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Protect and keep safe
Imagine for a moment, a place where independent, educated folks protected our water. Our air. Endangered species. Natural habitat. And the health of the environment. Imagine that this was their job. That we recruited the brightest and best to do this on our behalf. Imagine that we could rely on them, wholly and utterly, to provide independent and unfiltered prescriptions to safeguard the natural world.
Perhaps that is too grand, too fanciful, too ambitious. Imagine then, that these folks were simply unaligned with developers, that they were free to think, to observe and to prescribe solutions using the best data and methods available. Imagine that we lived in such a place.
We know it doesn’t exist. Not in Ontario.
Provincial agencies have been reduced to paper filers. Have all the boxes been ticked? The studies completed? Public consultation? Check. Check. Check. Approved.
We know, too, that serious investigation of potential threats to water, air and the environment in our communities are sub-contracted to the same d evelopers whose projects givves rise to those threats. It is a cliché that hired consultants tend to deliver the answer their client is seeking. The money talks. It defies nature itself, that it could be any other way.
This alignment of interests is shamefully out of balance. It would be funny were it not so tragic. For the turtles being crushed by heavy equipment in South Marysburgh. For the neighbours who whose water is compromised in Chatham-Kent. For property taxpayers across the province who will be stuck with the bill to clean up the mess when the developers move on after they reaped the last dime out of our government.
But it is worse than this still.
We know, for example, that killing endangered species in this province requires no more than a form to be filled out. That thousands of such permits are handed out each year, and that since 2013, everyone who has asked, has received a killing permit. Check.
So how did we get here? When did we agree this was a sensible arrangement? When did we say it was okay to farm out protection of the environment to developers and their consultants? And in this election year, who will restore these protections? Anyone?
Regular readers of this column will know your correspondent favours smaller government. That I worry about unsustainable debt piling up that mortgages my children’s future. Yet if ever there were a critical role for government, for a collective safeguard free from political, financial and faddish influence, it is the protection of the things that sustain life and the living world around us.
That is not a stretch of conservative principles. Nor is it contradictory. In its simplest reading, conservation is rooted in conservative principles.
Yet the erosion of natural safeguards, while certainly already underway, was accelerated under Mike Harris’s Conservative government, when these agencies were massively defunded, leading to a mass exodus of people, insight and capability.
But Ontario voted out the Conservatives in 2003. Looking for change.
Dalton McGuinty’s government did nothing, however, to restore these ministries. Worse he plundered the weakened agencies to eradicate safeguards and protections to enable his push for renewable energy. Whether you believe his motives were noble or reckless, the policy has proved ruinous to the electricity sector in this province and needlessly devastating to those struggling to pay their hydro bills.
His greatest crime however was the Green Energy Act, which wiped out regulations built over decades. He used this terrible legislation to defile the countryside, poison water and kill animals clinging at the edge of existence in this province.
Kathleen Wynne said she understood these mistakes and that her government would fix it. But four years have passed and those safeguards remain in tatters.
In a matter of weeks, we will go to the polls again. Yet, none of the leading parties in this election are proposing to commit the resources required to restore the independence and staffing needed to reconstruct these protective agencies.
The NDP say they will take the proceeds of the Liberal’s cap and trade scheme and distribute this to northern Ontario.
Doug Ford is, so far, silent on his priorities on environment other than to say he will axe the Green Energy Act. While it is a good start, it hardly points to a thoughtful policy direction.
The Liberals seemed bound for the political wilderness on June 7, so it may not much matter that they plan to spend billions on rebates to encourage residents to purchase green technology and make home improvements that promote energy efficiency.
Each of the contenders is simply nibbling around a broken status quo.
We have, it seems in Ontario, moved into a post-environmental safeguard era. Our governments are so keen to change our behaviour and to promote faith its own brand of green religion they’ve forgotten that their first job is to protect the environment and all the creatures who live in it.
Sadly that won’t change after June 7.
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