A National Sustainability Act for Canada

Why does Canada seem to sway from environmental crisis to crisis? Record breaking boil water advisories; devastating hurricanes and windstorms; forests ravaged by beetle infestation; ice storms and prairie droughts.

While surveys show that Canadians expect their country to be a world leader on environment issues, Canada holds one of the worst environmental records of any developed country, ranking 28th out of 30 OECD countries.

Yet our leaders do not have any comprehensive national strategy to address its environmental shortcomings.

In contrast, the twenty nations with the top environmental performing rankings are guided by national sustainable development strategies.
 
Despite repeated international commitments to address its environmental challenges by developing a national sustainable development strategy (at the both the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 and the UN World Summit in 2002), Canada has no national strategy, and no plan to create one.

To help Canada towards these international commitments--and to safeguard our natural legacy for future generations--the David Suzuki Foundation has laid out a plan to develop a National Sustainable Development Strategy designed to address these deficiencies and make Canada and its provinces world leaders in sustainable development.

Click here to download this report.

The proposed National Sustainable Development Strategy sets measurable targets for all environmental objectives, implements strategies to achieve targets, and provides independent reporting on progress.

Canada’s major deficiencies in sustainability planning include:

• Lack of comprehensive sustainability goals and targets;
• Absence of an integrated national sustainable development strategy;
• Poor linkage between strategies and targets;
• Weak leadership from senior levels of government;
• Weak linkage of progress monitoring to sustainability goals and targets;
• Deficient legal framework;
• Weak accountability for achieving goals and targets; and,
• Inadequate stakeholder engagement in development of the National Sustainable Development Strategy.

 
According to Canada’s former Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, the failure to develop a sustainable development plan “will leave Canadians and parliamentarians without a clear idea of the government’s overall plan for sustainable development, how it will get there, and what progress it has made.”
 
In 2004, the David Suzuki Foundation responded to Canada’s failure to develop a national strategy by producing its own plan to achieve sustainability entitled: Sustainability within a Generation. The purpose of this report is to outline a policy to help achieve Sustainability within a Generation and fulfill Canada’s international commitment to develop a National Sustainability Strategy.