SUDBURY—When the province gutted its climate targets, seven young Ontarians sharpened their pencils and sued.
This month, the reverberations from that decision reached all the way to the country’s highest court. And in Sudbury, 18-year-old Sophia Mathur is steady at the helm.
“I just turned 18—I can vote now—yet this case is still very much present,” Ms. Mathur told The Expositor. “My entire teenage years have been shaped by being part of this Ecojustice case.”
What began in 2019 as Mathur et al. v. His Majesty the King in Right of Ontario is now poised to redefine the legal relationship between governments, the environment, and generational rights. The seven youth plaintiffs: Beze Gray, Zoe Keary-Matzner, Shaelyn Wabegijig, Shelby Gagnon, Madison Dyck and Alex Neufeldt alongside Ms. Mathur—backed by environmental law charity Ecojustice—first filed their constitutional challenge after Premier Doug Ford’s government axed Ontario’s existing climate targets and replaced them with a limp-wristed plan that allows for 200 megatonnes more greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The Ontario Court of Appeal agreed with the plaintiffs this past October, affirming that the province’s climate backslide infringes on rights protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—most notably, the right to life, liberty and security of the person.
For Ms. Mathur, who has spent the past decade balancing activism with adolescence, the ruling is both vindication and fuel.
“I was contacted about this case not long after I started striking with Fridays for Future. I’ve gone through so much of my activism career alongside this case. Honestly? I expected that. These things take time. But I’m hoping by the time I’m older, we won’t need as many environmental lawyers.”
And yet here we are. The provincial government is dusting off its legal briefs for another round, just after as Mark Carney’s government repealed the national carbon tax back in mid-March—during the campaign, some Conservatives suggested that Carney might reinstate the consumer carbon tax. However, Carney, who holds a PhD in economics from Oxford, has indicated an understanding that Trudeau’s revenue-neutral carbon tax was ineffective — too modest to shift consumer behaviour and politically divisive in its implementation. It is unlikely he will pursue a similar policy.
The question now isn’t just whether Ontario’s targets hold water. It’s whether Canada’s patchwork of provincial and federal governments can keep pace with the collapse of the ecosystems they claim to steward.
For Fraser Thomson, a lawyer with Ecojustice and counsel for the plaintiffs, the case cuts deeper than legal precedent.
“One could describe the climate crisis as the greatest intergenerational injustice ever committed by one generation to another,” Mr. Thomson told The Expositor. “When I was young and working on these issues, it always seemed like something that was coming 10 years in the future, 20 years in the future. We thought we’d solve it before it got really bad.”
Spoiler: we didn’t.
“We are in a climate emergency,” he said flatly. “The Supreme Court of Canada has called it an existential threat of the highest order.”
The stakes are high, but the legal tide is shifting.
“Lawsuits are proving to be a game-changer,” Mr. Thomson added. “Courts around the world are increasingly siding with citizens.”
It’s a sharp contrast to the cautious, incremental politicking that has long defined Canada’s environmental record. And across Manitoulin Island, where Indigenous youth continue to champion land-based sovereignty—the resonance is unmistakable. Though Ms. Mathur herself is not Indigenous, her case threads into a broader tapestry: one where law and land, Western courts and Indigenous legal traditions, converge in the shared assertion that protecting the earth is protecting the people.
For Mr. Thomson, it’s also about humility. “The lesson from the climate crisis is that we need to take into account the limits of natural systems and come into better relationship with those limits.”
Ms. Mathur agrees. She’ll begin her undergraduate studies in public policy at Carleton University this fall—a path shaped directly by her years in the legal trenches.
“I would love to follow the line of the lawyers in my case,” she said. “But I’m hoping, by the time I’m older, we’ll have governments that protect our future — and we won’t need as many cases like this.”
In the meantime, she has a clear ask for those reading: protect reliable journalism.
“In a world where social media is becoming a big source of information, it’s important that people really focus on finding reliable news sources—especially on issues like climate change, where it’s easy for propaganda to be pushed against activists and cases like ours.”
The courts may still waver. Governments may still duck and weave.
But youth like Ms. Mathur aren’t blinking. And on Manitoulin, where land and law are stitched together by stories older than Confederation, the message lands clean and hard:
Justice is not a memo or a market mechanism.
It’s a river, a forest, a breath of untainted air.
And youth like Sophia Mathur will not stand idly by for it to be litigated away.
