Canadian Climate Values
We face a tragedy of the horizon.
For a decade, Mark Carney has warned of a “tragedy of the horizon”: the costs of climate change land beyond the horizon of the people making today’s decisions. Now he’s Prime Minister, and he holds the pen on the federal budget.
We’re asking him to put his values in it.
The price of everything has become the value of everything.
In Value(s), Carney argues we’ve gone from market economies to market societies. When the price of everything becomes the value of everything, anything without a price counts for nothing. Our forests, our coastlines, a stable climate: none of them carry a price tag. So in a budget, they’re too easily treated as worthless.
That’s the tragedy of the horizon. The worst impacts of climate change arrive beyond the business cycle and the political cycle. By the time they’re impossible to ignore, it may already be too late to prevent them.
2×
Canada is warming about twice as fast as the world, and the North even faster. Average land temperatures here rose about 1.7°C between 1948 and 2016.
$8.5 billion
Severe weather caused a record $8.5 billion in insured damage in Canada in 2024. That is nearly triple 2023, and 12 times the yearly average of the 2000s.
Seven values. One budget.
Carney names seven values that a good economy and a good society rest on. A budget is where values stop being words and become choices. Here’s what they ask of this one:
- Solidarity We’re in this together. Climate costs land on all of us.
- Fairness The transition can’t leave workers or communities behind.
- Responsibility We owe a liveable future to the people who come after us.
- Resilience Homes, farms and infrastructure built for what’s coming.
- Sustainability We can’t spend the future to pay for the present.
- Dynamism Clean energy is where the jobs and investment are going.
- Humility Listen to the science, and to the communities living the impacts.
We refuse the false choice.
We’re told to pick: the economy or the climate. Affordability or action. Jobs or a liveable planet.
Carney rejects that framing. He’s called the shift to net zero the greatest commercial opportunity of our time
. The real expense is inaction, and it’s billed to our kids.
This could turn an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time.
1.81%
In 2022, Canada spent 1.81% of its economy on research and development. That was below the G7 average and well below the OECD average of 2.73%.
$15.6 billion
In 2024, Canada’s environmental and clean technology exports fell 8.2%, and the sector’s trade deficit grew to $15.6 billion. A dry year for hydro power, which pushed up electricity imports, was part of the swing.
21% vs 40–45%
Canada’s target is to cut emissions 40 to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030. On current measures, the government’s own projections get us to about 21%.
Values without a budget are just words.
The people who’ll pay for inaction have no seat at the table: our children, and theirs. You do. Tell the Prime Minister to put Canadian climate values in the budget.