Narrow Economic Lens Blocks Climate Gains, Social Progress
Thirty years after Canada helped shape global human rights and sustainability commitments at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, the country is still repeating the same policy mistakes—now under far more urgent climate and social pressures, say two longtime advocates.
For Sheila Regehr, chair of the Basic Income Canada Network and a former Canadian negotiator at the Summit, the problem is rooted in an economic model that has barely shifted since the 1990s.
“The GDP problem is that what we don’t count, we don’t protect,” Regehr told The Energy Mix. “Unpaid work wasn’t counted. Environmental degradation wasn’t counted. That foundation is why we’re here now—and the planet is in jeopardy.”
[Sheila Regehr is a member of the Energy Mix Productions Board of Directors, and the Basic Income Canada Network is a lead partner in Energy Mix’s Green Resilience Project (GRP).]
Canada once led international efforts to measure unpaid work, but policy-makers never translated those insights into action. Instead, Regehr said governments have doubled down on tunnel-vision economic thinking that prioritizes profit and growth while ignoring the care work, community bonds, and environmental stewardship essential to resilience.
This narrow lens has made it nearly impossible to integrate lessons from climate science, Indigenous worldviews of “enoughness”, or the strengthening of communities, she said. Initiatives like the GRP highlight these overlooked contributions, showing how social connection and care are core components of climate adaptation—but remain invisible under current economic frameworks.
Human rights advocate and St. James Town Community Co-op co-founder Josephine Grey traced today’s crises directly to a pivotal moment in 1995. She recalled travelling to Copenhagen with hundreds of civil society leaders to advance income security reforms—only to discover that the federal government had used their absence at a conference to push through a budget that slashed social programs, dismantling Canada’s social planning infrastructure.
“When we got back, the department we’d been working with was simply gone,” she told The Mix. Grey responded by submitting independent evidence to the UN documenting the real impacts: worsening housing insecurity, declining access to services, and rising poverty. The UN was “appalled,” she said, by the widening gap between Canada’s international commitments and the on-the-ground reality.
Decades later, that gap has only widened.
“We’ve spent 30 years letting go of standards and accountability,” Grey said. “And now we’re in a full-on emergency—food, housing, climate.”
Through the OASIS Food Hub at St. James Town, Grey said she sees how climate disruption translates into local insecurity: crop failures in import regions, extreme weather, rising vulnerability in urban communities.
“If we don’t build climate-controlled growing spaces in a winter country, we’re not going to eat,” she warned. Grey is now working to revive a national people’s report on Canada’s progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to help communities and policy-makers align their work around rights and resilience rather than political cycles.
But both she and Regehr argue that Canada needs a deeper cultural shift in governance.
“We can’t keep relying on politicians as the gatekeepers of dialogue,” Grey said. “Government is supposed to work with us—civil service and civil society together.” The path forward, she added, depends on shared vision.
“We have the solutions. We just have to stop circling the drain and start acting like a society again. Why not build the world we actually want and need?”
Giselle Hausman is Project Manager with the Green Resilience Project.
Cover photo: moerschy / Pixabay
