Canada doesn’t need another climate plan. It needs the machinery to deliver |
Canada has repeatedly responded to missed climate objectives with new plans, targets and policy frameworks.
Since 1990, Canada has missed every national emissions-reduction target that has come due. We are also off track to meet the 2030 target of reducing emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels.
We’re a country with many climate plans, targets, programs and policy proposals. But we lack a consistently strong mix of legislation, regulation, co-ordination and implementation systems capable of carrying commitments through to political change. Too many initiatives weaken, stall or change substantially between cabinet approval and actual delivery, revealing persistent gaps between policy design and implementation.
Our five-year, SSHRC-funded research project explores how to transform the governance of Canada’s transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Climate change creates a different challenge than the emergencies governments are accustomed to. Acute crises generate urgency, concentrated political attention and temporary permission to bypass routine processes. Climate change unfolds over decades, and interacts with affordability, infrastructure, health, security and regional development. It persists when political attention moves elsewhere. We know that each delay leaves future governments – and generations – facing more costly and intractable combinations of mitigation, adaptation, disaster response and economic transition.
This matters beyond the climate file. The same co-ordination failures that stall reductions in emissions also slow disaster response, health-system adaptation and infrastructure renewal – a link our team explored directly during COVID-19. That work showed how pandemic and climate vulnerabilities share the same roots in fragmented, siloed governance. Reforming government’s capacity to deliver climate policy would strengthen its capacity to deliver so much more.
Five ways government trips over itself
Our research identifies recurring failure patterns, several of which also surfaced in our own re-analysis of a decade of interviews with local climate leaders in 11 British Columbia communities.
Departments are built around narrow mandates with little reward for working across boundaries, so climate action keeps stalling in the gaps between silos.
Federal, provincial, territorial and........