For as long as I can remember, being Canadian has always been an immense source of personal pride. We live in one of the greatest countries in the world - which is all the more reason why I'm so disturbed at where we are heading.
This week, my foundation released a comprehensive report on Canada's environmental performance compared to other industrialized countries. It shocked me, although I suppose the writing has been on the wall for some time. Still, it was disturbing to see just how poorly Canada's environmental record stacks up to other wealthy countries.
We rank 28th out of the 30 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) based on 29 key environmental indicators - things like air and water pollution, heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, pesticide use and more. Our performance is only marginally better than the two countries at the very bottom, the United States and Belgium.
It's not as though we're just bad in one area. We're consistently awful: energy consumption - 28th, greenhouse gas emissions - 26th, water consumption - 29th, sulfur oxides pollution - 27th, number of species at risk - 26th, nuclear waste - 30th, and the list goes on. In fact, Canada did not place first in any of the 29 indicators. We are decent at a few things, like recycling, but our list of failures is long and depressing. What's more, our performance has not improved over the past decade.
This not the Canada that I know and love. Polls tell us over and over that Canadians value our natural heritage and want to protect it for our future. Yet here we are, one of the worst environmental offenders in the world, chipping away at that heritage and threatening the health and well-being of future generations. So how can we fix this mess?
Well, we can't really compare ourselves to all the countries in the OECD. Some, like Turkey, rank high on the environmental scale, but only because they are still developing and don't have a large industrial base. A more fitting comparison is to look at countries that manage to protect their environment and still have a strong economy. These countries, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Austria and Sweden are clearly doing something right. And they show that protecting the environment and thriving economically can go hand in hand.
Canada's governments, at many levels, have failed us. Not because there aren't well-meaning, passionate individuals working within them to protect the environment. There certainly are such individuals, from city councilors all the way to Environment Minister Stéphane Dion. No, our governments are failing us because there are no overarching common targets and timelines to achieve our goals. And without a road map, how will we ever know where we're going?
It has become clear to me that Canada will continue to spin its wheels and we will fall further and further behind other countries until we pass a National Sustainability Act, one that sets out the targets and timelines for our country to achieve sustainability. It isn't good enough to just talk platitudes about protecting the environment. And it isn't good enough to lay responsibility in the hands of the Environment Ministry when so many of the important decisions that affect nature and our health are outside its jurisdiction.
I'm still proud of our big, beautiful country. But we are using her resources at an unsustainable rate. It's already affecting our quality of life and things will only get worse until we take decisive action, as other countries are already doing quite successfully. If we want our country to continue to be one of the greatest in the world, we must change. We need a National Sustainability Act and we need it now.
