It’s a moment nature lovers have been waiting for. On June 13, 2024, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault released Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy: Halting and Reversing Biodiversity Loss in Canada. At the same time, Minister Guilbeault  announced the Nature Accountability Bill—the legal framework needed to support implementation of the Strategy.

“Minister Steven Guilbeault deserves credit for his courage, vision and leadership in defining a strategy that he knows will go under the microscope of every ENGO, every land steward, every fisherman, logger, and nature-lover in the country,” says Emily McMillan, Executive Director of Nature Canada. “And while the exact wording gives way too much wiggle room for this and future governments, we now have a path to nature restoration, and we can start walking that path today.”

The Strategy and Accountability Bill were several years in the making, and Nature Canada and its partners have been there for all the ups and downs of the process. In April 2022, we organized a conference on halting and reversing nature loss, and later that year we launched the NatureBus Tour, which collected messages of support for nature from all across Canada. The messages were delivered to Prime Minister Trudeau at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (“COP 15”), held in Montreal in December 2022.

At that conference, Canada signed the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework, which lays out a set of global goals and targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy provides a roadmap for implementing this framework domestically.

Although the Strategy and the Accountability Bill constitute a good start, more needs to be done to ensure that they live up to the vision of COP 15.

A breakdown of the Strategy and the Bill

Nature Canada and its partners are happy to see that Indigenous conservation plays a strong role in the Strategy (though programs like Indigenous Guardians need renewed funding). We’re also pleased that the Strategy addresses nature-harming subsidies for agriculture, fisheries and energy. Phasing out these subsidies by mid-2025, however, will be a challenge.

Apart from this, the Strategy falls short in several important areas. For one thing, it is lacking timelines and progress indicators — the very thing that would make it an effective action plan. Secondly, it follows NRCan’s State of the Forest report in representing industrial logging as benign and carbon-neutral. (For a different take, please see the “counter-report” The State of the Forest in Canada: Seeing Through the Spin, released by eight environmental organizations including Nature Canada.) Finally, current funding is insufficient to achieve the targets outlined in the Strategy, especially those described as “additional opportunities.”

The idea of the Nature Accountability Bill is to give the Strategy teeth. With a strong bill, Canada can hopefully avoid the mistakes associated with its efforts to meet the previous global biodiversity commitments, the Aichi Targets. These went largely unfulfilled because there was no corresponding law to make the government accountable for lack of progress. The Nature Accountability Bill, in its current form, is not robust enough to prevent a recurrence of this fate. It does not outline clear consequences for governments failing to properly execute the Strategy, only “course corrections” (nudging departments in the right direction). Nor does the Bill actually enshrine the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in the legislation.

But the good news is that, over the next few months, parliamentarians will have a chance to improve both the Bill and Strategy. Nature Canada and its partners will be working with all political parties to make the legislation stronger and more precise. We also want to ensure that the provinces are active participants in the process. And finally, we will be urging the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance to announce funding for all identified actions at (or before) COP 16, to be held in Colombia in October 2024.

But for now, we’re celebrating. Kudos to decision-makers for making the Strategy and Bill a reality, and heartfelt thanks to our supporters for being there every step of the way!