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.