The federal government has quietly begun publishing a public scoreboard on how well it is protecting its own buildings, bridges and harbours from climate change, months ahead of a deadline it set for itself. The headline number on that scoreboard looks reassuring. The audit that sits underneath it is less so.
A Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat web page titled “The Government of Canada’s progress on environmental indicators: Climate resilience” tells readers, under the heading Key results, that “27 of 30 federal organizations have initiated or completed a departmental climate risk assessment.” Read on its own, that is a completion rate of 90 per cent. The page carries a publication date of Feb. 6, 2026 and was last updated Aug. 5, 2026.
What the page does not state is how many federal organizations are actually bound by the policy it is measuring. The audit that prompted the reporting does. In Climate Resilience of Federal Assets and Services, tabled in the House of Commons on May 4 by Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Jerry V. DeMarco on behalf of Auditor General Karen Hogan, the source note printed beneath two separate exhibits reads: “Based on 2024-25 data provided by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat from 30 of the 100 departments and agencies subject to the Greening Government Strategy.”
Measured against roughly 100 covered organizations rather than the 30 that filed, the same result is closer to 27 per cent. The Treasury Board page presents the smaller denominator without qualifying it, and canadanewsmedia.ca could not find any statement on the page disclosing how many organizations the strategy binds or how many did not report.
The gap matters because the assets in question are the federal government’s own. The audit puts the replacement value of federal buildings, engineering assets and fleet at roughly $100 billion, covering more than 30,000 buildings and 20,000 engineering assets. In his opening statement to reporters on May 4, DeMarco said the Treasury Board Secretariat’s framework for tracking progress was weak and that “despite repeated commitments, the secretariat did not publicly report on climate resilience in the 8 years that followed the strategy’s launch in 2017.”
The audit’s own figures are starker than the web page’s framing. Exhibit 8 of the report finds that as of 2024-25, of the 275 critical assets identified as being at significant risk, 3 per cent had climate-resilience plans in place and 97 per cent did not. The Treasury Board page, for its part, reports that of 1,578 critical assets reported in 2024-25, 89 have been assessed at the facility level while 1,489 remain to be assessed, a rate of about 5.6 per cent.
The department-by-department table published on the Treasury Board page is where the numbers become concrete. National Defence, which the audit says holds $52 billion in physical assets, the single largest federal share, is listed at 0 per cent of critical assets with a site-specific assessment. Public Services and Procurement Canada, which manages federal office space, bridges and highways, is also listed at 0 per cent. So are the RCMP, Health Canada, the Canada Border Services Agency, Environment and Climate Change Canada and Public Safety Canada. Public Safety Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada and Communications Security Establishment Canada are each recorded as having taken no measures to reduce identified departmental risks.
The audit also raises questions about the reliability of the underlying submissions that feed the published table. Auditors found the reporting template “was not designed to track progress effectively,” restricting departments to closed answers such as “yes,” “initiated” or “no” without requiring any description of incremental progress. They found some template questions unclear, and reported that “National Defence reported a false positive result because a question in the template was misinterpreted.” Those are the same submissions summarized on the public page.
There is a further wrinkle in the published data. The Treasury Board page’s Figure 6 is captioned 2024-25, but the accompanying Table 6 immediately below it is headed 2023-24. It is not clear from the page which fiscal year the 89 assessed assets belong to. canadanewsmedia.ca has not been able to resolve that inconsistency from published records alone.
On the timing, the record is straightforward and, in one respect, to the secretariat’s credit. The audit covered the period from Nov. 1, 2020 to Dec. 1, 2025, and the climate-resilience indicator page was published in February 2026, after that window closed but before the report was tabled. In its formal response to the audit’s transparency recommendation, printed in the report, the secretariat agreed to report climate-resilience results publicly each year, including “providing summary information on climate resilience commitments on the TBS website,” with completion planned by the fourth quarter of the 2026-27 fiscal year, meaning by March 31, 2027. The page is live well ahead of that date.
What remains unresolved is whether a page built on submissions from under a third of covered organizations, and presented without that context, meets what the auditors asked for. The recommendation was that the secretariat “ensure timely and public annual reporting on all of the climate resilience-related commitments in the Greening Government Strategy.” The secretariat agreed.
The audit is also explicit that the deadlines themselves have moved. Early versions of the strategy required departments to assess and reduce climate risks by 2022. After those commitments were not met, the audit found, they were replaced in 2024 with long-term commitments for 2035 and beyond, with no interim targets. The auditors called that shift concerning, saying it “did not convey a sense of urgency” consistent with Canada’s obligations under the Paris Agreement.
canadanewsmedia.ca has not put questions to the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat about the denominator used on the page or the fiscal-year labelling. This story rests entirely on published federal records, and is developing.
Sourcing note. Every claim above traces to a public federal document. Primary sources: (1) Climate Resilience of Federal Assets and Services, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, tabled May 4, 2026, full PDF at https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/oag-bvg/audit-reports/documents/cesd-202605-climate-resilience-federal-assets-services.pdf, supporting the “30 of the 100 departments and agencies” source note (exhibits 7 and 8), the 3 per cent of 275 at-risk critical assets figure, the reporting-template findings including the National Defence false positive, the 2024 shift of deadlines to 2035, the audit period, and the secretariat’s response committing to publish summary information on the TBS website by the fourth quarter of 2026-27. (2) The audit’s At a Glance page at https://www.canada.ca/en/auditor-general/our-work/audit-reports/commissioner-environment-sustainable-development-202605-climate-resilience-federal-assets-services.html, supporting the roughly $100 billion replacement value, the asset counts, the 67 per cent share held by the three audited departments, and the recommendation text. (3) The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s climate resilience indicator page at https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services/innovation/greening-government/government-canada-progress-on-environmental-indicators/climate-resilience.html, publication date Feb. 6, 2026 and last updated Aug. 5, 2026, supporting the “27 of 30” key result, the absence of any stated denominator, the 89 of 1,578 critical assets figure, the department-by-department percentages, and the Figure 6 / Table 6 fiscal-year labelling inconsistency. (4) The Auditor General’s news release of May 4, 2026 at https://www.canada.ca/en/auditor-general/media-room/federal-assets-services-at-risk-as-climate-resilience-actions-lag.html and (5) the May 4, 2026 opening statement at https://www.canada.ca/en/auditor-general/media-room/2026-may-reports-opening-statement-news-conference.html, supporting DeMarco’s on-the-record quotes.
Originality check. The audit itself was reported on May 4 and after by CBC News (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-strategy-climate-resilience-report-9.7186876), Global Government Forum (https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/significant-gaps-in-climate-resilience-of-canadas-critical-assets-audit-finds/) and the trade outlet REMI Network (https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/feds-have-hazy-read-on-climate-risk-exposure/). REMI Network reported the audit’s finding about the narrow survey base. What has not been reported elsewhere, and is the specific finding of this piece, is that the Treasury Board Secretariat’s public climate-resilience indicator page is now live, was updated on Aug. 5, 2026, and presents those partial results as a Key result without stating the denominator the auditors used.
