Governments are delaying emissions cuts. In Ontario, this 17-year-old activist is suing over it. She is our number one climate advocate.
April 1, 2024
Sophia Mathur has been running for the environment since he was literally in the womb: his mother, Cathy Orlando, was pregnant when she was protesting against big fossil fuels in the 2000s. Mathur grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. At age seven, he accompanied his mother to parliamentarians’ offices and Parliament and, at age nine, to the Capitol, politely declining leisurely trips to local zoos with his father. “At the time, he was obsessed with big cats and I thought: If we were more focused on solving the climate crisis, these animals would be saved!” recalls Mathur.
Mathur’s advocacy accelerated in 2018 when, at age 10, he successfully lobbied several Sudbury restaurant owners to reduce their use of plastic straws. She then saw a video on Twitter of one of her contemporaries in Sweden: Greta Thunberg. That November, Mathur became the first Canadian student to miss school as part of Thunberg’s soon-to-be global Fridays for Future strike movement. At first only her mother and some of her friends joined her, but soon more children appeared. In May 2019, hundreds of locals persuaded the City of Sudbury to declare a climate emergency. And later that fall, Mathur participated on a panel alongside Thunberg for the Amnesty International Ambassador Awards, when Fridays for Future received the award in Washington, DC.
Less than a week after his Fridays for Future strikes, Mathur received a message on Twitter from Ecojustice, a Canadian environmental law charity formed in the 1990s after the Exxon Valdez disaster. The group had previously filed cases against Enbridge and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Their latest target was the Ontario government, specifically its unambitious emissions targets. “At first I was hesitant,” says Mathur. “But while politicians can ignore the protests, they cannot ignore the demands. They have to hire lawyers and recognize it in the media; They have to answer to us.”
In November 2019, with the backing of Ecojustice and lawyers at Stockwoods LLP in Toronto (and years before she could legally vote), Mathur became the first of seven plaintiffs in the case. Mathur et al., Canada’s first youth-led climate lawsuit. When Doug Ford took office in 2018, his government passed the Cap and Trade Cancellation Act, which changed the outgoing Liberal government’s emissions reduction target (37 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030) to one significantly weakest: a 30 per cent reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. The lawsuit, filed in Ontario Superior Court, alleges that Ford’s climate plan violates the Charter rights of current generations and futures of Canadian children, chief among which is their right to life, liberty and security. They asked the court to declare the targets unconstitutional and for the province to produce a science-backed, cleaner emissions target. The Ford government presented a strike motion against Mathur et al., saying he had “no reasonable prospect of success”; lost.
Last April, Ontario Superior Court Justice Marie-Andrée Vermette finally dismissed Mathur’s legal challenge, which appears to be a devastating blow until her ruling is read. Ontario’s goal does not violate the Charter, Vermette said, but it falls dangerously short of the scientific consensus on what is needed to address climate change, which she says disproportionately affects young people and indigenous Canadians. Mathur and the other plaintiffs have since filed an appeal against Vermette’s decision, but they have already achieved the victory they really wanted: setting a precedent. Before this, no similar climate case had reached a full hearing. Mathur et al. will serve as a much-publicized standard for other children (and adults) brave enough to criticize governments for their climate inaction. “Now people can say, ‘Well, they did this in Ontario, why can’t you do it in this province or this country?’ ”says Mathur.
His message has gone global. She joined world leaders and other climate luminaries at COP26 (in Scotland) and COP27 (in Egypt), and spent a week training with Al Gore’s climate activism think tank, Climate Reality. (Mathur’s teachers sometimes do not mark her as “absent” when she is on a trip, due to the educational value of her trips.) She has more petitions, protests, and larger projects in the works, like On Roads, a new online simulator that shows the real-life impacts of weak climate policies, which she recently demonstrated in her biology class. But Mathur also has a lot of things to do as a teenager: trips to the movies, meeting her real-life Twitter friends, and figuring out what to do after finishing her International Baccalaureate diploma. She is considering a career in environmental law, but she won’t have to solidify that decision until about 2030, the point at which Canadians will find out whether we have collectively done enough to avoid catastrophic warming. By then, Mathur will still have everything to wait for; She will only be 23 years old.
This story appears in the May issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the edition. here or subscribe to the magazine here.