ABSTRACT
Climate leadership in Canada is highly politicised due to the significant role that fossil-fuel dominated energy industries play in the federation’s regional political economies – totalling nearly 12% of GDP at CAD309 billion in 2022 (Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), 2024, p. 7; Carter, 2020). Canada is the second largest country, by area, in the world with the third highest GHG intensity per capita in the OECD (after Australia and the United States), and fifth highest total emissions in the OECD (OECD, 2023). The country’s geography, climate and culture of high energy use have led to significant challenges related to decarbonising transport, buildings and the energy sector, and this is without even scratching the surface of addressing the history and practice of colonisation and its effects on Indigenous (First Nations, Metis and Inuit) peoples. Canada’s rapidly expanding population consists of an ethnically diverse 40 million people in 2023, of whom the fastest growing and youngest segment is Indigenous peoples.
