I believe you are referring to a comment that the Canadian Environmental Law Association made where they compared Ontario and California, and Ontario had a substantially larger order of magnitude in releases than California, which is a substantially larger jurisdiction.
The problem is that you are literally comparing Ontario's apples to California's oranges. You have a province here in Canada that is a high manufacturing industrial province and you're comparing it to a state in the United States which has very little manufacturing. It's basically an IT, high-tech state. It would be far more appropriate to compare Ontario to Michigan, New Jersey, Louisiana, states and jurisdictions that have a similar economy, that are manufacturing and industrial based.