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Sustainable finance is a key weapon in the supposedly inevitable “transition to a low-carbon economy.” As such it represents a particular threat to Canada, where demonization of “dirty” oil has already resulted in pipeline delays and capital flight. Its suite of tactics include “voluntary” corporate disclosure to ENGO overseers of greenhouse gas emissions, along with show-trial-like confessions of what worst-case weather scenarios might look like. This is linked to ENGO-masterminded campaigns of pressure on investors to divest fossil fuel assets. Then come ENGO-initiated climate lawsuits, along with co-opting of regulators.

However, the inconvenient truth for the shock troops of climate finance is that if climate risks were quantifiable, and likely to have a material impact any time in the foreseeable future, they would already be incorporated into financial reporting. Also, if there were profits to be made in renewable energy and climate resilient infrastructure, investors would not need to be “crowded in” by scare tactics.

Sustainable finance, like all parts of the UN global governance agenda, has spawned a plethora of institutions, processes, studies, initiatives and funding mechanisms, all of which tend to operate well out of the public view.

In the next month or so, a federally-appointed “Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance” is due to deliver a final report. Set up by Ottawa early in 2018, the panel delivered an interim report last fall which received virtually zero media coverage. The chairman of the panel is Tiff Macklem, Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and former number two to Mark Carney at the Bank of Canada. Its other members are Andy Chisholm, a board member of the Royal Bank of Canada; Kim Thomassin of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec; and Barbara Zvan, from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.