This thoughtful collection exposes the gap between rhetoric and performance in Canada’s response to environmental challenges. Canadians, despite their national penchant for environmental discussion, have fallen behind their G-8 peers in both domestic commitments and international actions. In a cogent examination of the issue, eight authors demonstrate how Canada’s configuration of political and economic institutions has limited effective environmental policy. Canadian environmental institutions, the authors argue, have produced an integrity gap: the sustainability rhetoric adopted by policymakers fails to achieve concrete results. In an analysis that penetrates several policy domains and combines various disciplinary, sectoral, and geographic perspectives, the authors demonstrate how Canada fell from leader to laggard within the international environmental community.
Eugene Lee is a member of the Department of Political Science, Sookmyung Women's University, Korea. Anthony Perl is in the Department of Political Science, University of Calgary.
A useful matrix in the introductory chapter identifies the institutional constraints that prevent Canadian governments delivering stated environmental goals ... The case studies offer useful support for this hypothesis.