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 municipal governments are handed sometimes overlapping responsibilities without matching money or authority and implementation capacity. Local governments, so often the level where climate action actually becomes visible, are left with obligations they cannot fund. Even where good policy exists on paper, implementation plans, delivery ownership and sequencing are frequently an afterthought, so programs stall at the handoff between design and delivery.
- Successful initiatives can be discontinued or substantially weakened as political priorities change because legislated targets and formal oversight do not, on their own, secure the policies, funding and implementation capacity needed to deliver them. This pattern is evident in an analysis of Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan, where strong governance structures built in 2015 were dismantled within four years of a new government taking office.
- Fragmented data and measurement systems make it hard to know what’s working or to course correct in real time. Canada has national emissions inventories and formal federal reporting requirements, but information remains uneven across governments, sectors and programs, and is not always aligned with the operational decisions needed to improve delivery.
- In many parts of government, thin in-house policy and delivery capacity, high turnover and heavy reliance on external expertise weaken institutional memory and increase risk aversion precisely when bold, sustained delivery is required.
These failures cut across governance structures. Weak co-ordination and delivery undermine execution; political turnover, fragmented accountability and limited institutional learning undermine durability; and opaque decisions, uneven participation and uncertain responsibility undermine legitimacy. None of these is a straightforward administrative defect.
Three governance capabilities governments need to strengthen
These failures are embedded in political incentives, federal arrangements, institutional cultures, uneven capacities and contested economic interests. Governance reform will not remove these conflicts, but it can give governments stronger ways to co-ordinate action, make trade-offs visible, sustain commitments and learn from implementation. We point to three reinforcing sets of reforms.
The first is execution: Ottawa needs to strengthen its cross-government delivery function with clear cabinet backing to resolve implementation bottlenecks, co-ordinate departmental responsibilities and track progress. Federal, provincial and territorial governments should pilot formal implementation agreements for high-stakes files such as electricity-grid buildout or industrial decarbonization. These agreements should spell out who does what, on what timelines, with what money and who reports what to whom. Affected Indigenous governments should help design and participate in these arrangements.
Financial markets can’t drive Canada’s climate transition alone
And no major program should be approved without an implementation plan attached – i.e., who owns delivery, what capacity is needed and where the handoffs are – so good policy does not die in the choreography between announcement and delivery.
The second is durability: Climate commitments need to be built to survive changes in government. Canada already has climate legislation and emissions targets, including the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. The challenge is to sustain the measures needed to meet them. A comparison of oil- and gas-producing regions shows how broad political consensus and stable policy signals supported an adaptive transition in Esbjerg, Denmark.
Canada should strengthen its existing accountability framework by linking targets closely to departmental responsibilities, multi-year funding and public-spending decisions. Federal proposals are already subject to requirements to assess their climate and environmental implications. Ottawa should strengthen the application of these requirements and show how the findings influence funding decisions and progress toward emissions targets. Carbon budgets – limits on cumulative emissions over defined periods – could provide an additional benchmark for assessing whether policies and spending are consistent with these targets.
Ottawa also needs to rebuild the in-house policy capacity – the expertise within the public service to develop, assess and implement policy – it has spent 20 years outsourcing. Institutional memory doesn’t survive turnover if it never lived inside government in the first place.
The third is legitimacy: None of this works if Canadians don’t trust the process, especially once the costs of transition – carbon pricing, grid upgrades, industrial change – become visible in household budgets. Governments should be required to show their homework: standardized, plain-language explanations of the trade-offs with evidence. Even the Montreal Protocol, the most successful environmental treaty in history, succeeded partly because it built equity between rich and poor countries, and adapted transparently as science evolved. This offers lessons for how Canada should communicate the fairness of its own climate trade-offs. Indigenous governments in particular need genuine co-governance arrangements.
What’s actually at stake
Skeptics might say Canada doesn’t need more governance architecture; it needs more political courage. It needs both. Governance reform cannot substitute for sustained political leadership, and leadership cannot achieve much without institutions capable of carrying decisions into delivery. Without that delivery capacity, political momentum dissipates as attention moves to the next crisis. Every additional plan produced without fixing the machinery behind it just adds to a growing pile of well-intentioned documents that have changed little.
Canada’s newly released Changing Climate Report, a federal scientific assessment produced by more than 100 academics and experts, projects that average temperatures across the country between 2021 and 2040 will be about 2.7 C above pre-industrial levels, regardless of near-term emissions cuts. By late century, that warming could reach about 5 C under current global policies, compared with about 3.5 C under a global net-zero emissions scenario. That gap will be measured in lives lost, homes destroyed and billions of dollars a year in economic damage. Closing it requires governments to co-ordinate, deliver and sustain climate action.
Canada has spent three decades demonstrating that setting targets is easier than meeting them. The next decade will test whether Canadian governments can build the capacity to deliver through collaboration across jurisdictions, commitments that survive elections and processes Canadians can trust.
