ABSTRACT
The environmental movement is a global phenomenon, of necessity, and Toronto is only one of many localities. Toronto houses most of the better-funded and most publicized environmental advocacy groups, including Greenpeace with a Canadian membership of about 350,000 and the World Wildlife Fund (Canada) (WWFC), a branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, which has more than two hundred thousand Canadian members. During the period under discussion in this chapter (1990), which covered the public consultation phase of the Canadian Green Plan (see below), environmentalism became the nation’s primary political issue, though displaced later by economic and constitutional questions. Almost 90 per cent of Canadians are concerned about some environmental issues; more specifically, 87 per cent of those questioned in a Decima poll in the spring of 1991 expressed concern about the quality of the environment in and around their homes.
