An old man at the back of the streetcar sitting in a pool of his own urine stares into middle space clearly unaware of where he is or what’s happening around him. He is lost. But for his silence, he himself is a cry for help. Yet those around him are more focused on ignoring him than helping. It might be easy to blame them but it’s a weekday morning in Toronto and people are in a rush to get where they’re going. Besides, what can they do? This is a situation for professionals, who, needless to say, are nowhere to be found.

Similar scenarios are also playing out in public libraries across Canada. Our “cities’ living rooms” now find themselves overwhelmed by our struggle to cope with the addicted, the mentally ill, and the plain down-and-out looking for a place to get out of the cold or the heat. This was never the intended purpose of libraries, but it’s one they now must serve.

And it’s not an easy task. Librarians report being punched and spat on. Between 2022 and 2023, security and safety incidents at the Winnipeg Public Library increased by 21 percent. Suspected overdoses in Toronto public libraries increased 529 percent. In Edmonton, staff say that no fewer than 99 opioid overdoses occurred in 2022. Little wonder librarians are learning how to administer naloxone as their jobs more and more resemble those of social workers.

Meanwhile, public parks in Canadian communities large and small have been taken over by makeshift tent cities that leave locals feeling like intruders. In Toronto alone, there were at least 202 tents this spring, up from 82 at the same time last year. It is a situation that has led to severely strained relations, even violence, between regular park users and these unwanted occupiers, not to mention brutal confrontations with police. Given the critical need for green space in a country urbanizing faster than ever, the loss of parks impacts literally millions of Canadians.

As sympathetic as we might be—or want to be—these incursions into the public realm and shared urban, suburban, and rural spaces are changing our relationship to the places we call home. Once safe arenas where our communal lives play out are now contested real estate, a no-man’s land, ground zero in the struggle between the haves and the have-nots, healthy and diseased, the secure and the desperate. All claim the space as their own as the civic sense of cooperation, order, and safety breaks down.

Even our sidewalks are becoming a locus of this random violence. In Vancouver, one victim was recently left dead and another with a severed hand. Early reports of the incident paint a picture of a deeply disturbed man attacking complete strangers with a knife. It doesn’t help that the accused, who has more than 60 “interactions” with police, was out on parole. Similar indiscriminate encounters on the Toronto transit system have left passengers shaken and leery about riding the “Red Rocket.”

As Canada’s much-celebrated social safety net erodes, the public realm is pressed into service to fill in the gaps and provide makeshift shelter for those who have nowhere else to go. The institutions created to help the needy have been closed or rendered impotent by decades of austerity budgets. Ontario Premier Doug Ford likes to boast that his is the only provincial regime that has never raised taxes. Ontarians pay, instead, through badly compromised living conditions and ballooning deficits.

The result is a worsening quality of life for all Canadians. This encompasses everything from increased congestion as commuters avoid increasingly dangerous public transit, to fewer opportunities for kids (and adults) to get out into the natural world to play, exercise, or walk the dog.

Some argue these developments are merely inconvenient, occasionally irritating, but not significant. Not so. The cumulative impact of the continued erosion of public spaces leads to an increased sense of disconnection between people and the places they live and work. Without access to safe transport, libraries that offer opportunities for study and contemplation, and the open spaces of our parks and the like, life is diminished for all.

Despite what they like to believe, not even the richest can escape the corrosive consequences of a culture that grows ever more stressful. Not even the most closely gated community can avoid an ever more dysfunctional environment. As the poet reminded us, “No man is an island.” Indeed, the global village is a reality. Everything (and everyone) is linked to everything (and everyone). No one is immune to the precarity and the siege mentality that are both causes and consequences of the collapse of the safety net that long helped underpin confidence in the country’s future. We used to believe the 20th century belonged to Canada; no one’s saying that about the 21st.

Though our prime minister-in-waiting, Pierre Poilievre, has yet to commit to supporting social programs such as child care and dental care, he is adamant he will “fix the budget.” Whatever that means. As things stand, Canada needs cutbacks like a hole in the head. That’s one of the main reasons we got into this mess in the first place.

After the Second World War, social housing was one of the federal government’s more successful programs. But in the early 1990s, the governments of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien downloaded the file to the provinces, which downloaded it to the municipalities, minus the required funding, of course. Today, Finland is the only country that has successfully managed the problem of homelessness. The Finns don’t see housing as a reward for good behaviour, but rather a crucial first step to getting lives back on track and treating the usual causes of homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and poverty. The virtual elimination of homelessness in that country confirms the soundness of that approach.

Canada is nowhere near solving the problem here. As the wider housing crisis reminds us, you don’t have to be homeless here to be in need of a place to live.

Canada and the world are at a decisive point in the climate emergency. Scientists agree that if we want to have any chance of limiting warming to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree Celsius target, we need to rapidly decarbonize the world economy and remove billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere globally.

Tangible progress is being made on decarbonization and carbon capture and storage, but it won’t be enough to meet Canada’s net zero target. We’ll also need to remove billions of tonnes of historical emissions from the air every year. This means scaling a nascent industry known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

CDR is a set of technologies that accelerates natural systems and creates engineering processes to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away durably, for hundreds to thousands of years.

Today, the world only removes and durably stores a few kilotonnes of carbon annually. CDR needs to grow exponentially—to at least 3.8 GT by 2050—and potentially up to 10 GT (especially if we continue to miss our emission reduction targets). The scale of this challenge is immense.

Companies, as well as countries, have a responsibility to help scale CDR to meet their climate commitments. For over four years, I was the Head of Sustainability at Shopify as the company kickstarted the carbon removal industry. I led the creation and management of Shopify’s Sustainability Fund, which deployed over $50 million into 40 CDR companies.

That experience crystallized that one company making investments—however large—was not enough. That was why Shopify chose to be a founding member of Frontier. Frontier is an advance market commitment where a number of companies have committed to buying more than $1 billion of CDR by 2030.

To date, these corporate efforts were catalytic and intended to bring more CDR supply online. But this approach won’t scale. Not every company can do extensive research and scientific due diligence themselves.

Scaling CDR requires a functioning market, where any company or country can purchase carbon credits and be sure their purchases had measurable climate impact. Earlier iterations of carbon markets couldn’t do this. Millions of carbon credits of varying quality have been issued with significant fraud.

Carbon removal credits are different from earlier “offset” credits (which were issued for “avoided” emissions). The traditional offset industry relies on “avoiding” emissions that would take place if business continued as usual. CDR technologies are inherently different as they pull carbon dioxide out of the air and are clearly additional. Most, if not all, CDR projects would not have taken place without funding through carbon credit sales, which means a direct line between credit purchases and climate benefits that can be measured. These technologies ensure that carbon dioxide stays locked away for thousands of years—far longer than the lifetime of a company, a human, or a tree.

As these technologies graduate from the lab to the real world, it is crucial to create and enforce scientifically rigorous standards that can transparently measure and prove that the project captured and stored more carbon dioxide than was emitted to operate the process.

For a CDR buyer to trust that the climate benefit was realised from the project, the carbon credits generated from a CDR activity must be independently measured and verified by independent third parties against the most rigorous standards available.

If we can scale carbon removal by setting scientific standards, building trust in a functioning market, and delivering credits that have a real climate impact, the upsides are almost limitless. But this effort is too important to leave up to just the private sector—it is after all a historical cleanup effort. To prevent the mistakes of the past that led to systemic overcrediting and limited climate impact, governments have a clear role to play.

According to a recent gathering of CDR leaders, the most important role for governments is in defining minimum quality standards for CDR and creating guidelines for use cases for corporations. Other countries are already doing this in their own ways.

The European Union has passed legislation that defines quality in carbon removal, including a minimum 200-year durability threshold (the length of time carbon dioxide must be locked away). The United States is running a Procurement prize for CDR that will set implicit standards and send the market a strong signal on the US Government’s expectations for CDR monitoring, reporting, and verification. The United Kingdom has consulted experts on how to integrate CDR credits into its Emissions Trading Scheme.

Canada has already made significant progress in combating climate change and scaling CDR. However, it is quite fragmented so far. Federal efforts such as a legislated net zero target, a national carbon price, and programs like the $135 million Low Carbon Fuel Procurement Program are critical to building demand for CDR. There are also various provincial-level programs that involve CDR. But more can be done to harmonize these efforts.

Ideal policy interventions in CDR regulate quality (setting a minimum bar for durability, or the length of time carbon is sequestered), mandate demand from the private sector, and provide direct funding for scaling the industry. Like all G20 countries, Canada should continue its progress in implementing such comprehensive CDR policies before 2030.

Canada has the conditions to become a clear leader in CDR—abundant renewable energy, incredible talent in engineering, science, and technology, and existing industries that offer complementary infrastructure (such as logistics, extractive industries, and more). The government has a once-in-a-generation chance to shepherd what will be a multi-billion dollar industry while creating new jobs, increasing productivity, and reaching its net zero target. I encourage our leaders to seize the opportunity.

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