Canada is jeopardizing its competitive position by dragging its feet on major climate-related financial policies as allies quickly adopt global standards and green investing rulebooks, Mark Carney said on Wednesday.
Canada’s slow progress in building a sustainable financial system puts it at risk of losing investment and the job creation it fuels, he said. Now, the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board is in consultations about how to adapt the ISSB standards to the Canadian economy. Mr. Carney said the CSSB is discussing extending an ISSB-recommended relief period for reporting Scope 3 emissions, the most difficult to tabulate, from one to two years. “Such that Canada would lag the EU by two years for no apparent reason,” he said.
He lamented slow progress by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in putting a taxonomy into force. In 2022, the government-appointed Sustainable Finance Action Council delivered a framework for a catalogue of climate-focused investments, which would categorize them as either “green” or “transitionary” depending upon the greenhouse gas emissions they produce and whether they are likely to continue to be used well into the future.