Beyond Crisis Narratives: Tracking Climate Backtracking in Canada

The past decade has been marked by a wave of ups and downs for climate politics. The mass climate movement of 2018/2019 – which was predominantly led by young women such as Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – prompted an unprecedented commitment to develop and implement comprehensive climate policies in numerous countries. Yet just a few years later in the mid-2020s, many of these very same nations – including Canada – are rolling back these commitments. How and why are these rollbacks happening?

For starters, political elites across borders are asserting that the climate “moment” is “over.” According to national leaders such as Prime Minister Mark Carney here in Canada and Keir Starmer in the U.K., “the people” cannot possibly still care about climate change amid the full-throated attacks on Canadian national sovereignty and global trade agreements by the U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

In actuality, however, “the people” are not only still concerned about climate change but also want their governments to do even more about it – contrary to claims and decisions made by Carney, Starmer, and other leaders, to backtrack on existing climate commitments. Evidently, “the people” can and do care about climate change, democracy, and affordability all at once – despite the very low opinions of us held by some of our nations’ leaders.

Beyond the dismissive view of the public shared by some of our leaders, national news media are adding to a palpable feeling of pessimism. Sensational and doomsday images of the present dominate the screens and covers of prominent news outlets. Concerningly, an apocalyptic “total crisis” framing does very little to clarify or contextualize current events, as it also obscures our collective desire for more robust climate policies.

A “total crisis” rendering of the present fuels “apocalyptic authoritarianism” – a reactionary mode of discourse and politics that legitimizes historically privileged figures’ claims to power. At the same time as political elites are being valorized by news media, egalitarian political visions and robustly democratic decision-making processes – such as those espoused by the young women at the helm of the popular mass climate movement during Donald Trump’s first presidency in the latter-half of the 2010s – are denigrated as “too extreme” and potentially threatening to a world already marked by profound political uncertainty. If apocalyptic authoritarianism thrives on fear, urgency, and the centralization of power among political and media elites, then meaningful climate action requires tools that do the opposite. In Canada’s current political landscape of contested climate narratives, the challenge is not only program and policy regression itself, but how that regression is framed, obscured, or justified. These rollbacks are not neutral responses to crisis, but political choices with an expectation that Canadians will accept trade-offs as inevitable. In today’s Canadian context where climate commitments are increasingly contested, it is more important than ever to make these decisions visible.

The Climate Backtracker does exactly this. Rather than amplifying fear or relying on abstract apocalyptic claims, the Climate Backtracker grounds public understanding in concrete actions. By documenting the weakening, delay, or reverse climate commitments expressed through programs and policies, the Backtracker helps see past vague rhetoric and sheds light on the concrete decisions shaping Canada’s climate future. Instead of relying on fear-based or apocalyptic messaging, the Backtracker grounds public understanding in clear, accessible evidence.

As a knowledge mobilization tool, the Climate Backtracker supports democratic engagement with Canada’s environmental commitments. It equips students, journalists, researchers, community organizers, and concerned members of the public with the transparency needed to form their own perspectives on Canadian climate policy. At a time when climate politics can feel overwhelming or inaccessible, the Climate Backtracker is designed to help the public clearly understand when and how climate backtracking occurs. It emphasizes that assessing the state of climate backtracking in Canada is not a task reserved solely for experts or political figures, but knowledge that should be transparent, accessible, and understandable to everyone. By making climate backtracking visible and understandable, it helps expand the space for public understanding and reminds us that climate outcomes are shaped not only by crises, but by collective choices. In illuminating the quiet reversals behind the rhetoric of crisis, the Climate Backtracker makes one thing undeniable: what happens next is not fate, but a political choice, and one the public deserves to see.

By Celeste Gutierrez^1^ and Hanna E. Morris^2^

^1^Research Assistant at the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability (IECS)

^2^Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with expertise in climate change media and critical methods of cultural analysis