Carbon Federalism

Carbon Federalism: Canadian Climate Governance in a Disrupted World

Volume written by: Mark Winfield (York University), Mark Purdon (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Keith Brownsey (Mount Royal University).

ABSTRACT:

This volume seeks to understand pan-Canadian climate policy focused on the post-2015 period, drawing on expertise from across Canada and internationally. The most recent data, from 2024, indicates Canadian emissions are only 10% below 2005 levels, whereas Canada has committed to a 40-45% reduction by 2030 under the Paris Agreement.

The volume also highlights how Canada’s international political economy—including an economic dependency on the US trade as well as relatively high costs of decarbonization—complicates domestic climate mitigation efforts. At least in the near-to-medium term, Canada’s climate commitments under the Paris Agreement appear increasingly out of reach, at least domestically and would even pose challenges if Canada were to resort to international carbon markets under the Paris Agreement.

In this context, three major themes emerge from the volume.

The first relates to the intergovernmental dynamics around climate and energy policy seen across Canada and in the comparative cases of the United States, European Union and Australia. The volume assesses the perceived performance, legitimacy and effectiveness of the Canadian federal system and other comparable federal and quasi-federal jurisdictions in advancing climate policies. It also sought to assess the functionality of intergovernmental dynamics in the construction of governance frameworks that provide adaptive capacity and policy resilience in the face of profoundly
shifting geopolitical, economic and environmental circumstances.

A second theme relates to the range of policy tools used by governments in response to the climate crisis and the sequencing of their deployment. Here, there has been a shift from relatively integrated strategies at the federal and subnational levels incorporating comprehensive arranges of instruments, to emergent industrial policy approaches. These shifts have raised questions in terms of the likely effectiveness of the resulting strategies in meaningfully advancing decarbonization, which is related to, but not synonymous with, industrialntransformation or energy transitions. Wider concerns are being raised around their impacts on energy sustainability and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and on basic legal and democratic norms as well.

Third, the narratives within the volume reflect the impacts of an extraordinary series of ‘ruptures’ in the underlying geopolitical context within which governments are formulating and implementing climate policies. The past two decades, beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, and especially the post-2020 period, have been defined by a succession of global events beyond the impact of a changing climate itself. Global upheavals have intensified, with the COVID-19 Pandemic, and major wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran and the wider Middle East, in the context of what is seen by some as an unravelling of the neoliberal international order. These events have been seen, as highlighted by Canada’s own Prime Minister in his January 2026
speech to the World Economic Forum, as marking the end of the post-Second World War rules-based order around peace and security, trade and, it seems likely, the environment. They have also been seen to strengthen the rise of right-wing populist political movements in the Global North.

Finally, there are elements that cut across all three of these themes within the volume. Indigenous Peoples and communities find themselves in the forefront of the impacts of a changing climate, and in a complex and changing legal and constitutional landscape of relationships with settler-colonial governments around climate change mitigation and adaptation, energy transitions and natural resource development, extraction and export. There have also been failures to achieve just outcomes in the distribution of costs and benefits related to energy transitions and resource development.

Table of Contents

To access the introductory chapter of this book, click here.

Manuscript submitted to University of Toronto Press. September 2026