Building Consensus for a Sustainable Future: Guiding Principles

RELEASED 1993

On November 4, 1991, the Foreign Policy Committee of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy hosted a conference in Toronto on "Trade, Competitiveness and the Environment." The purpose of the conference was to gather the major Canadian and international stakeholders from the government, business, environmental and academic communities to exchange views on an issue of rapidly growing importance on the public policy agenda. Recognizing that this was the first such exercise of its kind in Canada, and that the multifaceted links between trade and the environment were still being charted, the conference sought a preliminary identification of the key issues at stake, the perspectives of major stakeholders, and their initial judgements about how such issues might best be addressed. This volume is based on the edited version of the 21 major presentations made at the conference.