Canada received Tuesday’s Fossil of the Day award at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The award, bestowed by Climate Action Network International, recognizes the country deemed to have done the most each day to slow down global progress in response to climate change.

Adam Scott, executive director of Toronto-based Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health, accepted the award on Canada’s behalf. Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac) confirmed in an email Tuesday evening that the Canadian negotiation team had no advance notice that the country was under consideration for a fossil award.

CAN International chose Canada “with a heavy heart,” the network said in a release, “because the new government of Prime Minister Mark Carney has flushed years of climate policies down the drain, and is completely ‘Missing In Action’ at a COP where multilateralism needs to be saved. In addition to the backsliding on policies tackling Canada’s climate-destroying pollution, his Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin has chosen inaction and silence where leadership was urgently needed.”

With this year’s COP heading into its final days, Canada “remains silent in the conversation” while other countries work actively to establish the Belém Action Mechanism, aimed at ensuring a just transition towards a low-carbon economy for workers, communities, and Indigenous peoples, CAN International states. “We see the G77+China, the European Union, and others propose ways forward for the Just Transition Work Programme, yet Canada remains vague. The country offers only sympathetic nods to domestic ‘sustainable jobs’, but no substantive commitment to the mechanism that could link global cooperation, justice, and climate ambition.”

On the domestic front, the release adds, the Carney government has “systematically dismantled a decade of progress” in climate policy, announcing new fossil fuel infrastructure in the last week as part of a major projects agenda that disrespects Indigenous rights, democratic process, and environmental assessment rules. “Meanwhile, as climate impacts intensify across Canada, the National Adaptation Strategy sits untouched, gathering dust—a stagnation mirrored here in Belém, where Canada has brought no ambition to the Global Goal on Adaptation negotiations.”

The award citation concludes: “Canada: we expected better. Your people deserve better. And the world cannot afford your retreat.”