Cutting Up Canada’s Environmental Safety Net
Like rules that prevent smoking in the office or putting your kid in a car without a seatbelt, protecting citizens' health and livelihoods from a polluted environment is a Canadian social norm. Will this week's budget roll back established legal protections for our environment and put public health and safety at risk?
VANCOUVER, B.C.—Canadians once let corporations dump whatever they wanted into our air and water, and dig and destroy forests, rivers and lakes without consideration of what species might be living there.
Think of the Sidney Tar Ponds, where a steel mill was allowed to fill an entire estuary with toxic sludge, including cancer-causing PCBs. The local community is still paying for that mess with elevated cancer rates, and Canadian taxpayers are still paying to clean it up decades later. Think of the First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario that were poisoned because a chemical company dumped 9,000 kg of mercury into the river system people fished in. The list can go on and on—Lake Erie dying, the acid rain crisis, flooding communities for dam reservoirs, the collapse of the cod fishery, the toxic waste lying at the bottom of Hamilton Harbour.
The point in dredging up these environmental disasters is to show that we learned some lessons: a polluted environment hurts us humans as well as other critters. And cleaning up after the fact (assuming it is even possible) is extremely costly, making strong environmental laws a smart financial investment for taxpayers who can be left footing the bill.
Over the decades, Canada has developed an environmental safety net of laws intended to protect habitat and species. Limits have been put on what factories can put into the air and water. Environmental assessment, through which potential impacts are addressed before a project is allowed to go ahead, has become an established part of our democratic process. (Of course there are a few gaps in the net—one need only look at the continued decline of species at risk like woodland caribou and the rapid expansion of water-polluting tar sands mines). But, across many sectors, damage to the environment and health has decreased because our governments saw the long term value of putting in place rules to protect the environment.
We learned our lesson. Or did we? This week’s budget will be instructive.
Like rules that prevent smoking in the office or putting your kid in a car without a seatbelt, protecting citizens’ health and livelihoods from a polluted environment is now an accepted social norm. Yet over the last few months, there have been strong signals that legislation will soon roll back established protections for our environment. And like driving without a seatbelt, this would be a reckless move that puts public health and safety at risk.
Why? So Canada can ship unprocessed natural resources overseas as fast as we can, and earn oil companies a few dollars more per barrel of oil? Anticipated legislative changes to weaken environmental assessment may have been spurred by unprecedented public concern about the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline and supertanker project, but they could impact industries nationwide. There is even talk that habitat protection for fish and species at risk could be on the chopping block. (A key factor that these protections have in common is that they are common triggers of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act).
Strong environmental laws matter for our ecosystems, our economy and the democratic process. Canada’s key federal environmental laws like the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Fisheries Act, and the Species at Risk Act have made tangible improvements to our ability to promote a sustainable economy, protect us from toxics and pollutants, save species from extinction and hold polluters accountable.
What should we be working toward? First and foremost, we need to be able to count on governments to make sure the air we breathe and the water we drink is safe, not poisoned, and that our rivers, lakes, farmland and forests stay healthy enough to support our economy and be there for future generations. We can’t risk an Exxon Valdez-like oil spill on our coasts, nor can we allow another Sidney Tar Ponds to happen. There’s ample evidence that our existing laws need to be strengthened, not weakened, to protect humans from pollution. Take, for example, the leaking toxic tailings ponds in Northern Alberta and the elevated cancer rate found in First Nations communities living downstream.
Second, a credible decision-making process that gives citizens a voice is crucial for industries to obtain a social licence for their activities. Smearing people who have legitimate concerns about new projects like pipelines and cutting off their right to have a say won’t quiet the critics. It will just mean that the fight goes elsewhere, to where the products are being sold, to the courts and to investors. Again, the social licence for the oil industry in particular has already eroded given the failure to limit the impacts of tar sands development and deal honourably with First Nations. Canada has more to do on this front, and should not be contemplating doing less.
Third, it’s a few big companies that would benefit from weakening our environmental laws, yet all Canadians that would pay the price, in terms of impacts on our health and quality of life as well as the actual tax dollars to clean up environmental disasters. An oil tanker spill off the North Pacific Coast, for example, could leave citizens on the hook for billions.
Canadians want strong environmental laws to ensure a clean, secure, and sustainable future for ourselves and our children.50 organizations nationwide have endorsed a common set of principles that outline how; see www.envirolawmatters.ca, and which have been submitted to the federal government. We’ll find out on budget day if they have been listening.