Investment industry veteran Andy Chisholm, a leading voice in the effort to mobilize finance for Canada’s net-zero transformation, has a strong message for policy-makers: stop studying the problem and just get on with it.

“For goodness sake, the stuff that’s lying on our desks, get it done,” Chisholm said in Ottawa last month, in a passionate call to action at the Sustainable Finance Forum November 28-29. “We don’t need new reports. We have libraries full of fabulous reports. Let’s just act on the ones that we’ve got.”

In 2018, Corporate Knights recalls, Chisholm was appointed to the federal government’s Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance to make recommendations on how Canada could meet the enormous challenge of raising capital to fight climate change and build a low-carbon economy. The panel called for sector-by-sector decarbonization plans, corporate climate disclosure rules, and investment incentives for clean energy and reductions in fossil fuel emissions, among other recommendations.

Time is running short to create needed investment flows, said Chisholm, a Royal Bank of Canada board member who served 30 years in New York and London as a senior executive with global banking powerhouse Goldman Sachs. The Finance Department estimates that Canada will need between C$125 billion and $140 billion a year of investment to meet its net-zero targets, far more than the $15 billion to $25 billion invested now.

“Emissions are nowhere near what we want them to be,” Chisholm said. “They’re nowhere near what we hope they would be, and they’re nowhere near what we need them to be. Conditions are probably, in some ways, getting worse rather than better.”

Losing Race for Sustainable Economy

Canada’s greenhouse gas emission targets aren’t the only thing at stake, Chisholm said. Much bigger investments are needed to keep up in the global sprint to decarbonize the economy. Canada desperately needs to raise its ambition to play in the “game” of the global sustainable economy of electric vehicles and clean energy, sectors dominated by China and the United States. “We’re not winning this game, and we need to be a lot more aggressive.”

The government has failed to act on a key recommendation in the Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance’s 2019 report to work “deeply hand-in-hand” with Canada’s largest companies on decarbonization plans for their sectors, Chisholm told participants.

“We’re not very far along that path,” he said, adding that government-to-business, government-to-government, and business-to-business relationships need to be intensified.

Canada is also lagging behind in planning for the increased electrification of its economy, a key recommendation in the report, which has become more urgent with rising power demand from data centres. “We’re nowhere near the intensification and clarity we need.”

Chisholm was appointed to the expert panel along with three other financial industry heavyweights: Tiff Macklem, now governor of the Bank of Canada; Kim Thomassin, senior executive of the $400-billion Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec; and Barbara Zvan, now CEO and president of Ontario’s $12-billion University Pension Plan.

After two years of inaction, partly due to the COVID pandemic, the government appointed the Sustainable Finance Action Council (SFAC) in 2021 to implement the expert panel’s recommendations. But the range of activity narrowed over the years. Work on a taxonomy that would provide an official green and transition investment standard for banks, funds, and asset managers progressed slowly, bogged down by disagreement over whether to include oil and gas decarbonization projects.

A working group was able to forge a consensus on the taxonomy recommendations in March 2023, and the SFAC wrapped up its work in March 2024. But it wasn’t until this past October that now-former finance minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the taxonomy would go ahead. Even now it is not expected to be fully operational for another year.

Political Realities Loom

The two-day Sustainable Finance Forum, the third in an annual gathering pulled together by social innovation consultant turned Liberal MP Ryan Turnbull, attracted about 700 consultants, community economic development organizers, policy-makers, climate campaigners, think tank staffers, and financiers.

Despite the bleak picture he painted, Chisholm’s remarks were well received by participants in the conference, where Donald Trump’s re-election and the prospect of a Pierre Poilievre government in Canada cast a shadow over the country’s prospects for sustainable finance.

Sustainable investment incentive programs could be on the chopping block under a Poilievre government, including the $15-billion Canada Growth Fund, carbon pricing policies, and a cap on oil and gas emissions.

In an armchair discussion with Turnbull at the opening of the conference, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seemed to recognize the frustrations of Canadians who do not support these policies. “It’s understandable,” he said. “Right now, when people are squeezed every single day at the grocery store, in paying the rent, in thinking about whether their job is going to hold them to retirement, what their kids are going to do, it’s really easy to scare people into being even more anxious.”

This post first appeared on Corporate Knights. Republished with permission.