Ford government hopes to burn more garbage, build more landfills

Posted October 28, 2026 6:18 pm.

Ontario’s environment minister hopes to burn more garbage for energy and build more landfills as the province runs out of space to dump its trash, framing it as a way to fight U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent tariff on Canadian waste.

Ontario’s landfills will be full within 10 years and the province needs to act quickly, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said. 

On Tuesday, the government tabled an omnibus bill, Building Ontario Faster Act, that seeks to speed up the permitting and approval regime across all ministries, including for new landfill sites or incinerators.

“We want to have proponents come forward if they have proposals for either a landfill or an energy-from-waste site and then we have … municipalities that would be willing, able and supportive of being a host community,” McCarthy said Wednesday.

He said communities can say no to a landfill or garbage incinerator.

“Municipalities will hold the pen on whether or not they want a landfill site, but there are benefits, obviously, economic benefits, to having a landfill site, an expansion to a landfill, or energy from waste site in a community,” he said.

At a news conference the day before, however, McCarthy left the door open to imposing landfills on communities if none volunteer to be hosts.

Details in the bill that still has to pass show the province will repeal a section of the Environmental Assessment Act that requires municipal support for landfill sites.

Last year, the province made moves to force the reopening of a landfill site a community in southwestern Ontario did not want.

In 2025, Ontario passed Bill 5, a controversial omnibus bill that sought to speed up approvals for large projects, particularly mines. But that bill also contained a section that exempted the former landfill in Dresden, Ont., from a full environmental assessment as the province looked to reopen it despite opposition from the municipality.

Trump signed an executive order last week that lifted some tariffs on Canadian goods, but added a 50 per cent tariff on Canadian trash, with the measures set to go into force in a few days.

McCarthy said that decision could mean Ontario’s landfills will be full within five years if the tariff stays, but he did not say how many landfills or incinerators the province needs.

A 2024 report from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said Canada shipped more than three million tonnes of garbage to the state in 2024.

“Energy from waste is something we can and should embrace,” McCarthy said. “Europe, Great Britain have embraced it because they don’t have landfill capacity. We do, but we do need to improve our landfill capacity because in 10 years we won’t have it. We haven’t built a new landfill site in Ontario for 20 years.”

He said the incinerators produce clean energy, which Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner took issue with.

“I think the minister needs to go talk to the scientists who show, one, that incineration leads to toxic air emissions, and two, the ash from incinerations is quite toxic as well and still has to go to landfill.”

McCarthy pointed to two waste-to-energy incinerators in the province as success stories: Emerald Energy from Waste in Brampton, Ont., and the Durham-York Energy Centre in Clarington, Ont., in the minister’s riding of Durham.

Schreiner said one major stumbling block to building landfills and incinerators is that many residents oppose them in their neighbourhoods.

“People do not want toxic air pollution in their backyard,” he said. “They instead want a government that’s not going to dismantle our blue box program and are actually going to look at ways in which we can reduce the amount of garbage actually going into landfill instead of accelerating and increasing the amount going into landfills.”

Interim Liberal leader John Fraser said the government needs to sell the idea to Ontarians.

“You can’t just keep invoking tariffs and Donald Trump as an excuse to do everything or anything that you want to do without any explanation, and that’s exactly what’s happening here,” he said.

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