In the context of climate change, this means taking ownership for limiting temperature increases to 1.5°C. This act would require Ottawa to set bolder national targets for greenhouse gas reductions – while developing enforcement mechanisms and milestone targets prior to 2030. Canadian governments must also stop propping up fossil fuel industries.

Businesses clearly have a role to play in lowering global emissions, but even business leaders agree they need stronger climate regulations to meaningfully lower emissions. The We Mean Business Coalition, which includes more than 700 firms around the world, acknowledges that “the decisions governments make now will lock in the strategic direction of entire economies for years to come.” They’re calling on governments “to put the economy on a positive course to a resilient, zero-carbon future.” These leaders know that their businesses will thrive if governments design policies that hold all corporate actors accountable for the full scope of their impacts.

Households, too, could be a more effective part of the solution – if there were a national entity coordinating their efforts. Businesses and households alike need governments to take ownership of Canada’s net-zero vision.

Currently, that sense of ownership is borne mainly by non-governmental actors and organizations. Environmental champions and resource-constrained non-profit organizations have led change efforts because the federal and provincial governments have failed to invest in the required systems, policies, programs and interventions. Even the new efforts announced in the recent federal budget are expected to, at best, reduce Canada’s emissions by 36% from 2005 levels by 2030. In contrast, the U.K. recently passed legislation requiring emissions reductions of 78% from 1990 levels by 2035. The Liberals’ $17.6 billion in new climate action is equivalent to just 0.25% of Canada’s GDP. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, “we should be spending more like 1% to 2% of GDP per year to aggressively decarbonize.”

Scientists, business and civic leaders, Indigenous Elders and other Canadians have identified the solutions we need to tackle climate change. We have technology that enables us to embrace electric vehicles and wind and solar power, along with emerging technologies to sequester carbon. We have market-based instruments that can reduce the environmental impacts of production. Many of these solutions are being implemented with great success. But we need government action to transform these successes into systemic change.

As an example of today’s responsibility gaps, consider sustainable procurement – the purchasing of goods and services that takes into consideration social, environmental and economic impacts. Generating more than 13% of Canada’s GDP, public sector procurement has the potential to drive impact at scale. The federal government “made numerous commitments to green its procurement dating back to 1992.” Yet a recent study found sustainability has only narrowly and superficially been integrated into public sector procurement. A 2005 Auditor General’s report revealed many challenges, ranging from a lack of central direction to limited use of performance indicators to measure progress. Many of these challenges persist 16 years later, illustrating a lack of ownership from our government.

By acknowledging that we cannot rely solely on pollution pricing to tackle climate change, Canada’s federal political parties have all signalled their readiness to take ownership over climate mitigation and adaptation.

But taking responsibility means governments must establish a comprehensive strategy for change that includes specific and measurable goals. They must integrate those goals into objectives and leaders’ performance metrics. Of critical importance, they need to allocate resources commensurate with the scale of the challenge they’re taking on. And along the way, they must establish mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

So what is holding governments back? First, let’s recognize that we are talking about complex change, which is rarely easy. Governments are often trying to find consensus among stakeholder groups with divergent interests, and climate change is competing with a breadth of other priorities that in the past have been seen as more urgent. Also, we are still influenced by a neoliberal ideology that sees good government as one that embraces the free market, not shapes it, as well as outdated cost-benefit calculations that value economy over environment. More generally, governments seem to be enacting climate mitigation measures on one hand while investing in greenhouse-gas-emitting systems on the other. Yes, we have $17.6 billion in new spending, but we continue to invest in pipelines and subsidies to the oil and gas industry, and we have failed to really reckon with the fact that we have an economic system that is focused on driving infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

What do governments need to do to change? We need a deep and ingrained recognition that a healthy environment is an unassailable foundation for healthy communities and a sustainable economy. We need to accept that what is required to keep temperatures below 1.5°C is likely not popular in the short-term, but taking ownership over achieving climate justice and committing to investing in what is required is the only path to net-zero emissions.

Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of operations research, says most organizations stumble because they solve the wrong problem, rather than because they get the wrong solution to the right problem. While existing innovations, policies and programs have solved important challenges, we now need to solve the root problem of ownership and commitment.

We are hopeful that federal and provincial governments will take full responsibility for climate justice. We are hopeful they will connect our hodgepodge of climate activities into a synergistic strategy that will achieve our goals, create mechanisms of accountability, and allocate sufficient resources to keep temperature increases below 1.5°C. With a sense of ownership and commitment, they will enable sustainability to become a core part of our socioeconomic DNA.

Monica Da Ponte is principal at Shift & Build

Emily Huddart Kennedy is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at University of British Columbia.

The post Wanted: Government ownership over the common good to achieve climate justice appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The most urgent and dire of these is the threat of climate change. Only the state, acting in an interventionist mode, has the financial resources, administrative capacity and legislative authority to produce a serious plan to fight the climate crisis. But just as importantly, an interventionist state is capable of initiating a plan that generates a sense of solidarity and common purpose in the population – a necessity if the plan is to succeed.

Here again our government’s role in fighting the pandemic proves instructive. Canada’s relief efforts, while far from perfect, have aimed largely to help ordinary Canadians by getting money into their hands quickly. In the U.S., Congress approved an astonishing $4 trillion in spending to deal with the pandemic, but a strong resistance to “big government” redistributive schemes meant that the lion’s share went to bailing out corporations. And unlike in Canada, where temporary relief efforts are backstopped by universal healthcare, in America there are 44 million people who lack any kind of health insurance at all.

The inadequate American pandemic response has done nothing to calm the political, economic and racial tensions that already plagued the U.S. Nor has it inspired confidence in the machinery of state: a number of polls have shown a steep decline in American levels of trust in government over the course of the pandemic. In Canada, we’ve seen a very different trend. Although attitudes may now be shifting thanks to recent delays in the vaccine roll-out, polling throughout 2020 revealed rising levels of trust in government. This trust was borne out in the fact that Canadians have been much more supportive of government-mandated health protocols and more willing to bear the inconveniences and privations that they impose on their lives.

A common criticism of interventionism is that it breeds self-seeking individuals who (to riff on a famous American) ask only what their country can do for them and not what they can do for their country. But the fact is that state programs that are guided by notions of justice and fairness can help to nurture a sense of a common good and breed feelings of shared purpose. A nation that does little to address the inequities within its borders, on the other hand, can give rise to widespread symptoms of anomie and fragmentation.

State programs that are guided by notions of justice and fairness can help to nurture a sense of a common good and breed feelings of shared purpose.

A serious national climate plan would build on this lesson and incorporate policies capable of embodying an idea of the common good. The centrepiece of the Liberal Party’s current climate plan, the federal carbon tax, is poorly suited to this purpose. Many fiscal conservatives like carbon pricing as a policy response to global warming because it is a market mechanism that relies purely on the self-interested actions of consumers to curb carbon use. But it is hard to whoop up public enthusiasm around something as abstract as an economic signalling instrument. More to the point, self-interest as a motivation sits in uneasy tension with feelings of loyalty or commitment to the larger whole.

Not surprisingly, the carbon tax is unpopular with many Canadians, something the government has tried to remedy by promising a rebate to most households in excess of what they are taxed and, as a sweetener, by opting to send those rebates as quarterly cheques, rather than as an annual tax credit. These inducements may yet succeed in selling the Canadian public on the deal, but inasmuch as they constitute a narrow appeal to the self-interest of individuals, they will never generate the sort of popular support that Canadians express for public healthcare.

Inasmuch as carbon tax rebates constitute a narrow appeal to the self-interest of individuals, they will never generate the sort of popular support that Canadians express for public healthcare.

Climate policy is more likely to gain this sort of support if it produces concrete outcomes that are felt in the lives of ordinary Canadians and that can be associated with the goals of justice and equity. Such a plan would, for instance, need to provide good, secure income opportunities in local, low-carbon agricultural production, renewable energy projects like hydrogen and geothermal development, and cleantech industries like decarbonized steel and concrete. It would also need to invest in care work like teaching and nursing – climate-friendly jobs that, as the pandemic has taught us, we underfund at our peril.

A climate plan that invests in these areas – without letting private industry run away with the profits – could dramatically reduce our carbon footprint while also addressing the wage stagnation and economic inequality that have become endemic in recent decades. It could also address long-standing regional and cultural divides. In Alberta, for instance, where many view the federal carbon tax as a direct attack on the oil industry that has served as their province’s economic backbone, a dramatic investment in clean industry would go a long way to calming economic fears and easing resentments. A green economy could also help us to address wrongs against Indigenous Peoples in Canada, helping to create new economic opportunities on lands that have too often been treated as a resource storehouse or thoroughfare for extractive industries.

In recent months there have been small signs that some of this may come to pass. A federal budget is anticipated this spring, and the Liberal government has provided indications that it will assume a more interventionist role in fighting climate change.

If it recognized that it also has a role to play in creating unity and a sense of shared purpose in the country, it might be emboldened to act more quickly.

Scott Staring has a PhD in Political Science and is a professor in Georgian College’s Liberal Arts department.

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