Ottawa quietly dropped its thermal coal export ban work

Environment and Climate Change Canada stopped its work on banning thermal coal exports without any record of being told to do so, Auditor General Karen Hogan said Thursday, calling it something she has not seen in 20 years of auditing the federal government.

The audit, tabled in the House of Commons on Oct. 29, 2026, and issued by the federal environment commissioner, found the department did not tell the public or other federal departments that the work had ended. “The department did not produce evidence of an official direction to discontinue work on the ban in 2024,” the report said.

Ottawa promised in 2021 to ban thermal coal exports by 2030. The audit found the department spent about three years looking for a way to enforce the ban, including by using existing laws to regulate coal as a toxic substance. By February 2024 that effort had shifted to non-regulatory approaches such as voluntary measures, which the report does not describe. All work stopped in November 2024 after lobbying from the coal industry, according to the audit, and the decision was not formalized until August 2025, when the government was looking for savings.

“We also found no clear records to show that the department had provided the minister with an assessment of the implications of stopping all work on the export ban,” the report said. Thermal coal exports were higher in 2025 than in 2021, it found, and 61 per cent of the thermal coal shipped from Canadian ports in 2025 came from the United States, largely Washington, Oregon and California. It travels by train to terminals in British Columbia.

Deputy Auditor General Andrew Hayes told reporters the office would have expected a documented analysis for decision-makers and a paper trail confirming that work should stop. Hogan said she could not recall a time in the past two decades when she had seen work end that way, The Canadian Press reported.

Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin was in Montreal for the Canada-EU summit and was not made available for questions. A statement from her office said Canada was “pausing” its work. Press secretary Keean Nembhard said the previous government paused efforts to implement the ban in 2024 and that the current government is assessing its policies against energy affordability, security and its wider climate ambitions. Wade Grant, Dabrusin’s parliamentary secretary, was asked whether Canada still intends to phase out the exports by 2030 and said it was “something (the government) will look at.”

The audit called the lack of public information on the government’s current approach concerning. It said transparency gives provinces, coal companies, port and shipping operators and workers the certainty they need to take part in a just transition.

The report also pointed out that Canada co-chairs an international alliance, which it helped launch in 2017, to move countries away from coal. Environment Canada never told Global Affairs Canada, which oversees about $16 billion in international coal transition commitments, that the export work had stopped, the audit said. That includes $1 billion in low-interest loans to the Climate Investment Funds’ Accelerating Coal Transition program, which made up 42 per cent of the program’s funding.

Coal burned to generate Canadian electricity fell 68 per cent between 2011 and 2023, according to the Canadian Press account of the audit. The report is one of nine tabled Thursday. Others covered federal greenhouse gas reduction tracking, pesticide risks, the Canadian Dental Care Plan and the national emergency stockpile.

The findings arrive as Ottawa faces pressure over its wider climate targets. Our earlier coverage looked at the UN finding that 1.5 C is out of reach, how the EU carbon tariff exposes Canadian metals and the Alberta court ruling on the Impact Assessment Act.

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