Federal environment minister Julie Dabrusin has doubled down on her government’s quiet release of its latest climate report.
The report was posted to a government website with no fanfare on Thursday evening ahead of the Labour Day long weekend, without ministerial availability to the media, a press conference or a briefing — a protocol that was in place when the government released its first report in 2019.
At an unrelated press conference on Wednesday, Dabrusin called the report “really important,” while defending the way it was released. The report analyzes the impacts of climate change in Canada and paints a dire picture of how Canada will fare under a warmer world: more floods, fires, melting glaciers and accompanying dwindling water supplies, among other impacts.
“It was released with a news release; any experts who produced the report were made available to answer questions,” she said.
“But this was not a political exercise, and I want to really be clear about that, because the science of climate change is real. This is the work that shows that we take the work of scientists and experts seriously in how we address it and in recognizing what the problems are, and like I said, they were made available to answer questions from the media.”
However, Julia Levin, associate director of national climate at Environmental Defence, says the report is indeed political. Its authors “went to great lengths to make sure this was a focus: that policy decisions matter more than ever,” explained Levin. And while Levin agrees the experts who wrote the report would be best positioned to answer technical questions, “it’s not their job to answer questions about the policy decision-making,” said Levin.
“It is entirely her job — exclusively her job — to connect the science to government decision-making,” she said, referring to Dabrusin.
Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the federal government has cancelled the consumer carbon tax, scrapped the electric vehicle sales mandate and supported a new Alberta pipeline while exempting the province from clean electricity regulations.
The report was released following the United Nations’ most recent climate findings which show the world will cross 1.5 C of warming — a threshold the Paris Agreement was signed in order to avoid — “likely within the next few years.” It places the future of humanity in the hands of governments, whose policies will dictate how much the world warms and how much money is put towards adaptation to help protect people and communities.
The federal government also fell short in the way it communicated to the general public, said Levin. When the 2019 report dropped, Levin says there was “real effort” to get the findings out to the media and Indigenous stakeholders, as well as the public at large.
September 9th 2026
