Tone deaf

The decision last week by the Ministry of Environment to challenge the ruling of its own review process in a courtroom defies comprehension. It defies logic. Defies reason.

The optics were bad from the outset, a publicly funded provincial ministry whose sole mission it is to safeguard the environment, battling fiercely on behalf of a well-financed industrial wind developer arrayed against a handful of mostly grandmothers desperately resisting the destruction of an endangered species. On Crown land no less. The first bit of land for 40 kilometres on a busy migratory bird flyway.

It was the wrong fight for the MOE to become entangled. This was the developer’s job. The developer had the resources and one of Canada’s largest law firms backing them up. They didn’t need the MOE’s help.

The process was rigged in their favour from the beginning. The Green Energy Act was enacted precisely to facilitate wind and solar energy developers and mute the objections of the people who would be affected.

The MOE set the rules. It cleared away the obstacles (safeguards). It established a threshold so high (serious and irreversible harm) that they must have believed nobody was going to stop them.

Yet when their own environmental review tribunal got underway the MOE was right in the thick of things—fighting cheek by jowl with the developer to ensure that the industrial wind project it approved at Ostrander Point, got built.

To understand how the provincial bureaucracy became so badly entangled in a mess that would see MOE officials throw endangered turtles under the bulldozer on behalf of an industrial wind developer, it helps to remember that former premier Dalton McGuinty believed he was doing missionary work in renewable energy—bringing righteous and pure ideas to the unenlightened and unwashed in the rural countryside. Naturally we would resist but McGuinty knew best and his will would prevail. Good was on his side. Or so he believed. And likely continues to believe.

Ontarians wanted to believe him too. And many did for a while. But frustration over gas plants, choking debt and declining manufacturing jobs seeded disillusionment. The promises made over the last decade now appear half-baked and unrealistic. Too much righteous fervour—not enough practical and workable solutions.

But McGuinty is gone. Kathleen Wynne has taken over his job as premier and is hanging onto a minority government. She is desperate not to oversee a rout of her party in the next election.

The Tribunal presented her a gift—a way to escape the ugly battle over Ostrander Point. But the signal to cease and desist never came. So Instead of taking the gaping exit, the MOE, like a bloodied beligerant drunk who doesn’t know the fight is already lost, reenters the fray with fists up. Once again the MOE is choosing to stand with the developer —this time in an Ontario courtroom. Against whom?

The Prince Edward County Field Naturalists—as kindly, gentle and dedicated a group of folks you are likely to meet. Ontario Nature. The municipality of Prince Edward. Bird experts. Bat experts. Turtle experts. Alvar experts. Health experts. And now its own Environmental Review Tribunal. Througout the 40 days of hearings, Tribunal members Robert Wright and Heather Gibbs listened, considered and then concluded that this industrial wind project should be stopped or the turtles there would be decimated.

Yet the Ministry of Environment, backed by a seemingly endless supply of our tax dollars, is readying to launch an expensive court fight against all these folks to see that its will prevails.

But when they enter the courtroom later this year the MOE won’t just be challenging a Tribunal’s decision, but democracy itself. They will be defying the right of ordinary people to stand up to its governments and policies that do harm to them, their community or the world around them.

When governments stop listening they become menacing threats to a free people. This ought to alarm us all.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca