"Science indicates that we are not on an environmentally sustainable path."  This recent announcement comes from the fiscally sober accountants at the Office of the Auditor General. This is the body that monitors federal government spending and raises the flag when the books don't add up.  According to the latest report from the OAG's Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Canada's environmental sums are off -by more than a few decimals. Pretty soon, we will all have to pay, and some of us sooner than others.

The report finds serious flaws in how government implements programs to reduce harmful emmissions including cancer causing substances found in gasoline, rubber and foam.  Programs intended to reduce greenhouse gases have done little to achieve their desired effect, despite their enormous costs.  In many cases, it seems that government is shooting in the dark at its targetted reductions.  In the case of Agriculture and Agrifood Canada, the report finds that the department "lacks sufficient data to determine the extent to which action at the farm level has resulted in positive environmental change."  Together these holes in Canada's environmental policy paint a disturbing picture: four decades after environmental concerns first burst onto the political agenda in Canada: "Few if any of the problems that led to the advent of the environmental protection agenda have been fully resolved."

The challenge of sustainable development is to find ways of meeting the economic, social and cultural needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of our descendents to fulfill their own needs.  As the the Arctic thaws, many Aboriginal and Inuit communities  are unable to continue their traditional ways of life.  Low income neighbourhoods in Canadian cities suffer higher rates of environmental illnesses, including cancer, and farming families are pinned between agrochemical monopolies that poison their land and the lending banks at their door. In Canada, we face a deficit in environmental policy and action that threatens not only the future, but is increasingly reducing the options available to the more socially and economically marginalized segments of our own society.   

Our governments may find ways to to sidestep the criticisms of an ecoblogger, but if as Pythogoras said, "Numbers rule the Universe," they'll have a harder time getting around the OAG.