Canada: what did the 2026 amendments actually change about greenwashing law?

A rollback that wasn't — and was

No development in this theme has been reported as inaccurately as Canada's 2026 amendments to its greenwashing provisions. The headlines describe a repeal; commentary describes the country "reversing course"; industry summaries describe relief from the 2024 regime. The consolidated statute describes something more precise and more interesting: one provision amended to delete a single contested phrase, one private-enforcement route closed for one category of claim, and everything else — the product-claims rule, the reverse onus, the penalties, the Competition Bureau's full enforcement authority — left standing. The Canadian episode is this theme's best case study in the difference between what legislatures do and what gets reported, and in the anatomy of a modern greenwashing regime: which parts industry contests, which parts survive contestation, and what "rollback" means when the text is actually read.

This article reconstructs the regime in three layers: what Bill C-59 built in 2024, what the Bureau's 2025 guidelines settled, and what Bill C-15 changed in 2026 — verified against the consolidated Competition Act.

The 2024 architecture: Bill C-59

Canada's greenwashing provisions arrived on 20 June 2024, when Bill C-59 received Royal Assent and inserted two environmental-claims paragraphs into the Competition Act's civil deceptive-marketing provision (Competition Bureau, 2025).

The first, s. 74.01(1)(b.1), addresses product claims: a representation "of a product's benefits for protecting or restoring the environment or mitigating the environmental, social and ecological causes or effects of climate change that is not based on an adequate and proper test, the proof of which lies on the person making the representation" is reviewable conduct (Competition Act, s. 74.01(1)(b.1)). The second, s. 74.01(1)(b.2) as enacted, addressed business-level claims — representations about "the benefits of a business or business activity" for the environment — requiring "adequate and proper substantiation in accordance with internationally recognized methodology" (Competition Bureau, 2025).

Three design features made the package the most aggressive greenwashing statute in this theme's survey. The reverse onus: both paragraphs place "the proof of which lies on the person making the representation" — the trader proves substantiation, not the enforcer its absence. The penalties: administrative monetary penalties for corporations reaching "the greater of $10,000,000 and, for each subsequent order, $15,000,000" or three times the benefit derived, or where that cannot be determined, "3% of the corporation's annual worldwide gross revenues" (Competition Act, s. 74.1). And private access: from 20 June 2025, private litigants could seek leave of the Competition Tribunal to bring deceptive-marketing applications directly — deputising competitors, consumers and environmental organisations as enforcers (Torys, 2025).

The "internationally recognized methodology" phrase in (b.2) became the regime's lightning rod. It conditioned every corporate environmental representation — net-zero commitments, sustainability reporting quoted in marketing, transition plans — on substantiation against methodologies the statute did not name, with a reverse onus and severe penalties. The reported consequence was the phenomenon commentators labelled "greenhushing": companies withdrawing environmental disclosure rather than pricing the uncertainty (Gowling WLG, 2025).

The 2025 settlement: the Bureau's guidelines

The Competition Bureau's final guidelines, issued 5 June 2025 after "two rounds of public consultation, with over 400 submissions", stabilised the regime's interpretation without amending it (Competition Bureau, 2025b). The Bureau's framing was studiedly moderate: "Companies are free to make any environmental claims they wish, as long as they are not false or misleading, and have been adequately and properly tested or substantiated where required" (Competition Bureau, 2025b).

The guidelines' key positions, as summarised in the legal analyses this library retrieved: the provisions target marketing and promotional representations, not "representations made solely for other purposes or that are regulated by other government agencies"; a methodology is "internationally recognized" where recognised as valid by standards bodies, regulators or industries "in two or more countries", with methodologies required under Canadian federal or provincial programmes presumed consistent; and a bare factual statement — "20% recycled content", without a broader benefit representation — falls outside the environmental-claims paragraphs, though the general misleading-representations law still applies (Torys, 2025). The guidelines also carried their own limitation, stated with unusual candour: they "do not constrain private litigants, nor do they bind the Competition Tribunal or courts" (Torys, 2025) — a caveat whose significance the private-access regime made concrete: the Bureau's moderation could not moderate anyone else's applications.

For claim interpretation, the Bureau's glosses on "adequate and proper" carry the doctrinal weight: testing must be "conducted before the claim is made", and adequacy is "fit, apt, suitable or as required by the circumstances", judged against "the general impression that the representation conveys to consumers" (Competition Bureau, 2025b) — the prior-evidence rule and the impression standard examined comparatively in the substantiation article, anchored in Canada by the Imperial Brush jurisprudence upholding the testing requirement's constitutionality.

The 2026 amendments: Bill C-15, read against the statute

The change arrived through the budget process. Budget 2025, tabled 4 November 2025, announced the government would remove the internationally-recognized-methodology requirement for business-level claims and remove third parties' ability to bring greenwashing cases directly to the Tribunal — on the reported rationale that the rules were "creating investment uncertainty" (Gowling WLG, 2025; Norton Rose Fulbright, 2025). The implementing instrument, Bill C-15 — the Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1 — was introduced 18 November 2025 and received Royal Assent on 26 March 2026, becoming Statutes of Canada 2026, c. 3 (LEGISinfo, 2026).

What the amendments did, verified against the consolidated Act:

Section 74.01(1)(b.1) — product claims — untouched. The provision reads as enacted in 2024: product environmental-benefit representations require "an adequate and proper test, the proof of which lies on the person making the representation" (Competition Act, s. 74.01(1)(b.1); amendment history showing "2026, c. 3, s. 597" attaching to the section's other paragraph). For packaging — whose claims are product claims almost by definition — the 2026 amendments changed nothing.

Section 74.01(1)(b.2) — business claims — amended, not repealed. The provision now requires that business-level environmental representations be "based on adequate and proper substantiation, the proof of which lies on the person making the representation" (Competition Act, s. 74.01(1)(b.2), as amended). The words "in accordance with internationally recognized methodology" are gone; the substantiation duty and the reverse onus remain. Corporate environmental claims in Canada are still reviewable, still reverse-onus, still penalty-bearing — measured now against the open-textured "adequate and proper" standard rather than the international-methodology yardstick.

Private access — closed for (b.2) only. New s. 103.1(6.2) provides that "the Tribunal is not to consider an application for leave in respect of an application under section 74.01 that is made on the basis of paragraph 74.01(1)(b.2)" (Competition Act, s. 103.1(6.2)). Private applications over product-level environmental claims under (b.1) remain available, with leave, as does Bureau enforcement of both paragraphs; the penalty provisions of s. 74.1 stand unamended (MLT Aikins, 2026; Lawson Lundell, 2026).

The misreporting, diagnosed

Set against the text, the circulating characterisations sort cleanly. "Canada repealed its greenwashing law" is false on every element: both provisions exist, both bind, the Bureau enforces both. "Relief for corporate net-zero messaging" is half-true: business-level claims lost the methodology yardstick and the private-enforcement exposure — a genuine reduction in legal risk for corporate climate communication — but retained substantiation, reverse onus and Bureau enforcement. "No change for product-level on-pack claims" is exactly true, and is the proposition packaging practice needs: a "compostable", "recyclable" or "30% recycled" representation on a package sold in Canada faces in 2026 precisely the regime it faced in 2024 — adequate and proper testing, conducted in advance, proof on the claimant, penalties to three per cent of worldwide gross revenues, and private applicants still eligible to seek leave.

The misreporting has a structure worth recording for this library's methodology pages: the amendment was announced in a budget (a document read for its politics), implemented in an omnibus act (a text read by almost no one), and reported through the frame of the loudest prior controversy (the corporate-claims backlash) — three filters through which a scalpel reliably reads as an axe. The parallel with this theme's other correction cases — the "withdrawn" Green Claims Directive, the "banned QR code" — is exact: in each, the institutional record diverged from the reported record within months of the event, and the reported version colonised the secondary literature.

The regime in packaging practice

For the on-pack claims this library documents, the Canadian regime's operational content sits in the Bureau's interpretive positions, and three of them do most of the work.

The first is the boundary between benefit claims and bare facts. On the Bureau's reading, a factual statement without a broader benefit representation — the example in the legal analyses is "20% recycled content" standing alone — falls outside the environmental-claims paragraphs entirely, governed only by the general misleading-representations law (Torys, 2025). The position rewards exactly the claim style this library's third theme documents as most informative: the specific, quantified, unadorned statement. A percentage is a fact; "better for the planet because 20% recycled" is a benefit claim requiring adequate and proper testing of the benefit. Canadian law thus prices the marketing gloss, not the disclosure — an incentive structure whose direction matches the EU's generic-claims rule by an entirely different mechanism.

The second is the temporal rule's bite on packaging workflows. Testing "must be conducted before the claim is made" (Competition Bureau, 2025b), and packaging claims are made when packages ship — which converts the substantiation file into a gate in the artwork release process rather than a defence assembled when challenged. The reverse onus compounds the design: in any proceeding, the producer's file is the case, and its dating is examinable. Among the regimes this theme surveys, only ISO 14021's clause 6.2.1 states the same rule as explicitly — and Canada is where that standards principle carries administrative monetary penalties.

The third is the general-impression standard. Adequacy is judged against "the general impression that the representation conveys to consumers" (Competition Bureau, 2025b) — Canada's version of the evidence-meaning pairing this theme's substantiation article treats as the field's deepest axis. Its packaging consequence is familiar from every family in this library's third theme: the certified, tested, documented property does not bound the claim; the package's total impression does, imagery and iconography included.

One further Canadian particular deserves record: the penalty arithmetic's reach. Three per cent of worldwide gross revenues, available where the benefit derived cannot reasonably be determined (Competition Act, s. 74.1), scales the exposure to the corporate group rather than the Canadian business — for a global consumer-products firm, a theoretical ceiling in the billions, attached to provisions whose substantive test is an open-textured "adequate and proper". That combination — vague standard, reverse onus, extraterritorial penalty base — is what industry contested; it is also, post-C-15, entirely intact for the product claims that packaging carries.

What the episode teaches

Beyond the correction, the Canadian sequence illuminates the anatomy of greenwashing regimes generally. The elements industry contested to the point of amendment were the methodology yardstick (an external standard imported wholesale into a penalty statute) and private enforcement (risk pricing outside any regulator's discretion) — not the substantiation duty, the reverse onus or the penalties, all of which survived without serious legislative challenge. The revealed preference is informative: what firms found intolerable was not being held to evidence, but being held to evidence defined elsewhere and enforced by anyone. Regimes elsewhere in this theme sit at different points on exactly those two axes — the EU's blacklist externalises the standard into legislation itself; the UK concentrates enforcement in a single administrative authority — and the Canadian amendments are, in effect, one jurisdiction's measured retreat along both axes simultaneously, executed without touching the substantive core.

For the on-pack claims this library exists to document, the durable summary is the statute's own: in Canada, an environmental product claim untested in advance is reviewable conduct with the proof burden reversed — before 2024's bill, after 2026's, and regardless of what the headlines said in between. The consolidated statute, freely published and amendment-noted, settles the question in minutes — which makes Canada the cheapest correction exercise in this theme, and its persistence in the commentary the least excusable of the misreadings this theme corrects. Primary sources are not always this kind; when they are, there is no reason to read anything else first.

References

Competition Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-34, ss. 74.01, 74.1, 103.1 (consolidated, current to 2026). Available at: Open source ; Open source ; Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Competition Bureau (2025) Competition Bureau issues final guidelines regarding environmental claims, news release, 5 June. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Competition Bureau (2025b) Environmental claims and the Competition Act (final guidelines). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Gowling WLG (2025) Federal government reverses course on greenwashing rules in Budget 2025. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Lawson Lundell (2026) Canada's Bill C-15: new amendments to anti-greenwashing laws. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

LEGISinfo (2026) Bill C-15: An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on November 4, 2025 (45th Parliament, 1st session). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

MLT Aikins (2026) Federal government narrows scope of the Competition Act's anti-greenwashing provisions as Bill C-15 receives royal assent. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Norton Rose Fulbright (2025) 2025 budget proposes amending Competition Act greenwashing provisions. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Torys (2025) Competition Bureau finalizes greenwashing enforcement guidelines. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Note on sources and verification

The current texts of ss. 74.01(1)(b.1), 74.01(1)(b.2) and 103.1(6.2) are quoted verbatim from the consolidated Competition Act as published by the Department of Justice, whose amendment notes ("2026, c. 3, s. 597" and "2026, c. 3, s. 598") tie the changes to Bill C-15; the consolidation's currency statement ("last amended 2026-03-26") indicates the amendments took effect on Royal Assent, and no deferred coming-into-force provision was identified. Bill C-15's dates and citation are from LEGISinfo. The 2024-enacted wording of (b.2), including the deleted methodology phrase, is reconstructed from the Bureau's 2025 release and the law-firm analyses; the C-59 text as enacted was not separately retrieved. Budget 2025's provisions and rationale rest on the Gowling WLG and Norton Rose Fulbright summaries; the budget document itself was not retrieved verbatim. The Bureau guidelines' key positions are as summarised in the Torys analysis, with direct quotations from the Bureau's own release and guidelines page as cited; whether the guidelines have been revised post-C-15 could not be verified (the guidelines page fetch partially failed). The "greenhushing" characterisation is the cited commentary's, reported as such. One analysis references a new s. 74.01(1.01) concerning private applications; only s. 103.1(6.2) was verified against the consolidated Act, and this article relies on the verified provision.

Last verified: 18 August 2026.