Air Pollution in Ontario – Community Profiles
February 5, 2026
Where you live in Ontario should not determine how much pollution you breathe.
Yet under the province’s current air pollution system, some communities — often low-income or Indigenous — are exposed to far higher levels of harmful pollution than others. This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a regulatory system that manages pollution facility by facility instead of protecting people from cumulative harm.
Ontario’s air pollution laws are broken. They are designed to regulate individual facilities rather than protect people. Although the stated goal of the province’s air pollution approach is to protect human health by limiting exposure to air pollution, this is undermined by two fundamental flaws in Ontario’s regulatory system:
Air pollution causes serious and well-documented health harms, including respiratory and cardiovascular disease. When pollution is allowed to accumulate in the same places, the health burden is not shared equally. Low-income and Indigenous communities are more likely to be exposed to higher levels of air pollution, often over long periods of time.
Ontario must update its air pollution laws and regulations to ensure that health is protected equally across the province. This means regulating air pollution based on the cumulative exposure people actually experience, rather than the current facility-by-facility approach to regulation. It also requires closing loopholes and ending exemptions that allow facilities to release pollutants above health-based standards.
Every community deserves equal protection from air pollution.
CELA has filed an Application for Review under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights calling on the province to review and strengthen its cumulative effects assessment policy for air pollution.
The application outlines how the current approach has failed to improve air quality and has not been meaningfully implemented. By filing this request, CELA is using the Environmental Bill of Rights to press for accountability and to help ensure that communities affected by air pollution have the information they need to advocate for themselves and for a new, people-centred approach to air pollution regulation in Ontario.
Where you live shouldn’t decide what you breathe. Explore the full, interactive community air pollution profiles to see how pollution adds up, and why policy change is needed.