This thoughtful collection exposes the gap between rhetoric and performance in Canada’s response to environmental challenges. Canadians, despite their national penchant for environmental discussion, have fallen behind their G-8 peers in both domestic commitments and international actions. In a cogent examination of the issue, eight authors demonstrate how Canada’s configuration of political and economic institutions has limited effective environmental policy. Canadian environmental institutions, the authors argue, have produced an integrity gap: the sustainability rhetoric adopted by policymakers fails to achieve concrete results. In an analysis that penetrates several policy domains and combines various disciplinary, sectoral, and geographic perspectives, the authors demonstrate how Canada fell from leader to laggard within the international environmental community.

Placing the study of Canadian environmental policy within a sound theoretical framework for the first time, this book makes a significant contribution to existing policy scholarship. It will find an enthusiastic audience among political scientists, neo-institutional theorists, policy analysts, and students at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Anthony Perl is the Director of Urban Studies at Simon Fraser University. He has acted as a government advisor in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the US on transportation and environmental research. He has co-edited and co-authored four books including The Integrity Gap: Canada's Environmental Policy and Institutions. He lives in Vancouver.

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A useful matrix in the introductory chapter identifies the institutional constraints that prevent Canadian governments delivering stated environmental goals ... The case studies offer useful support for this hypothesis.

British Journal of Canadian Studies, 12 November 2005