Bill C-38, putting Profit before the Environment

Clarifying the deliberately confusing Bill C-38

- Elizabeth May

As a long-time environmental lawyer who has watched, and in some cases, played a role in the development of Canada’s environmental laws, I am devastated at the cynical, manipulative and undemocratic way the Harper Conservatives are weakening or destroying those crucial laws.

The Conservatives have hidden their destructive, anti-nature, health, and even jobs agenda in the 425-page Bill C-38, the Budget Implementation Bill. Due to their imposition of time allocation on the Bill’s various stages through the House of Commons, I haven’t been able to speak during Second Reading, although I have been able to ask questions and make comments. That’s why I decided to hold a press conference Thursday morning, May 10, to itemize the various bills, regulations, policies and programs that will be affected.

Bill C-38 Changes Clearing the Way for Resource Extraction:

Canadian Environmental Assessment Act – “Environmental effects” under the new CEAA will be limited to effects on fish, aquatic species under the Species at Risk Act, migratory birds. A broader view of impacts is limited to: federal lands, Aboriginal peoples, and changes to the environment “directly linked or necessarily incidental” to federal approval.

Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency – The Agency will have 45 days after receiving an application to decide if an assessment is required. Environmental Assessments are no longer required for projects involving federal money. The Minister is given wide discretion to decide. New “substitution” rules allow Ottawa to download EAs to the provinces; “comprehensive” studies are eliminated. Cabinet will be able to over-rule decisions. A retroactive section sets the clock at July 2010 for existing projects.

Canadian Environmental Protection Act – The present one-year limit to permits for disposing waste at sea can now be renewed four times. The 3 and 5 year time limits protecting Species at Risk from industrial harm will now be open-ended.

Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act – This legislation, which required government accountability and results reporting on climate change policies, is being repealed.

Fisheries Act – Fish habitat provisions will be changed to protect only fish of “commercial, Aboriginal, and recreational” value and even those habitat protections are weakened. The new provisions create an incentive to drain a lake and kill all the fish, if not in a fishery, in order to fill a dry hole with mining tailings.

Navigable Waters Protection Act – Pipelines and power lines will be exempt from the provisions of this Act. Also, the National Energy Board absorbs the Navigable Waters Protection Act (NWPA) whenever a pipeline crosses navigable waters. The NWPA is amended to say a pipeline is not a “work” within that Act.

National Energy Board Act – NEB reviews will be limited to two years – and then its decisions can be reversed by the Cabinet, including the present Northern Gateway Pipeline review.

Species at Risk Act – This is being amended to exempt the National Energy Board from having to impose conditions to protect critical habitat on projects it approves. Also, companies won’t have to renew permits on projects threatening critical habitat.

Parks Canada Agency Act – Reporting requirements are being reduced, including the annual report. 638 of the nearly 3000 Parks Canada workers will be cut. Environmental monitoring and ecological restoration in the Gulf Islands National Park are being cut.

Canadian Oil and Gas Operations Act – This will be changed to exempt pipelines from the Navigational Waters Act. Coasting Trade Act – This will be changed to promote seismic testing allowing increased off-shore drilling.

Nuclear Safety Control Act – Environmental Assessments will be moved to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is a licensing body not an assessing body – so there is a built-in conflict.

Canada Seeds Act – This is being revamped so the job of inspecting seed crops is transferred from Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspectors to “authorized service providers” the private sector.

Agriculture Affected – Under the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, publicly owned grasslands have acted as community pastures under federal management, leasing grazing rights to farmers so they could devote their good land to crops, not livestock. This will end. Also, the Centre for Plant Health in Sidney, BC, an important site for quarantine and virus-testing on plant stock strategically located across the Salish Sea to protect BC’s primary agricultural regions, will be moved to the heart of BC’s fruit and wine industries.

National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy – The NRTEE brought industry leaders, environmentalists, First Nations, labour, and policy makers together to provide non-partisan research and advice on federal policies. Its demise will leave a policy vacuum in relation to Canada’s economic development.

More Attacks on Environmental Groups – The charities sections now preclude gifts which may result in political activity. The $8 million new money to harass charities is unjustified.

Water Programs – Environment Canada is cutting several water-related programs and others will be cut severely, including some aimed at promoting or monitoring water-use efficiency.

Wastewater Survey – The Municipal Water and Wastewater Survey, the only national study of water consumption habits, is being cut after being in place since 1983.

Monitoring Effluent – Environment Canada’s Environmental Effects Monitoring Program, a systematic method for measuring the quality of effluent discharge, including from mines and pulp mills, will be cut by 20 percent.

In spite of the fact that most Canadians have no idea how seriously Bill C-38 will affect their lives, the Senate is beginning hearings so that Conservative Senators can vote on it as soon as possible. This railroading version of democracy is tragic for Canada.

The Green Party of Canada is launching its C-38: Environment Devastation Act campaign to engage Canadians in having their C-38 concerns heard. Please visit budgetdevastation.ca for more information.

Elizabeth May is the Leader of the Green Party of Canada and Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands.

Hamilton 350 Blog

Connect the Dots

Climate change action starts at home

Global Day of Action
When: Saturday, May 5, at 1 and 3 p.m.
Where: King and James streets at 1 p.m. and Dundas Driving Park at 3 p.m.
Why: To “connect the dots” around climate change and its impacts locally. Bring a black umbrella to the King and James gathering if you have one.

Hamiltonians need to “connect the dots” between the odd shifts in weather they are seeing locally and the global impacts of climate change, environmental leaders say. A meeting at City Hall Thursday organized by seven groups emphasized the need for municipal action to address concerns around climate change. The news conference was held to advance Saturday’s Global Day of Action, which is being hosted by the Hamilton 350 Committee

In the past eight years, there have been 17 rainstorms that flooded homes in Hamilton and at least six of them were only supposed to come once every 50 to 100 years, said Don McLean, co-ordinator of the local 350 committee. “The very strange weather that we’ve had in the last two or three months, the winter that didn’t happen ... clearly the kinds of impacts it’s going to have on food production have to make it more and more urgent we do something,” McLean said.

The 350 Committee is part of a global campaign for the maximum safe level of carbon dioxide — 350 parts per million — in the global atmosphere. Right now, it’s sitting at 394 parts per million. “We’re at a point where you have almost unanimous agreement from climate scientists that this is occurring … Let’s pull up our pants and get the job done,” said Pete Wobschall, executive director of Green Venture.

Lynda Lukasik, the executive director of Environment Hamilton, said she wanted to see city council and the province take a vocal stance against Ottawa’s pipeline projects and approaches to energy resources. Lukasik’s basement was flooded in the storm of July 2009 that swamped the Red Hill Valley Parkway. She said some of her neighbours told her they had never had a flooding issue like that before. “As it starts to hit people personally more and more … it has made people reflect and think.”

Councillor Brian McHattie, who chairs the Hamilton Conservation Authority board, noted that the predicted rise in temperature in the Hamilton area by 2050 is 2.6 C.

The increase in rainfall over the past four decades was 26 millimetres, McHattie said.

dawong@thespec.com
905-526-2468 | @WongatTheSpec

Hamilton 350 Blog

The Great Bear Rainforest

The War in the Woods

More than six years after a historic agreement to save the Great Bear Rainforest, the promise of protection remains unmet.

A Forest like No Other

The dense web of natural life found in the Great Bear Rainforest has earned it the deserving nickname, "Canada's Amazon." 

A Double Threat

The proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline puts the unique ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest, and the communities that rely on it, at risk.

Journey into the Great Bear 

20-min video

Hamilton 350 Blog

Sinking of the RMS Titanic

April 15, 1912

The RMS Titanic sank.

One hundred years later,
we should reflect on this tragic disaster.

Why did the Titanic meet its fate?

The answer is a simple one – arrogance.

And yet we repeat the same mistake.

We are all on our Titanic.

We sail full steam ahead in uncharted waters,
ignoring the signs of danger ahead.

 Collapse

How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
 - Jared Diamond

Tell the whole story on the Tar Sands

Minister tells the Government side; Hamilton should challenge him.

Federal Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver is speaking to the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce on March 30th. His talk is described as “about the Federal Budget and the future of Canada's oil sands and associated manufacturing opportunities here in Ontario.”

Minister Oliver’s views and those of the federal Government are well known. They promote development of the tar sands as one of the main routes to economic growth in Canada. But there is another view that must be heard before deciding if the rewards of the tar sands exploitation are worth the cost.

The impact of developing Alberta’s tar sands is of national importance, so clearly there is some responsibility of civil society in Hamilton to ask if the growth and jobs created are justified. The City of Hamilton has for a long time promoted the “triple bottom line” as a way to view the merits of any proposal. It asks that we always view development in three ways – economic, social and environmental. The “triple bottom line” is also not a short term view, but asks what sort of City we want for future generations – more recently we’ve adopted “the best place to raise a child” which happily reflects a long term view.

So let’s look at the tar sands through the triple lens and for the long term - for generations to come - for Canada and the rest of the world.

The economic impact of the tar sands

The cost of inaction on climate change in terms of lost GDP outweighs the costs of taking action to cut emissions. Yet the tar sands exploitation, far from helping meet any emissions goal, is making it harder to reach. We are trading off current GDP growth for much larger GDP losses in the future. Losses that come from drought reduced agricultural production, pine beetle devastated forests, poorer fishing yields and flood and storm damaged homes and property. Some pundits state that Canada will benefit from warmer weather, without discussing the disruption that comes from accelerated climate change and the broader impacts – which will affect global GDP. In these days of globalization, we are not immune to this – as we can see when Honda North America had to shut production last year due to floods in Thailand. Worse still would be the cost of the “climate wars” anticipated by Gwynne Dyer.

We’ve seen our Premier state that our “petro-dollar” is driving manufacturing away from Ontario. And where are the economic benefits really going? To large foreign owned oil companies who are mining the oil. Not to supply Canadians but to supply the gas guzzling life style of our neighbours to the south.

The social impact of the tar sands

It is clear that the exploitation of the tar sands has led to debate, much of it unpleasant. Locally, nationally and globally we see communities and governments who not only disagree (which is democratic) but resort to finger pointing, unjust accusations and sometimes unethical tactics.

Tell the whole story on the Tar Sands

At the local level the tar sands are having significant negative impacts on nearby communities – there’s evidence that mining the Athabasca tar sands has increased cancer causing levels in the environment downstream on the Athabasca River. Health Canada has asserted that “climate change is expected to increase risks to the health of Canadians through many pathways – the food they eat, the air they breathe, the water they drink”. So as the tar sands impact our climate, so they impact our health. Nationally we see the breakdown in civil discussion. We see the spat between Premier Dalton McGuinty and Alberta’s Premier Alison Redford in discussing the rising value of our dollar due to oil exports and its impact on our manufacturing economy. We see respected national organizations being tarred as “radical groups” when challenging the Northern Gateway pipeline.

Canada’s international standing has also been harmed. We lost the respect of many countries globally when we backed out of the Kyoto commitment at last December’s Durban Summit. For this we earned yet another “Fossil of the Year” award, for the fifth year running.

The environmental impact of the tar sands

No one, not even our Minister of Natural Resources, has claimed that the tar sands are good for the environment. They are affecting an area of 140,000 sq km in the primary boreal forest of Canada, an area the size of New York State or England. Due to oil sands operations, the Alberta landscape will never look the same again, as the forest is blasted away into huge opencast mines and vast tailing ponds filled with toxic waste water. Promises to reclaim the forests to their original state are unlikely to be possible. Canada is home to half the remaining boreal forest in the world, which contains 11% of the global terrestrial carbon sinks. In order to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, the International Panel on Climate Change has said that global emissions must peak by 2015 and fall by at least 80% compared with 1990 levels by 2050. Yet Canada’s emissions have grown by over 30% since 1990 and we have no real plan to bring them down by enough to come close to what is needed.

The production of oil sands is also water intensive, averaging three barrels of water to produce a single barrel of oil. The primary source of water is the Athabasca River, which is already down to critical levels as extraction from the river increases. Only 5-10 percent of the water is returned to the river. The rest is too toxic and is stored in tailing ponds so poisonous that birds who land there die. The huge volumes mean that enormous amounts of toxic wastewater are produced. Individual tailing ponds are up to 50 sq km in size and (so large they) can be seen from space.

What’s a job worth?

So when Minister Oliver stands up to promote the tar sands, lets also ask questions about the true triple bottom line, not just for today’s slightly bruised economy but also for the world of our children and grandchildren. Who will truly benefit from oil sands development?

Hamilton 350 Blog

The Ethical Path for Canada – Stop the Tar Sands, its Pipelines and Tankers

Atmospheric greenhouse gases are already past the maximum safe level and significant global climate change is obviously underway. By far the most rapidly growing source of greenhouse gases in Canada is from the exploitation of the tar sands (renamed the oil sands to make them sound less dirty that they are). 

Therefore, the ethical responsibility of Canadians is to stop the growth of tar sands exploitation and work to reduce it. That is the single largest contribution that Canadians can make to slow global climate change and hopefully avoiding or minimizing its worst effects.

The tar sands are the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and already exceed – on a daily basis – one million cars each driving 500 km.

Nearly all tar sands products are exported, primarily to the United States. To increase these exports, efforts are underway to establish additional pipelines to carry the bitumen to foreign refineries.

One of these is the Keystone XL pipeline to American refineries on the Gulf of Mexico – a scheme that has at least temporarily been blocked by the US president under pressure from Americans worried about climate change and about the pollution danger from ruptured pipelines.

The second major pipeline scheme is Northern Gateway, an 1100-km pipeline across northern Alberta and British Columbia to the port of Kitimat where the bitumen would be loaded onto 225 oil super tankers each year. These mega ships would then have to make their way through the narrow channels and fjords of the Great Bear Rainforest, and along the pristine Pacific coastline. Their likely main destinations are China and the United States. As outraged First Nations and other BC residents are loudly arguing, it is only a matter of time before one of these tankers crashes and devastates the BC coastline.

The Pacific coast has already experienced the worst oil tanker spill in history – the grounding of the Exxon Valdez on March 24, 1989, that dumped between 11 and 32 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound on the Alaska coast. That spill spread over 2100 km of coastline and 28,000 square-km of ocean and its effects are still being felt more than twenty years later. The immediate effects included the estimated deaths of 100,000 to as many as 250,000 seabirds, at least 2,800 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbour seals, 247 bald eagles, and 22 orcas, as well as the destruction of billions of salmon and herring eggs.

This must not be allowed to happen again.

The Northern Gateway pipeline must not proceed and oil tanker traffic on the BC coastline must not be permitted.

These supertankers are longer than the height of the Empire State building (more than a third of a kilometre).

 The effort to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline and the tanker route is now recognized as the most significant environmental action in Canada.

The Hamilton 350 Committee fully supports this effort and is taking solidarity actions in Hamilton, including on March 24 – the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

We also understand that the export of tar sands bitumen has very serious consequences for employment in Hamilton. As recognized by Premier McGuinty, Ontario manufacturing has been heavily damaged by Canada’s growing dependence on oil exports. The Canadian dollar has become a petrodollar – closely tracking the price of oil as it has climbed dramatically alongside the ramping up of tar sands exploitation. The resulting high dollar has hurt manufacturing exports and resulted in tens of thousands of lost jobs, particularly in southern Ontario.

Hamilton has another connection to Enbridge Inc, the company pushing the Northern Gateway pipeline. One of their pipeline hubs is in the village of Westover, in Flamborough. Enbridge is the largest transporter of crude oil in Canada (over 15,000 miles of pipeline) and exports 65 percent of western Canadian oil and bitumen. Enbridge is currently proposing to reverse flows in the 200 km Sarnia-Westover pipeline to allow shipping of tar sands oil to the ExxonMobil refinery near Nanticoke. This is a first step in making eastern Canadian refineries accessible to tar sands products, and another alternative to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines.

Other Hamilton connections to the tar sands include four major gas station groups operating locally that are owned by tar sands companies – Esso, Petro-Canada, Shell and Husky. 

Hamilton 350 Blog

Corporations have no use for borders

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.

“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”

Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

- Chris Hedges