Commission for Environmental Cooperation

Minister of Environment and Climate Change
Location: North Vancouver

The Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson has served as the Member of Parliament for North Vancouver since 2015.

Raised in Saskatchewan, Minister Wilkinson spent more than 20 years in the private sector, holding leadership positions with a number of companies dedicated to the development of green technologies.

Minister Wilkinson’s work as CEO of both QuestAir Technologies and the former BioteQ Environmental Technologies (now BQE Water Inc.), in addition to his role as senior Vice-President of Business Development with Nexterra, provided him with extensive experience in the energy and environmental technology sectors. He also previously worked at Bain & Company, a leading global management consultancy.

A Rhodes Scholar, Minister Wilkinson made use of his educational background in public policy when he worked as a constitutional negotiator and a federal-provincial relations specialist for former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow. He has served on several industry and charitable boards, including the United Way of the Lower Mainland and the B.C. Technology Industry Association. He also served as a board member and treasurer of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation.

Minister Wilkinson has deep roots in North Vancouver, where he is raising his family alongside his wife, Tara.

Doctor in ecology and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), as well as visiting professor at seven international universities, notably the International University of Andalucía, Spain, and the University of California, Berkeley, Víctor Manuel Toledo has dedicated over four decades to interdisciplinary research, working in areas and on such issues as sustainability, conservation, natural resources management, socio-environmental metabolism, agroecology, political ecology and biocultural diversity. He founded a new area of interdisciplinary studies known as ethnoecology.

His outstanding academic work has earned him many national and international distinctions, including the National Environmental Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the UNESCO Chair in Environment and Sustainable Development at the University of Barcelona and the Ecological Merit Prize (awarded by the Government of Mexico). His political ecological thought is widely known and recognized throughout Latin America.

A longtime environmental activist, Toledo has advised numerous civil society organizations in Mexico, in particular cooperatives, unions and indigenous groups. For two decades, he has been a columnist at the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, as well as, more recently, Regeneración. He has published over 200 research papers and popular science articles, including twenty books, as well as given over 300 conferences, talks and workshops.

In May 2019, he was appointed Mexico’s Minister of Environment and Natural Resources.

On July 5, 2018, President Donald J. Trump announced the appointment of Andrew Wheeler as the new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He had previously been confirmed by the US Senate as the EPA Deputy Administrator on April 12, 2018.

Wheeler has dedicated his career to advancing sound environmental policies. He began his career during the George H.W. Bush Administration as a special assistant in EPA’s Pollution Prevention and Toxics office. He was a principal and team leader of the Energy and Environment Practice Group at FaegreBD Consulting, as well as counsel at Faegre Baker Daniels law firm, where he had practiced since 2009. He also served as the co-chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Industry team across the entire firm.

Prior to his work with Faegre Baker Daniels, Mr. Wheeler served for six years as the majority staff director and chief counsel, as well as the minority staff director, of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and in a similar capacity for six years for the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change, Wetlands and Nuclear Safety. He is also a past chairman of the National Energy Resource Organization (NERO) and a Stennis Fellow.

Wheeler was born in Hamilton, Ohio. He completed his law degree at Washington University in St. Louis, his MBA at George Mason University, and his undergraduate work in English and biology at Case Western Reserve University.