The federal government’s first public accounting of climate risk to its own buildings and infrastructure shows it has completed facility-level risk assessments on 89 of 1,578 critical assets, or about 5.6 per cent, according to figures published by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
The numbers appear on a Treasury Board web page titled The Government of Canada’s progress on environmental indicators: Climate resilience, which reports data for the 2024-25 fiscal year. Page metadata records the environmental indicators series as first issued on Feb. 6, 2026, and last modified on Aug. 5, 2026.
That publication date is itself significant. In a report tabled May 4, 2026, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Jerry V. DeMarco found that the secretariat “had not publicly reported on the strategy’s climate-resilience commitments and objectives during the first 8 years.” The Greening Government Strategy was introduced in 2017. The indicator page went live roughly three months before the commissioner’s report reached Parliament.
The commissioner’s audit reported that as of 2024-25, three per cent of federal critical assets identified as subject to significant risk had climate-resilience plans in place. The Treasury Board figures describe an earlier step in the same sequence, the facility-specific risk assessment that is meant to precede a plan, and show that step is also largely undone. By the secretariat’s own count, 1,489 of 1,578 critical assets remain unassessed.
A department-by-department table on the same page, which does not appear to have been reported previously, shows the gap is concentrated rather than evenly spread. Of the 23 organizations that reported owning critical assets, 14 reported that zero per cent had received a site-specific climate risk assessment.
Those 14 include National Defence, which the commissioner’s report identifies as holding $52 billion in physical assets, or 45 per cent of the federal total. They also include Public Safety Canada, the department responsible for national emergency management, and Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Environment and Climate Change Canada’s entry is the most internally inconsistent of the 30 listed. It reports its departmental climate risk assessment as “Completed” and its measures to reduce those risks as “Completed,” one of only two organizations in the table to claim completed measures. In the adjacent column, it reports that zero per cent of its critical assets have a facility-specific assessment.
Public Safety Canada’s row records a departmental risk assessment as “Initiated,” risk reduction measures as “Not initiated,” no climate resilient portfolio assessment, and zero per cent of critical assets assessed.
At the other end of the table, three organizations reported that 100 per cent of their critical assets had been assessed: the Canadian Space Agency, the National Research Council and Polar Canada. Correctional Service Canada reported 70 per cent and Transport Canada 58 per cent.
A second gap runs underneath all of these figures. The commissioner’s report states that its 2024-25 data came from “30 of the 100 departments and agencies subject to the Greening Government Strategy.” The Treasury Board page lists exactly 30 organizations. On the arithmetic of the audit’s own source note, roughly 70 federal organizations covered by the strategy do not appear in the government’s first public accounting at all, and the page offers no explanation for their absence.
The scale of what is being counted is set out in the audit. The federal government manages more than 30,000 buildings, 20,000 engineering assets and 40,000 fleet assets, with a replacement value the secretariat estimated at roughly $100 billion. The Treasury Board page notes that the number of critical assets “is expected to increase in the coming years” as organizations with larger real property portfolios continue to identify them, which means the 5.6 per cent figure could fall before it rises.
Two elements of the published data could not be resolved from the record. Table 6 on the Treasury Board page, which carries the breakdown of 89 assessed and 1,489 unassessed assets, is labelled 2023-24, while the figure directly above it and the narrative text below both describe the same numbers as 2024-25. A footnote separately flags that Global Affairs Canada’s row reflects 2023-24 data. Whether the table heading is a labelling error or indicates that some figures predate the stated reporting year would require clarification from the secretariat, which has not been sought for this report.
The commissioner recommended that Treasury Board “ensure timely and public annual reporting on all of the climate resilience-related commitments in the Greening Government Strategy.” Whether the February 2026 page becomes an annual fixture, and whether the count of unassessed assets falls in the next edition, will be the practical test of that recommendation.
This report is based entirely on public records. Primary sources: the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s climate resilience environmental indicator page; the 2026 Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Climate Resilience of Federal Assets and Services; and the Office of the Auditor General’s May 4, 2026 news release. Canadanewsmedia.ca has sent no inquiry to the departments named and will update this report if the secretariat addresses the discrepancies noted above.
