that’s why I’m here. Look, I’m here to be hearing what the needs are and to continue working with it. So I actually look forward to it. I think there are a lot of really exciting opportunities up here in the North.