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Canadian environmental governance formally began in the 1970s with an ambitious vision critical of the status quo. Until the Justin Trudeau government from 2015, this vision had been largely eroded when compared to the transformative environmental ideas, ambition, and efforts initially put forth. Drawing on elite interviews in Canadian environmental politics and an articulation of the dominant system, we develop and demonstrate a novel explanation for Canada's systematic failure to act more ambitiously on the environment. We argue that this failure is the result of progressive selection of Canadian environmental governance in relation to the dominant system at key selection moments. It is at those moments when the environment is least prioritized and the economy most urgently needs attention that environmental governance suffers the most. The paper concludes by emphasizing how features of the dominant political-economic system not typically thought of as environmental can have systematic environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]