Every day, about 2,500 heavy trucks pass through the heart of downtown Ottawa following an interprovincial route that connects Highway 417 in Ottawa and Highways 5/50 in Gatineau via the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge. Air pollution levels along the trucking corridor far exceed the levels recommended by the World Health Organization, posing an alarming health risk to those who live, work, and play in the downtown core.
The trucking route runs through a densely populated neighborhood, home to thousands of residents and hundreds of local businesses. Heavy vehicles pass beside a daycare centre with an outdoor play area, social housing, and three homeless shelters where people congregate at street level for hours every day. This means some of Ottawa’s most vulnerable communities are the most heavily affected by pollution from the trucks.
Air pollution is recognized globally as a major health risk. In Canada, about 15,000 people die prematurely from air pollution every year, with approximately 6,600 deaths in Ontario alone. Traffic-related air pollution can cause serious health damage, including asthma, cardiovascular disease, reduced lung function, impaired lung development in children, pre-term and low-birthweight infants, childhood leukemia, and premature death. Large diesel trucks, including many that use the downtown trucking route, are the worst pollution offenders and older large trucks are the worst of the worst.
Over the past five decades, multiple different attempts at solving the problem have been tried and failed to yield results. In January 2023, Ecojustice sent an open letter on behalf of Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) and Friends of the Earth Canada, to Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe demanding that he take urgent action to clean up air quality in the City’s downtown.
The following month, a group of physicians, represented by Ecojustice, filed a complaint under section 11 of Ontario’s Health Protection and Promotion Act (HPPA). Doctors from CAPE are asking the province’s medical officer of health, Dr. Vera Etches, to investigate the social and health harms caused by trucking pollution in downtown Ottawa.
