Thirty Years of Failure: Understanding Canadian Climate Policy

"This is a book about Canadian climate policy. It is the first book-length study of the topic that aims to provide readers with a broad understanding of the tattered history of Canadian climate policy, as well as the precise reasons why Canada has emerged as one of the world's preeminent climate villains over the past few decades. The books main underpinning argument is that Canadian climate policy is beset by a perfect storm of interrelated (and mutually reinforcing) cultural, institutional, and economic factors - the aggregate of which has made a functional and effective national climate strategy all but impossible over the past 30 years. Yet, while these factors have made climate action quite difficult to date, they nevertheless have much to tell us about what reforms would need to occur in order to resolve the situation. With individual chapters focusing on institutional, economic, and cultural factors in turn, the book aims to provide readers with an understanding of the types of strategies and policies required to decarbonize the Canadian economy, and make Canada a global leader on climate change. This book is extremely timely. At the moment, the greatest single effort to achieve a comprehensive national climate policy (one that was supposed to correct all the failures of the past quarter-century) appears, yet again, to be collapsing. This incessant failure has left activists and concerned citizens enormously frustrated, and has, yet again, confused and dismayed the international community. This book was written in an effort to explain precisely why this keeps occurring. One of its central premises is that these failures have all been predictable and avoidable, and that, with an informed and holistic understanding of the situation, activists, policymakers, and ordinary citizens can advocate for policies that are both technically effective and politically plausible."--