There are two levels of thinking along the lines of “binding” in this context. That's not a particularly helpful concept here, but let's tackle it.
First of all, this statute is legally enforceable, and that's represented or indicated by the mandatory provisions throughout. However, just like any law that the federal government enacts, it's open to a subsequent federal government to repeal that act, just as we saw with the initial federal environmental assessment statute. In that same way, future governments can repeal it, just as the KPIA was repealed.
With regard to the latter, on perhaps a more interesting and more practical level, this statute can only go so far, because it cannot impose emission reduction targets or specific budgets on a province-by-province level. Rather, the elephant in the room in Canada for decades has been the lack of formal agreement among all provinces, territories and the federal government with respect to who is going to reduce emissions by how much.
One option is to adopt what the European Union has adopted, which is, in some realms, called a burden-sharing agreement, but today is typically called an effort-sharing agreement, which sounds a little less scary, a little less burdensome. Either way, it is a negotiated agreement whereby all those jurisdictions—in Canada we have national jurisdictions and provinces—indicate explicitly what their contributions are going to be to emission reduction. Another way to think about it is that it's almost like a mini Paris Agreement within the Canadian federation.
You can't set that out in Bill C-12, but you can create a sort of portal that recognizes that this might be happening. That could be included in, for example, subclause 10(1), with information about provinces and territories. You can at least create the platform and consistency for that kind of burden-sharing agreement.
The last thing I would say is that this is almost like a pan-Canadian framework circa December 2015, but with emission reduction targets signed by all jurisdictions.