Unravelling

The revelations in Demorestville on Friday were as shocking as they were predictable. Many folks harbour a degree of cynicism about their government’s action and intentions. Sadly last week, for many, their worst suspicions were confirmed.

To fully grasp the significance of Joe Crowley’s explosive testimony on Friday at the reconstituted Environmental Review Tribunal (Tribunal) looking into the permit to allow a developer to build nine industrial wind turbines on Crown Land at Ostrander Point in South Marysburgh, one has to consider the origins of the Green Energy Act (GEA). There is much more at stake here than the outcome of one ill-considered wind project. Rather, it reveals the truly dangerous and overreaching ambition that corrupted the very foundations of the GEA and why it must be dismantled.

To begin with, one has to recall that the primary purpose of the GEA in 2009 was to remove the hurdles standing before developers. Then-premier Dalton McGuinty was growing impatient with the slow pace of wind and solar development, despite a rich banquet of subsidies his government had prepared. He was frustrated that private sector developers and investors weren’t gorging themselves at the lavish table of incentives he had laid out for them. He convened a committee of developers and renewable energy advocates to tell him what he needed to do to speed up the proliferation of industrial wind turbines on horizons across the province.

He had come to the crossroads. McGuinty believed in his heart the virtue of renewable energy. Yet he never really grasped the complexity of the electricity system in Ontario, its interdependence on neighbouring jurisdictions, its advantages relative to other markets, or the fragility of the alternatives he proposed. He had vowed in a debate in 2003, and many times afterwards, to see that thousands of wind turbines and thousands of acres of solar panels would be constructed across the province. Altering the landscape so audaciously, so severely, would herald a new era of electricity generation. It was an emblem of his modernity and progressivism.

But by 2008, he had missed deadline after deadline. It looked like he might never reach his goals. He had come face to face with the same demon as every ambitious leader does. He was persuaded that to meet the good goal of renewable energy he would have to do some bad things. (The Samsung deal and gas plant scandal would come further down this slippery slope.)

The message emerging from the wise-persons committee during that winter of 2009 was that the province’s own regulatory apparatus, erected to safeguard the environment, nature, health and the electricity distribution system, was itself the problem. It was the bottleneck. The province’s own protections discouraged investment in these projects. At each stage, at each ministry, a bureaucrat could stall the process, creating delays that cost money. It was too openended. Developers needed certainty. Money alone couldn’t attract the scale of investment he needed to fund his renewable energy ambitions. These safeguards had to come down.

So the GEA was cobbled together. Despite its friendly-sounding name, the real goal of the GEA was not about renewable energy at all. Its primary function was to neuter McGuinty’s own ministries of energy, environment, heritage and natural resources. Other government agencies— the Ontario Power Authority, Ontario Energy Board, Hydro One, Ontario Power Generation— were forced to fall in line.

Today renewable energy applications are expedited within Ministry walls, away from the curious and probing eyes of the public—with just a single appeal opportunity: The Environmental Review Tribunal examines a project only after it has been approved.

The renewable energy business blossomed just as McGuinty had hoped. Suddenly, the banquet was joined by developers large and small—including one developer eager to build turbines on a rugged, largely untouched patch of Crown land in the throat of the North American migratory bird flyway.

It was, however, behind the walls of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry that the Ostrander Point developer was granted a permit to “harm, harass and kill” endangered species, known to live and breed in the proposed project location.

This permit smelled bad to the Tribunal— itself a creation of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. So much so that Tribunal members Heather Gibbs and Robert Wright concluded that the risk to the Blanding’s turtle was too grave and that the mitigation measures proposed were too feeble and ultimately untested. It revoked the developer’s renewable energy permit because it determined the risk to the endangered species was serious and irreversible. It was a brave and precedent-setting decision.

But how did the Tribunal reach this conclusion after the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry—the ministry tasked with protecting endangered species— had determined mitigation measures proposed by the developer would provide an overall benefit to the species? Indeed, the developer’s lawyers argued that it wasn’t the Tribunal’s job to second-guess the MNRF. The MNRF, after all, were the experts.

We know now, however, thanks to Joe Crowley, that the MNRF knew the risks. It was warned of the peril posed by the project to endangered species. It knew the mitigation measures the developer was proposing were untested and unlikely to work. It was advised not to grant the permit to “harm, harass and kill” the Blanding’s turtle. The ministry simply ignored the advice from its own expert.

So now it is laid bare. Not only did the MNRF fail to do its job to protect endangered species—it was coerced to look the other way because it was a renewable energy project favoured by the government.

Shame alone ought to compel the minister of natural resources and forestry to resign. But if not, the opposition parties and Ontarians must insist that a thorough investigation is conducted and the safeguards we have established to protect this province and its inhabitants from destructive development are restored.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca