Panel: Evidence, Accountability, Action: Bridging Sustainability Accounting Research and Public Policy
Panelists
The Honourable Rosa Galvez
The Honourable Rosa Galvez is an environmental engineer, an independent senator at the Senate of Canada, and the President of the Parliamentary Network on Climate Change of ParlAmericas. She was a professor at Laval University in Québec for over 25 years and was Chair of its Civil and Water Engineering department from 2011 to 2016. She specializes in pollution control, water and wastewater treatment, municipal and hazardous waste, sustainable development, impact assessment and climate risk to infrastructure.
At the Senate of Canada, she is the Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources and a member of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. In 2021, she was the sponsor in the Senate of the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, providing an accountability framework for the Canadian federal government to achieve its net-zero emissions goal by 2050. She was also recipient of the Clean50 Award 2021, the 2022 Ecological Society of America Regional Policy Award and the 2023 Top 25 Women of Influence Award for her parliamentary work on climate and the environment.
Since her appointment at the Senate, Senator Galvez has published several policy papers including a discussion paper on Canada’s building codes and a white paper on a clean and just recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2022, she published a white paper on Aligning Canadian Finance with Climate Commitments, which led to the introduction in the Senate of Bill S-243, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act, legislation to help guide Canada’s financial sector in its transition to a net-zero economy.
Calvin Trottier-Chi
Calvin Trottier-Chi is the Research Lead at Greenback Revolution, an initiative to improve the accessibility of impact investing and a member of the Canadian Coalition for Community Capital. In this role, he is working to make it easier for stakeholders and rights holders to express their preferences for capital allocation. He has experience as a policy researcher at the Canadian Climate Institute, where he worked on the initial design of Canada’s sustainable finance taxonomy and has led research on regulatory streamlining, climate mitigation from circularity, capital costs of critical minerals, and climate-related disclosures. Prior to joining the Climate Institute, Calvin worked on international sustainability with UN-Energy, Sustainable Energy for All, and Social Value International.
Candace Newman
Candace Newman is the Manager, Data Integration in the Marine Planning and Conservation Directorate at Fisheries and Oceans Canada. She leads work to advance ecosystem assessments, conservation benefits, nature financing, data science, and analytics to better understand the ecological, social, cultural, and economic value of marine protected and conserved areas to inform evidence-based decision-making. Candace has almost 20 years of experience in the Government of Canada, including at Parks Canada, where she supported the establishment of new national marine conservation areas and worked with Indigenous partners in Hudson Bay, Labrador, and the Arctic. She also worked at Natural Resources Canada as a policy advisor, developing policy approaches that integrated environmental information into offshore oil and gas decision-making. Candace holds a PhD in remote sensing from the University of Waterloo, where she used satellite imagery to map shallow-water coral reef environments.
