In the past 15 years, all of Canada's environmental indicators have suffered, say experts who distribute the blame among local and national governments, businesses and the public.

A young polar bear (Ursus maritimus) scavenges in the garbage near the Canadian city of Churchill, Manitoba. - Photo Stock

The lead author of the landmark 1987 Bruntland Report, “Our Common Future”, was Canadian Jim MacNeill. The very first international climate change meeting involving scientists and political leaders was held in Toronto in 1988.

Canadian Maurice Strong organized the first World Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972, was the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and was secretary-general of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

But after this flourish on the world stage, Canada sat back and did virtually nothing domestically. The country ranks 28th out of 30 high-income countries in terms of environmental sustainability, according to an independent Canadian study. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Canada 27th in terms of environmental performance.

In the past 15 years all ecological indicators have declined, said David Runnalls, president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Winnipeg, Canada, and who has a 30-year history with various governmental and non-governmental institutions around the world, including UNEP and the World Conservation Union.

“Sustainable development is alive and well and working in Europe, but not in North America,” Runnalls told IPS at a recent conference tracking Canada's efforts since 1987 towards sustainable development, which entails preserving natural resources while respecting social rights.

Europeans made sustainable development part of their laws and regulations; Canada did not. Instead, governments slashed budgets in environmental departments and corporate leadership stopped being interested in sustainability, he said.

“You couldn't get 15 minutes with a senior environmental official to talk about sustainable development in Canada,” said Johanne Gelinas, former commissioner of the environment and sustainable development for the Canadian government.

“Sustainable development has never been a priority in the federal government, no matter which party was in power,” she said.

Any progress that has been made in Canada is mainly thanks to non-governmental organizations like Greenpeace forcing governments and industries to act. Today, the corporate sector is moving ahead and could push governments towards creating sustainable policies.

“If large institutions like Canada's banking sector decided to only buy paper from Forest Stewardship Council suppliers (which have been certified for sustainable practices), it would have a huge impact,” Gelinas said.

“Ninety-five percent of government effort is to keep everything going as usual,” said Tim Sale, former health minister in the central province of Manitoba.

“Governments only act when they perceive there is a serious emergency. Climate change is not seen as an emergency,” Sale said. Nor does the public really understand issues like climate change, he added.

“Before the Kyoto Protocol went into force (in 2005), we knew we weren't going to try to meet our international obligations” to curb greenhouse gas emissions, confessed David Anderson, Canada's minister of the environment from 1999 to 2005.

Under that international agreement, Canada had promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by six percent from its 1990 levels by the 2008-2012 period. Its emissions are now 34.5 percent above 1990 levels.

There was simply too much pressure from the oil sector, heavy industry, the oil-rich province of Alberta and the U.S. government, Anderson said.

“The media didn't support us and the U.S. wanted us to fail,” Anderson said.

Given the absence of any real leadership, civil society has been the driver when it comes to putting sustainable solutions in place, says Robert Gibson, an environment and resources expert from the University of Waterloo.

The environmental NGO Équiterre in Montreal not only conducts energy audits of households, it will retrofit homes and apartments of low-income people for free because it convinced landlords, energy companies and governments that they would save more money by paying for the retrofits, Gibson said.

NGOs are generating the ideas and action plans that are of big benefit to society, and governments should support their efforts, he said.

But the opposite is happening. When civil society and the mining and gas industry recently agreed on new environmental and social justice policies, the federal government refused to adopt them, said Steward Elgie, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and director of the Institute of the Environment.

The Stephen Harper government is ideologically opposed to regulations, said Elgie.

“If I read my cards right, they're even considering withdrawing Canada's financial support for the chronically cash-strapped UNEP,” he said in an interview for this report.

NGOs need to push for structural changes in government and in society but are incapable of driving this because they lack the resources. Canadians are far from generous when it comes to making donations to NGOs, believing that their taxes — which have declined in the past decade — fund needed social and environmental programs.

The public, professional and non-professional associations and NGOs have to pressure governments to act and restructure our society so that it can be sustainable, said James Meadowcroft, a political scientist at Carleton University.

In Britain, elites at all levels — pop stars, TV personalities, sports heroes, entrepreneurs, scientists, etc — are all championing action on climate change, he said.

“In Canada, we just need to get started. To do one thing well that shows we're on the right path and get some positive feedback and generate some momentum to tackle this big, complex problem of sustainability,” Meadowcroft said.