Commentary
There’s an old hockey expression for the player who chases the puck to where it was, not where it’s going. In hockey, you lose the play. In financial regulation, you lose something considerably more valuable: the retirement savings of millions of Canadians who trusted the people managing their money to have checked the foundational assumptions. Canada’s financial regulators have an assumptions problem, and a recent, seismic development in climate science has made it impossible to ignore.
In April 2026, the ScenarioMIP committee responsible for developing the emissions scenarios that feed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) officially retired its most extreme emissions pathways—RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0—declaring them “implausible.” These are not fringe scenarios. They are the foundational inputs that shaped climate-related stress testing, capital requirements, and disclosure mandates across the global financial system, including Canada’s….