1996 Preserving Canada's forests
1996 Capitalizing on free trade
1996 Eliminating sewage pollution; reforming fisheries; siting controversial facilities
1995 Property rights in the defence of nature
1994 Preventing massive water exports
1994 Privatizing natural resources
1993 Reforming environmental assessments
1993 Property rights: the key to environmental protection
1992 Free trade's environmental benefits
1992 Economic union's environmental potential
1991 Preserving the Carmanah Valley
1990 Reforesting Canada
Preserving Canada's forests (1996)
Dear Friend:
These are bad times for Canada's forests. We are slowly losing our forested areas across the country, as new growth fails to keep up with increased harvests. And we are plagued by bitter conflicts over how forests should be managed. In Northeastern Ontario's Temagami region, disputes over logging have resulted in demonstrations, blockades, arrests, court challenges, and even an explosion. The Ontario government has opened up vast areas in the region to logging and mining. But native people claim the area's lands as their own and demand the right to manage them. Meanwhile, environmentalists insist that the provincial government close access roads and set up a wildland reserve to preserve some of our last remaining old-growth white pines.
Similar conflicts are occurring in the Christmas Mountains, the nine remote hills in New Brunswick's highlands that harbour some of the province's last unlogged forests and the headwaters of three famous salmon rivers. For over a century, lovers of wilderness have called on the province to protect the unbroken expanse of Crown forest. Calls for its preservation have even come from the government's own Department of Tourism and Heritage. But to no avail. The last decade has brought roads into the previously inaccessible hills. Logging has followed the roads: The multinational Repap has begun to clearcut the area for logs and pulp.
In such situations, whom can we trust with the future of our forests? We can't trust the government: Premier Frank McKenna and 21 other MLAs have reneged on their 1995 promise to establish a protected wilderness area in the Christmas Mountains. And Alan Graham, the Minister of Natural Resources and Energy, has put the creation of road building and harvesting jobs ahead of the preservation of the forests that he complains have become "overmature." Nor can we trust the logging company: Repap has no incentive to preserve the area, since its five-year lease doesn't permit it to profit from conservation.
It would be far wiser to place our trust in the people of New Brunswick themselves: the native people who want to preserve ancient passage routes, village sites, and burial grounds in the Christmas Mountains and who want greater control over the area; the 20 percent of New Brunswick's population who belong to organizations fighting for the Christmas Mountains' protection; the 85 percent of the provincial population who favour protecting examples of New Brunswick's forests, even at a cost to the timber harvest.
But governments often ignore their citizens' concerns. With an eye to the next election, they are steered by short-term political needs. They want to promote visible economic activity; they want to put people to work; and they want to satisfy powerful industries. Such incentives make it inevitable that logging will continue to take its toll on our environment and on our economy.
Loggers' incentives also work against the environment. Stumpage fees, although higher than they used to be, still don't reflect the true value of our trees. Forestry licences don't cover the time it takes trees to grow. Many licences don't allow loggers to prevent others from harvesting in the same area. And the licences apply only to commercial timber harvesting, preventing licence-holders from benefitting from the increased recreational opportunities that would result from efforts to preserve forests, protect water quality, or promote wildlife. In short, timber companies have few financial incentives to invest in a forest, to regenerate it once logged, or to preserve it for other, more valuable uses. As a result, in one logging executive's words, companies "work to rule" on provincial land, doing the bare minimum required by regulations.
Because of our confidence that the people themselves, rather than short-sighted politicians or single-minded industries, can best preserve our precious resources, we are calling for a new approach to forestry—an approach that would see the resolution of native peoples' claims to land and resources, the setting aside of protected areas for future generations, and the decentralization of forestry management that would allow individuals and communities to control the forests they love and depend on.
In recent years, we have worked to promote this sustainable alternative to our current forestry regime. In studies and in a book, at conferences, and in the media, we have presented our approach to academics, forest industry representatives, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and most important, the general public. We have indeed made some progress. A better informed public has become more involved in the preservation of our forests. Stumpage fees, especially those in British Columbia, have increased to better reflect the value of our trees. And a number of wilderness areas have been set aside for future generations. But we are by no means out of the woods.
I hope that this season you will be able to support our ongoing work to preserve our precious resources. Your tax-creditable donation will advance our efforts to promote ecologically and economically sustainable resource management across the country. In anticipation of your assistance, I thank you.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Executive Director
Capitalizing on free trade (1996)
Dear Friend:
Back in 1989, Environment Probe campaigned to turn free trade to the environment's advantage. Since then, the environmental impacts of free trade have been hotly debated. Critics have rightly pointed out that, in theory, governments may be hamstrung in imposing certain environmental standards. But other enterprising environmentalists have capitalized on free trade to reduce subsidies to—and raise standards in—our environmentally destructive resource sectors.
Ironically, environmentalists have found powerful allies in U.S. resource industries that object to the generous subsidies enjoyed by their Canadian counterparts. Subsidies, they argue, give Canadian resource companies an unfair advantage. Although U.S. corporate efforts to level the playing field spring strictly from financial interests, their actions bring substantial environmental benefits.
The U.S. lumber lobby, for example, has played a critical role in reducing government subsidies to forestry companies operating in British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. Since the early 1980s, it has charged that the low "stumpage fees" (the tree-harvesting fees charged by provincial governments) make trees unreasonably cheap for Canadian companies, enabling them to undersell their U.S. competitors. The lumber lobby found an excellent forum for its complaints in the U.S.-Canada Trade Agreement and used trade actions to push up the disputed fees, especially in B.C. The result? Higher stumpage fees more accurately reflect the value of our trees, making logging more expensive. Export fees, also a result of U.S. pressures, will further increase the price of our trees. As the costs of logging and exporting increase, low-value logging becomes less feasible. And governments earn more from the logging that does occur. Our stumpage fees are still below those charged on the open market. But the dramatic increases of the last decade show that we're moving in the right direction. Free trade is helping us get there.
We can also use free trade to eliminate subsidies that take the form of lax environmental standards. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has announced that it will be scrutinizing Ontario's movement towards environmental deregulation: Its lawyers will examine the Mike Harris government's recent report recommending reductions in the number of environmental regulations to determine if the proposed changes violate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
After a report released last year indicated that most of British Columbia's forests are more laxly managed than are the public forests across the border in Washington State—B.C. standards allow for logging at a faster rate, bigger clearcuts, and inferior stream protection—environmentalists in the United States called for upwards harmonization of forestry standards under NAFTA. B.C.'s looser rules, they charged, gave the province's lumber companies an unfair advantage. Their brief to NAFTA's environmental commissioners alerted activists to the environmental promise of the harmonization of standards. With environmentalists across the continent joining hands on this issue, we can look forward to improved forestry practices north of the border.
Just this month, environmentalists in Alberta filed a complaint under NAFTA, charging the federal government with ignoring its own environmental laws. The government, they contend, has bypassed provisions of the Fisheries Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, facilitating approvals of damaging projects. They hope that their complaint will prompt a full NAFTA investigation and pressure the government into complying with its environmental protection legislation.
NAFTA is working to protect the southern environment as well. For the first time, officials in Mexico and the United States are cooperating to control pollution along their border, with the ultimate goal of enacting common standards. Texans who understand that the quality of the air they breathe depends on pollution controls in Mexico are among those looking to NAFTA for environmental gain. Progress is slow, but it is indeed progress.
I hope that you agree that events have confirmed the value in our approach to free trade. Much of what we advocated has come to pass. But past accomplishments will not finance our future operations. To continue our efforts to promote policies that are both economically and environmentally sustainable, we need your help. I urge you to support our ongoing work.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Executive Director
Eliminating sewage pollution; reforming fisheries; siting controversial facilities (1996)
Dear Friend:
Quebec's bureaucrats don't appreciate our findings. They complain that our recent study of sewage pollution in Quebec makes them look like they're incompetent, or not doing their jobs. And no wonder. The study, by Environment Probe researcher Martin Nantel, points out that although Quebec has made considerable progress since the 1970s (when wastewater treatment facilities served less than two per cent of the population), 376 municipalities, representing 1.5 million people, still flush their sewage directly into lakes and rivers. When we released the study early this year, media interest created great consternation in government ranks. The Environment Minister is now demanding explanations from senior bureaucrats, who berate our uncompromising positions.
Environment Probe isn't likely to make any more friends in government ranks on the West Coast when we release our just-completed study of sewage pollution in British Columbia. That study concentrates on sewage's adverse effects on salmon and other fish. Sewage pollution degrades aquatic habitat, robbing water of oxygen, preventing sunlight from reaching plants, and damaging spawning grounds. It can also directly harm fish, clogging their gills, scraping exposed membranes, causing stress and disease, and interfering with reproduction and feeding. Treatment plant effluents that are disinfected with chlorine, but not subsequently dechlorinated, can burn fish gills and induce convulsions; chlorinated effluents—characterizing 20 of BC's sewage treatment plants—can be deadly to fish hundreds of metres downstream. Such threats to fish pose more than an environmental problem. Given the fisheries' overwhelming importance to BC's economy, sewage polluters' disregard for fish constitutes a real economic risk.
Environment Probe supporters appreciate our research and public education projects. Meanwhile, our conclusions often make polluters—and the governments who have licensed or subsidized those polluters—squirm. We're not afraid to be critical. But we also strive to be constructive, always taking a solutions-oriented approach stressing guiding principles and suggesting concrete reforms.
Such reforms characterize our recent work on fisheries, which, perhaps for this very reason, has made a real splash in the New Brunswick press. Because of the failure of remote governments to manage large scale fisheries, we've been looking into the ecological implications of establishing individual or community fishing rights. Experience in other countries indicates that secure rights empower fishermen to protect their resources from pollution; secure rights also provide fishermen with incentives to reduce fishing pressures, implement conservation measures, and enhance stocks and their habitats. We recently completed a chapter on this issue for an upcoming book on Atlantic fisheries, and are currently preparing a paper and a speech for a conference in Vancouver on the BC salmon crisis.
We've also been involved in what I believe is groundbreaking work on the siting of controversial facilities. Our research shows that the surest way to avoid "NIMBY" is to give decision-making power to all communities of interest likely to be affected by a proposed project: those bearing the risks and costs of a proposed facility should benefit from it, and they should have a deciding say in whether or not it goes ahead. In the future, we will be promoting these principles to protect communities and individuals from the adverse effects of facilities as diverse as landfills and pipelines.
As you can see, we've been extremely busy and productive. If you agree that we're engaged in timely and valuable work, I would urge you to support our efforts.You can guess that our research gets no assistance from governments and corporations; our research and public education projects depend on your support.
If you have questions or comments about our current or past projects, or if you'd like more information, please don't hesitate to write or call. If you wish to contact me by e-mail, my address is ElizabethBrubaker@nextcity.com. I always appreciate hearing from our supporters.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Executive Director
Curbing sewage pollution (1995)
Every day, cities dump over one billion litres of raw sewage into Canada's waters
Dear Friend:
Before world leaders gathered in Halifax for June's G-7 summit, organizers fretted over an embarrassing problem: one of the city's sewage pipes emptied just outside the meeting site, spewing raw sewage into the otherwise scenic harbour. Worried that foreign dignitaries and journalists would smell sewage and spot floating condoms, tampon applicators and toilet paper, politicians devised a plan. Their proposal? To extend a submerged pipe into the harbour, improving the view and sparing the visitors' noses. The federal government ended up scrapping the plan, but not because merely hiding the sewage wouldn't solve the problem. On the contrary, it simply deemed the $1 million project too expensive.
This spring, West Coast bureaucrats faced a different sort of sewage problem. Two years earlier, environmentalists and fishermen, incensed by Vancouver's dumping of human excrement and toxic chemicals into Burrard Inlet, had launched a private prosecution under the federal Fisheries Act, which forbids anyone from poisoning waters in which fish live. The provincial Crown soon took over the case from the private complainants, as is its policy, to ensure that prosecutions that proceed are in "the public interest." Then, in May, in an abrupt reversal, the Crown's special prosecutor dropped the charges, explaining that the provincial and local governments had an unwritten agreement to allow the discharge of raw waste from overloaded pipes.
In Ontario, the government has also tacitly approved pollution, by sewage, of the province's lakes and rivers. Last fall, when the provincial auditor announced that 24 percent of Ontario's sewage treatment plants—many operated by the province itself—fail to meet provincial guidelines, the environment minister urged reporters not to convey to their readers the impression that provincial waters are unsafe. Apparently unconcerned that his own ministry's reports of long-standing compliance problems—reports, for example, that of the 91 plants not complying with effluent guidelines in 1991, 36 had failed to comply five years in a row—could indicate serious threats to our health and environment, he blithely defended his government's efforts to protect Ontario's waters.
The above stories are by no means isolated cases. All across the country, sewage threatens fisheries and human health, closes beaches and casts an aesthetic blight on our precious waters, with untold social, economic and environmental consequences. Some of this pollution violates provincial water quality standards but is ignored by sympathetic regulators. Other pollution—particularly the toxic metals and chemicals often found in treatment plant effluents—escapes provincial regulation entirely.
But the problem doesn't lie in an absence of laws prohibiting sewage pollution. The federal Fisheries Act makes it illegal to put even minuscule amounts of any "deleterious substance" into "water frequented by fish," providing for fines of up to $1 million a day and, for repeat offenders, three-year prison terms. And riparian rights—a form of common law property rights—enable pollution victims to obtain court injunctions against those who foul lakes or rivers flowing past their property. Preventing even subtle changes, such as the hardening or warming of water, traditional riparian law surpasses the zero discharge regulations now sought by many environmentalists.
The problem lies in governments' refusal to enforce existing laws, and in their reluctance to let aggrieved citizens take enforcement into their own hands. In some provinces, such as British Columbia and Alberta, governments intervene as a matter of course in Fisheries Act prosecutions, taking control out of the hands of concerned citizens. In other provinces, such as Ontario, governments have overridden common law property rights with laws and regulations shielding polluting sewage treatment plants from civil lawsuits.
Governments' reluctance to allow citizens to enforce anti-pollution laws is hardly surprising, since legal actions would often be directed at the governments themselves, as the operators of many of the offending sewage treatment plants. They also fear that tougher enforcement would result in their having to fund improvements to municipally operated plants. Governments thus find themselves paralysed by conflicts of interest, loath to spend the money required to upgrade sewer systems and sewage treatment plants, and determined to keep the courts from forcing them to act.
Breaking the deadlocks that occur when governments both operate (or finance) and regulate sewage systems requires either changing the operator or changing the regulator. We can't change the regulator: regulation is the proper role of government. But we can change the operator. By getting governments out of the sewage treatment business, we can begin to restore their regulatory integrity. Governments will police privately operated sewage treatment plants more effectively than they have policed public plants: requiring all plants to meet tough effluent standards won't cost them scarce tax dollars. Such has been the experience in the U.K., where the government privatized water supply and sewage treatment in 1989. Required by the government to meet strict standards, the U.K.'s new water and sewer companies are taking on polluters—powerful lobbies, such as farmers, that governments had long refused to tackle—and spending over six billion dollars upgrading sewage infrastructure. The result? Dramatic reductions in pollution, in many places bringing the U.K. in line with European Community water quality standards for the first time.
There is an even more effective way to resolve the current environmentally disastrous conflict of interest between operators and regulators. By strengthening citizens' rights to clean water, we can turn ordinary citizens into vigilant regulators. Governments should stop interfering with private prosecutions brought by concerned citizens under the federal Fisheries Act. And they should restore common law property rights to clean water. Fighting sewage polluters in the absence of political interference is hard enough; with governments on the side of the polluters, the battles become virtually unwinnable.
Sewage pollution is not new to Canada: Halifax has been dumping raw waste into its harbour for almost 250 years. But events of the last year in Nova Scotia, British Columbia and Ontario remind us that we can't rely on governments, wearing two hats as both operators and regulators, to correct our long-standing sewage problem. Please support our work to get governments out of the sewage business and to empower citizens to take polluters to court when governments refuse. With these reforms we can prevent further deterioration of our lakes, rivers and oceans, and begin to clean up the damage that has already been done.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Executive Director
Growth at All Costs
With any province, such as this, growing as it is, it is impossible not to affect the conditions of people and of streams and watersheds, as compared to the way they were before. They must be affected.
Ontario Premier Frost, 1956
Nineteen fifty-five was a bad year for Ontario's municipal polluters. In separate cases, courts ruled that two municipalities—Woodstock and Richmond Hill—must stop dumping raw sewage into local rivers. But the municipalities needn't have worried: the provincial government came to their rescue before the injunctions took effect.
Woodstock had constructed its sewage disposal plant in 1922 for a population of 9,000. In the following decades, the plant failed to keep up with the city's growth. Improperly maintained and operated, it could not handle the waste from 16,000 residents; the sewage simply overflowed into the Thames River, or received inadequate treatment before being discharged there.
Mr. Burgess, who operated a dairy farm just downstream from the sewage outlet, found one of his cows mired in the Thames in 1947. He inspected the river, which he found "slimy and stinking, with solid matter flowing downstream." The condition worsened over the next several years. The cows developed dysentery, decreased their milk production, and aborted their calves. Mr. Burgess sold them at a loss. He stopped renting out pasture land, and he stopped selling sod to landscape gardeners, since he had no cattle to keep it short.
In 1955, Mr. Burgess went to court, where he sought and obtained an injunction and damages. The judge who heard the case found that Woodstock's pollution of the river constituted a nuisance which should be restrained. Citing a recent Supreme Court decision, he simply explained, "where there is pollution of a watercourse, then an injunction ought to be granted." The judge did, however, make one concession: he stayed the injunction for 18 months, giving Woodstock a chance to upgrade its plant.
Meanwhile, the Village of Richmond Hill was undergoing a similar trial, with a similar result. In 1952 the village had constructed a sewage disposal plant that discharged its effluent, along with storm-sewer water, into a branch of the Don River. Because the sewage plant was too small for Richmond Hill's population and because chlorination was improperly controlled, the formerly clear stream became dark and dirty, its fish and watercress disappeared, its banks became littered with toilet paper and condoms, and the surrounding area began to smell of sewage.
Fed up with the mess being created by the sewage plant, Annie Stephens, who owned land along the Don, filed a lawsuit claiming that Richmond Hill had violated her riparian rights—the rights of people who own or occupy land beside lakes and rivers. The judge who heard the case in 1955 agreed that a riparian has the right to the natural flow of a stream, "without sensible alteration in its character or quality," and need not suffer damages in order to obtain an injunction.
Richmond Hill argued that an injunction against it would harm the public welfare: not only would it deprive its own citizens of the only affordable method of sewage disposal, but it could also adversely affect 95 per cent of the province's other municipalities with similar systems. The judge responded with a passionate defence of the court's role in preserving individual rights:
It is not for the judiciary to permit the doctrine of utilitarianism to be used as a make-weight in the scales of justice. . . .
It is the duty of the State (and of statesmen) to seek the greatest good for the greatest number. To this end, all civilized nations have entrusted much individual independence to their Governments. But be it ever remembered that no one is above the law. Neither those who govern our affairs, their appointed advisers, nor those retained to build great works for society's benefit, may act so as to abrogate the slightest right of the individual, save within the law. It is for Government to protect the general by wise and benevolent enactment. It is for me, or so I think, to interpret the law, determine the rights of the individual and to invoke the remedy required for their enforcement.
The judge therefore concluded that Mrs. Stephens was entitled to a broad injunction; he perpetually restrained Richmond Hill from discharging effluent or storm overflow into the Don and from polluting it in any manner. He then suspended the injunction for one year. Five months later the Court of Appeal affirmed the injunction.
At issue in both the Woodstock and Richmond Hill trials was the question of statutory authority. Normally, polluters can protect themselves with "the defence of statutory authority" if their pollution results inevitably from a government-authorized activity. In licensing an activity, the thinking goes, the government licenses its inevitable results; otherwise, of what use would a licence be?
Both Woodstock and Richmond Hill argued that their permission, under the Public Health Act, to operate sewage treatment plants gave them statutory authority to pollute. The courts rejected these arguments, explaining that regardless of whether the Department of Health had lawfully approved the municipalities' sewage treatment plans, water pollution was neither an anticipated nor an inevitable result. The municipalities, albeit at great expense, could have installed larger plants or considered land-based alternatives, such as sewage-farms.
It took the provincial government only six months to respond to the court's conclusion that "the Public Health Act does not authorize a municipality to interfere with riparian rights." On March 20, 1956, the government introduced An Act to amend The Public Health Act. The act dissolved the injunctions against Woodstock and Richmond Hill. It went even further, deeming any sewage project approved by the Department of Health to be operated by statutory authority. In the words of the Attorney General, "This means that the courts would not have power to grant an injunction to stop the operation of a sewage disposal plant to the inconvenience and detriment of all the inhabitants of the municipality." The Leader of the Opposition described the bill more bluntly, explaining that it empowered the Department of Health to allow municipalities to pollute Ontario's rivers: "Once the Department of Health gives approval, each one of these streams—in effect—can have sewage dumped into it."
A month earlier, the government had introduced An Act to establish the Ontario Water Resources Commission, purportedly to end "the pollution problem" in the province. The act empowered the OWRC to build and operate water supply and sewage disposal systems. The following year, the government authorized the commission to establish operating standards for sewage works and set water quality regulations. As the OWRC assumed responsibility for water quality from the Department of Health, it also acquired the department's power to authorize water pollution. It correspondingly gained that department's power to deprive citizens of their riparian rights—which traditionally permitted no sensible alteration in water quality. The OWRC Act so completely superseded riparian rights that there have been few riparian cases reported in the province since.
The debates surrounding both the Public Health Act amendments and the OWRC Act illuminate the government's approach to pollution. In the mid-1950s, most legislators assumed that population growth and industrial development inevitably led to pollution. As one MPP suggested, "wherever we have progress in industry, we have to contend with polluted water."
The politicians' insistence on pollution's inevitability verged on dishonesty. The Minister of Health admitted that treating most waste was not a technical problem. Others, most obviously the courts, also believed that pollution could—and must—be stopped. The real issue in dispute was not whether pollution could be stopped, but who should pay to stop it. The government argued that taxpayers—rather than polluters—should bear responsibility for clean-up costs. Premier Frost explained his commitment to shouldering the tremendous costs of cleaning up industrial pollution as follows:
I think it is reasonable and common sense to regard the fact that concentrations of industry create obligations. To regard them merely as possibilities for additional revenue is completely the wrong conception. . . . It will take everything Ontario receives from corporation and personal income taxes to pay for the incidence of industry only, and then it will not be sufficient.
As for polluting municipalities, many of them lacked the capital—or the credit to borrow money—to pay for repairing or expanding their sewage systems. And so the provincial government would have to come to their rescue, despite its own tight financial situation. This was not just the governing party's position; the Leader of the Opposition agreed wholeheartedly:
The municipalities in this province are not in a financial position to carry the full burden that will be imposed upon them by the type of corrective measures which will be proposed to them in the next few years. I believe quite sincerely that the Province of Ontario will have to come to the aid of these municipalities, and they will have to be given grants in order to lessen the financial impact upon the municipal taxpayers for these services.
Ultimately, of course, the two new acts shifted the burden not only to the provincial government but also to the victims of pollution. As is so often the case, the government pursued the public good by depriving victims of their rights. The public interest, the Attorney General explained, "must be paramount in the matter of injunction proceedings." The people of Woodstock and Richmond Hill "must live and have health and sanitation, no matter what happens. That is the first consideration." But the courts had not suggested otherwise; they had simply insisted that sanitation not occur at the expense of some citizens.
The politicians worried about a snowball effect if people were to retain—and use—their property rights. Pollution victims had increasingly begun to exercise their common law rights to clean water. One MPP described the situation as follows:
In too many cases, a municipality takes its water from a relatively pure stream, and discharges its sewage below its own water intake but above its neighbour's intake. Interest in this problem, I find, is much greater than ever before. There is a growing realization on the part of the public that it is a trespass on the rights of their neighbours and of themselves for untreated effluent to be discharged from municipal or industrial sewers into a stream or lake which serves others.
The legislators well knew that many municipalities used their rivers as sewers and could therefore be subject to lawsuits. One MPP remarked on the pollution plaguing the Humber and Don Rivers. Another described the Grand River as "nothing more or less than an open sewer," thanks in part to the city of Brantford's spewing into it raw sewage from 50,000 people. Another noted that even Ottawa had no sewage disposal plant. And Toronto's pollution had become the subject of international protest. The Attorney General suggested that, in all, 65 Ontario municipalities could be affected if people started exercising their common law rights to clean water.
When the Premier suggested that the new Public Health Act "modernizes and straightens out a situation which undoubtedly has been at loose ends for a number of years" he was saying that the legislation transferred responsibility for making decisions about water quality from individuals to government. But he could not say that the government could be trusted with the responsibility. Government had in the past proven reluctant to enforce its own laws. For example, the Public Health Act had long prohibited pollution. One section stipulated that "no garbage, excreta, manure, vegetable or animal matter or filth shall be discharged in any of the lakes, rivers, streams or other waters in Ontario." Another section empowered the Department of Health to issue mandatory orders to establish or improve sewage treatment plants.
Yet the Department of Health had refused to exercise its power to prevent pollution. When it did issue clean-up orders, municipalities simply ignored them, confident that the government would not enforce them. Even the Premier admitted that his government's orders had been "more disregarded than they have been observed." He blamed their ineffectiveness on municipalities' financial problems.
New legislation failed to correct the situation. Almost a year later, during the debates regarding further amendments to the Public Health and OWRC Acts, the Opposition accused the government of failing to enforce its environmental laws. The Minister of Health could recall only one time that the government had pursued a mandatory clean-up order under the former version of the Public Health Act; even that had ended in failure. "As far as I know," the Minister admitted, "in the annals of our history, there was one order where the court order was carried out and they were fined $100 a day, some 20 or 30 years ago; that is the top fine. It mounted up to $75,000 or so, and the government of the day forgave them or whatever one likes to call it."
Sadly, the OWRC showed no signs of using its new powers more forcefully than had the Department of Health. Although by 1957 the commission had issued two mandatory clean-up orders—one for Sarnia and one for Trenton—it seemed likely to be as understanding as its predecessors: in neither case had it set a deadline for compliance.
In allowing sewage treatment plants to violate people's riparian rights, Ontario's legislators provided a brazen example of government's desire to promote growth at all costs. But they were by no means the first or last to do so. The Ontario Water Resources Commission Act and the amendments to the Public Health Act joined a growing list of laws designed to encourage industrial development at the expense of the environment and those who depend upon it. Nor have riparians been the only victims of such laws. Those living downstream from sewage treatment plants share a fate with countless others living beside railroads, nuclear power plants and other nuisances. Their rights sacrificed for "the public good," they find themselves increasingly unable to control the environmental degradation whose costs they must bear.
This is an excerpt from Property Rights in the Defence of Nature by Elizabeth Brubaker, published by Earthscan, 1995.
Property rights in the defence of nature (1995)
Dear Friend,
Over a century ago, in 1885, Antoine Ratté filed a lawsuit against several of Canada's most notorious polluters. That suit and the government's reaction to it established a shameful pattern that governs pollution across Canada to this day.
The owner of a waterfront lot and pleasure boat rental business on the Ottawa River, Mr. Ratté objected to water pollution from upstream sawmills. Sawdust, bark and blocks of wood piled up on the river bank and formed floating islands, interfering with boat traffic. Stinking gasses, accumulating in the rotting sawdust, frequently exploded. Unwilling to tolerate this violation of his property rights, Mr. Ratté took the offending lumber barons to court, where he sought damages and an injunction to stop their dumping wastes into the river.
Mr. Ratté's lawsuit alarmed the Ontario government, but not because of the pollution. To protect the sawmills, the government passed a law curbing the courts' ability to protect Mr. Ratté's rights. Citing "the public interest," the government ordered judges to consider the lumber trade's economic importance before prohibiting pollution.
So began a calamitous Canadian tradition of governments overriding property rights that citizens would otherwise use to protect their lands and waters. This tradition—and the need to change it—is the subject of my new book, Property Rights in the Defence of Nature, which has just been released by Earthscan.
Property Rights in the Defence of Nature documents the many ways in which governments have supported polluters at the expense of their victims. It describes the protection afforded nickel smelters in the 1920s, pulp and paper mills in the 1940s, and sewage plants in the 1950s. By now, almost no major polluter lacks special protection. Laws shield shippers from the consequences of oil spills and nuclear power plant operators from the consequences of major accidents.
It hasn't always been this way, and it needn't remain this way in the future. For centuries, common law property rights empowered people to protect their environments. Those who had been harmed by others' activities had recourse to the courts where they could obtain injunctions against the offenders. Property Rights in the Defence of Nature argues that it is time to restore such rights.
Strong property rights protect the environment by vesting responsibility in those individuals most directly affected by pollution. We can count on the people whose health and livelihoods depend on clean air, land, and water to make wise decisions about these resources: it is in their self interest to do so. Governments also act in their own self interest. But that interest keeps them focused on the next election, all too often spurring projects that create short-term jobs and become long-term environmental disasters.
Back in 1885, the government's desire to protect a source of public revenues drove its decision to allow sawmill pollution. Only those who had a direct interest in clean water—people like Antoine Ratté, whose customers didn't want to row through putrid masses of rotting sawdust—fought the mill wastes. Until the government intervened, Mr. Ratté had the tools to save the Ottawa River. The time has come for Canadians to reclaim those tools. Empowered by strong property rights, we can break the pattern established in 1885 and take back responsibility for our precious land and resources.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Executive DirectorP.S. If you are able to donate $50 or more (or upon request, if you can't afford a donation of that size) we will be pleased to send you a complimentary copy of Property Rights in the Defence of Nature.
Preventing massive water exports (1994)
Dear Friend:
A new book from a conservative think-tank, the Fraser Institute, overflows with essays by prominent water experts promoting the sale of Canadian water to the United States. A recent cover story in Financial Post Magazine boldly declares "Why We Should Sell Our Water to America." The World Rivers Review last year stated that a "thirty year-old plan to send wild Canadian and Alaskan waters through a series of dams, reservoirs, and canals to the U.S. Southwest has gained new momentum." And Jeffrey Simpson, a prominent Globe and Mail columnist, predicts that early in the next century the U.S. and Canada will start debating the export of our fresh water in earnest.
Canadians have every reason to be alarmed, because if history has taught us anything, it is that our governments cannot be trusted as custodians of our precious resources. For over a century, they have razed our forests, and more recently they have subsidized energy megaprojects for the benefit of multinationals. With pressure mounting on governments to reduce the deficit and then retire the federal debt, can any Canadian state with confidence that our provinces - which own most of our lakes and rivers - won't be tempted by a quick fix of selling off our water supplies?
To stop a senseless export of our water, three things need to happen. First, governments must stop subsidizing resource developments. Grandiose water export schemes - with price tags in excess of $300 billion - would inevitably require government backing. Next, the government's sweeping right of expropriation - which it would need to build reservoirs, canals, and pipelines through people's lands - must be drastically curbed. Governments not only expropriate with abandon for their own purposes, but they wantonly allow literally thousands of quasi-governmental bodies - and even private corporations - to exercise that power. Expropriation was once limited to "necessary public functions" such as roads or right-of-ways for telephone lines and sewers. Today, governments expropriate river-front property to build casinos, and even forcibly evict people from their homes for the benefit of real estate developers.
Finally, the government should uphold rights of water users, and restore riparian rights - the traditional rights to water flows unaltered in quantity or quality - to the citizens who live along lakes and rivers, and who depend upon them for their livelihood and for their recreation. Large-scale water diversions would become impossible, while small-scale uses would flourish: fishing communities would ensure that the local fisheries were preserved, tourism areas would value the clean water for the tourists attracted by pristine wilderness experiences, breweries using pure waters would prevent polluters from fouling their product.
Only governments - who own or control virtually all the water in the country and who have been only too willing to run roughshod over the rights of Canadians - would ever be able to make the nightmare of a massive export of water to the U.S. a reality. We must rein governments in to protect our heritage and our resources by placing trust where it is most deserved - in the hands of the men and women who make up this land, and who want to preserve it for generations to come.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Executive Director
Privatizing natural resources (1994)
Dear Friend:
Can you imagine a greater example of incompetence than the federal government's stewardship of the east coast fishery, where the cod stocks have been recklessly depleted and entire communities are now on welfare, losing both their economic independence and their dignity? When the welfare runs out in several years, many of the communities will become ghost towns, emptied like the fisheries nearby.
This east coast environmental disaster has counterparts on the west coast, where, just as cod was overfished, forests are being overlogged to satisfy short-term political needs for job creation. Because these are not sustainable jobs—the logging is often at a loss—forest communities will be devastated in turn, leaving us with ravaged lands and lost jobs. Then another way of life will be destroyed, with other communities put on the dole until they disappear.
As with the cod fishery, the forests are government-owned, and that's where the problem starts. Unlike you or me, who value and protect our property to preserve it for our own use and for our children's, a politician's horizon tends to be as long as the next election. If re-election involves manipulating government resources to create a feeling of prosperity—the same kind of prosperity enjoyed by individuals who live the high life on their credit cards—governments will overlog and overfish like there's no tomorrow. Because governments have four- or five-year terms, they are not suited to the ownership of resources, which require long-term commitments, and which deserve protection from political expediency. To make matters worse, governments (when owners) have also tended to ignore environmental rules and regulations to push their exploitation plans—a clear conflict of interest. Without this conflict, governments would be free to be honest regulators that upheld laws and public values.
For those of us who value the environment, and want to protect and nurture it knowing it underpins our economic and cultural values, reason and decency demand that resources be placed with private owners who have powerful incentives to protect their value. To secure those incentives, owners must be given strong property rights to allow them to fend off those who would destroy their property.
But one very large impediment blocks this change in ownership—big business, which has been the main beneficiary of government ownership, and which opposes placing power in the hands of individual owners.
"If people in Alberta had property rights, as you suggest," a multinational oil company executive complained to me, "we'd have to stop most of our drilling. If you let individual property owners decide when we can drill on their land, they'll hold us up to ransom." The president of a mining firm told me that "People have too many property rights," in saying that people object to debris that lands on their property as a result of his company's blasting operations. This gentleman has good reason to fear stronger property rights rules: his company would need to change the way it did business if people had enforceable property rights. Forestry executives voiced similar concerns about property rights, as have other environmentally destructive industries, which know full well that the absence of strong property rights allows them to pollute with virtual impunity.
In the next few years, Environment Probe's main focus will be educating Canadians about the role of property rights in our society, in order to promote a truly sustainable society. To this end, we will soon be releasing a major book that I believe will be profoundly influential in the coming years in changing public opinion in our country. Elizabeth Brubaker, its author and our current Director of Policy Research, will then become Executive Director to lead this all-important issue (I will be leaving my post with Environment Probe to become Executive Director of Consumer Policy Institute, a sister organization which was recently introduced to you by Jane Jacobs, who is a Director of Environment Probe).
Please welcome Elizabeth as your new Executive Director and please reaffirm your confidence in Environment Probe's analyses and direction by renewing your support with another generous tax-creditable donation. For my part, in my last act as Environment Probe's Executive Director, I wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your faithful support of Environment Probe during my years here as Executive Director—they have been among the most rewarding years of my life—and to assure you that you and Environment Probe will be in the finest possible hands with Elizabeth Brubaker at the helm.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director (Outgoing)
Reforming environmental assessments (1993)
Environmental Assessments Can Be Bad for the Environment
Dear Friend:
Environmental assessments and the public hearings that should scrutinize them were intended to empower the public to bring forward its concerns over projects that threatened their communities. Regrettably, environmental assessments—which are generally produced by promoters to justify their projects—often became cosy arrangements in which industry and government negotiated deals behind the public's back, and circumvented public hearings. The result of those closed door arrangements were fiascos such as the Darlington nuclear power plant, which was never needed and which now threatens Ontario Hydro with bankruptcy, and the subsidized clear-cutting of old growth forests, which simultaneously ravaged our heritage and our economy.
When governments do decide to allow public hearings, independent bodies called environmental assessment boards (similar to courts) take over. These boards' judgements have often been sound, seeing through the promoters' often-strained rationales and turning down projects that are unneeded or dangerously designed, saving society money as well as sparing the environment.
But many environmental assessment hearings—particularly mega-hearings—have become fabulously expensive, bonanzas for lawyers and consultants who have often controlled the proceedings, making them seem inaccessible and creating an effective roadblock to public participation.
Instead of citizens or citizens' groups raising issues of concern, too often lawyers and consultants take the lead. My Foundation, for example, has been solicited by lawyers and consultants urging us to take certain positions at hearings—in their areas of expertise—and to hire them to present those issues. When we haven't, they successfully solicit other organizations by explaining that the organizations can participate in the hearings at little or no expense. The organizations get a public profile—sometimes on issues that had little to do with their activities—and the lawyers and consultants collect fees that can amount to millions of dollars per hearing. The fees come at the expense of taxpayers who pay for public hearings that might not be needed, or if needed, should be much smaller.
If you attended such a public hearing, you would find highly legalistic and jargon-ridden proceedings in a room packed with lawyers and consultants. Unlike those for whom the hearings are meant - the affected communities, who only want a fair decision in the fastest possible time to allow their members to get on with their lives—for the lawyers and the consultants the hearings are their lives, and the source of their livelihoods. These "hearings professionals" benefit from protracted hearings—at some hearings, the lawyers involved can expect to share $50,000 for each additional day the hearing drags on, providing them with a strong incentive to approach problems in time-consuming ways, and no incentive to find quick resolutions.
This trend has been growing across the country, but has reached the height of irresponsibility in Ontario, which boasts the world's largest and most expensive hearings processes—ones whose tabs can run not just into the millions of dollars but into the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Earlier this year, an environmental assessment hearing process that began in the mid-1980s was ended after costing the public between $100 and $200 million, about half of it before the hearing even began. The hearing—whose purpose was to assess an Ontario Hydro master plan to build numerous power plants over the next 25 years—involved everyone from environmental, consumer, and human rights groups to native organizations, community and farming organizations, federal and provincial government bodies, all manner of business lobbies as well as individual businesses—over 100 parties in all, all with the right to cross-examine, all financed either wholly or largely by the ratepayer.
The result was a zoo that was all-but-impossible to administer, and a mountain of studies, transcripts, and other paper that would have been impossible for either the parties or the Environmental Assessment Board to fully absorb. Mercifully, the hearing was cancelled midstream when Hydro—who had been pushing its plans for power plants for a decade—discovered that it didn't need any of those power plants after all.
Amazingly, this largest-of-all-hearings was actually preliminary to other hearings - had Hydro somehow seen the environmental assessment hearing through to a successful conclusion, it would then have needed to successfully steer through a dozen additional environmental assessments in far-flung communities to obtain permission to build the specific plants in its master plan.
Rivalling this environmental assessment process are others—in forestry, toxic wastes, arctic exploration, mining—many whose details are as shocking in their own way, generally because of the extent of government interference in what should be an independent process. Last year, a federal hearing for the Oldman irrigation dam in Alberta—held as the dam was being completed—found the dam so foolhardy that it recommended it be decommissioned, a recommendation the government ignored. In the case of Saskatchewan's Rafferty-Alameda flood control dams, an environmental assessment panel quit in outrage when construction for the project continued with the hearing underway. The assessment for PEI's fixed link to the mainland has little credibility with many Islanders due to political intrigues.
For communities threatened by such projects, who have their lives disrupted for years, and even for those who happen to have a worthwhile project that deserves to be built, the environmental rules can be an undeserved nightmare. A citizens' group opposing Ontario Hydro facilities collected 10,000 signatures on a petition calling for an end to all of Hydro's environmental assessments, seeing them as rubber stamps for bad projects. But assessments can also be a nightmare for virtually everyone else involved - for the local business interests who are adversely affected by the megaproject which upsets their community; for the public interest groups whose heartfelt convictions are given short shrift; and for the civil servants who must thanklessly administer proceedings destined to satisfy almost no one.
There must be a better way, and there is.
Most environmental assessments are needless—typically they consider government infrastructure projects that are uneconomic or unnecessary, which governments promote to create jobs but which no private individual or corporation would consider. Other environmental assessments occur for megaprojects such as Hibernia—government-industry partnerships subsidized with public monies, again because the private companies considered the ventures uneconomic. These projects, and the assessments for them, should be eliminated altogether by getting government and industry out of bed with each other, and keeping each to its proper role: industry should develop industrial projects that can stand on their own, without government hand-outs, and governments should regulate them stringently and without compromise—when government becomes a partner in a project, it develops a conflict of interest and loses its status as a neutral party.
Still other infrastructure projects are necessary, but on a much smaller scale - governments have taken viable small-scale projects and bloated them to create additional short-term jobs. By keeping these needed projects to their proper size, they may avoid the large environmental effects that trigger environmental assessments, and the public can be protected through other mechanisms. Factories and other small-scale projects, for example, are regulated by zoning rules.
Most environmental assessments could be eliminated with strong property rights, which would better protect communities. Logging in B.C.'s Slocan Valley could soon be occurring at the expense of small-holders, whose properties are being threatened by logging which would divert and clog the waters needed for their farming and household uses. By empowering communities like these with the right to say no to projects that harm their property, developments would proceed only when concerns were met to the communities' satisfaction.
Environmental assessments for 25-year plans, or (as is being suggested) for broad policies such as the effects of NAFTA or proposed tax polices, should be recognized as futile exercises and avoided—doing so will eliminate most of the ill-defined mega-hearings that degenerate into exorbitant debating societies that accomplish nothing of value.
When assessments are genuinely needed, they should always be tested in public hearings, which should be smaller and better focussed to allow the legitimate concerns to be clearly heard. Environmental assessment boards must both encourage the participation of all affected parties and—if the public is to pick up the tab—be vigilant in challenging the credentials of others, whose involvement may stem more from the ease of participation than from long and deeply-held concerns.
In the past, Environment Probe has often introduced hard-nosed propositions - that megaprojects were unsustainable economically as well as environmentally, that the free trade deal had merits for the environment as well as risks, that property rights are powerful tools for environmental protection. Through our publications and other public education efforts, many of our positions have come to be widely accepted.
With your generous support, we will now try to explain to Canadian decision makers and the Canadian public the importance of injecting sense in our system of environmental regulation. If the regulatory system isn't reformed to give local communities decision-making power, to minimize the number of environmental assessments, and to make public hearings work fairly and efficiently, we may find that decisions are once more made exclusively in the back rooms, once more with disastrous results.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director
Property rights: the key to environmental protection (1993)
Why Property Rights Are the Key to Environmental Protection
Dear Friend:
In 1949, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a pulp and paper company in Espanola, Ontario, to stop polluting downstream waters, ruling that the property rights of the affected fishermen, farmers, and tourist operators must be respected. The Ontario government immediately passed new legislation allowing the pulp mill to continue releasing chemicals. For good measure, the government—anticipating that the court might rule against the company—had several months earlier also changed the Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act to encourage courts to allow pulp mill pollution.
Soon after, in 1955, citizens suffering from water pollution successfully sued the Ontario municipalities of Richmond Hill and Woodstock, whose shoddy sewage disposal practices were polluting rivers that flowed through their land. The Ontario government again acted to deny citizens their property rights, passing legislation to overturn these two court decisions, and creating the Ontario Water Resources Commission to protect polluters against citizens.
Imagine the frustration felt by these courageous individuals—to fight through the courts for their livelihoods and the simple enjoyment of their lands against corporate and government adversaries, to have the courts ultimately decide justice lay with them, only to have the politicians then change the law to get their way. Since these events, polluters across Canada have multiplied: with the degradation of property rights, citizens lost the power to protect their environments and their livelihoods.
Today’s right to pollute—to treat our rivers, lands, and air as sewers—can be traced back even further, to Britain and the U.S. in the bleak days of the Industrial Revolution, when governments and courts began to override property rights to promote a greater, so-called national interest—the interest of industry. Courts began to shield railway magnates from liability for fires set by sparks from their locomotives, and laws gave mill owners the right to flood their neighbours’ land. Following those early precedents, the property rights of individuals and communities have steadily been eroded, generally to serve large and powerful commercial interests like the railroads or smokestack industries, and generally at the expense of individuals and smaller, less powerful commercial interests, like farmers. The right to pollute did spur economic activity, but the activity was often uneconomic for society as a whole: both the economy and the environment would suffer, because the benefits from the polluting activity were outweighed by the costs to others.
The pulp mill operation at Espanola provides a useful example: the company continued its polluting activities after the legislation was passed, but its special dispensation didn’t spare it from economic woes. In fact, since the first pulp was produced at that site in 1905, one company after another failed to make a go of it, with a series of shutdowns, bankruptcies, changes in ownership and even a 13-year period during which Espanola became a ghost town. In effect, for decades a series of marginal or losing operations received preferential treatment to allow them to continue, while sound and sustainable operations downstream providing stable jobs and creating genuine wealth were forced to suffer and finally close—a lose-lose proposition for the economy and the environment.
Yet the notion persists that pollution is necessary to a modern society, and that allowing people property rights would frustrate development. In fact, this belief is so ingrained that a Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded just two years ago for proving the opposite—that economic efficiency does not depend on giving preference to polluters. Ironically, Dr. Ronald Coase won the Nobel for a paper he wrote in 1960—conventional wisdom took three decades to remove its blinkers and recognize the obvious.
But times are changing. The public is waking up to the realization that human values captured by terms such as thrift, preservation, conservation, and husbanding our resources are not relics of a former era, and that people need strong rights to protect their values against those who would debase them.
No rights are more important to environmental protection than the rights to property, whether the property be land or belongings, an apartment lease or any other contractual right. Property rights would create a protector out of every one of us—a force 25 million strong—to guard against environmental insults to our homes and communities.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brubaker
Director of Policy Research
Free trade's environmental benefits (1992)
Dear Supporter:
Earlier this year, the Quebec government, conceding that it was subsidizing Norsk Hydro, a multinational magnesium producer, agreed to stop subsidizing the company’s magnesium smelter, which is a major polluter. It did so following official trade protests by a U.S. industry group—the Non-Ferrous Producers Committee—over Norsk’s access to subsidized water and subsidized electricity. This industry lobby, for its part, decided to use trade remedy laws after being contacted by Environment Probe, who alerted it to the Free Trade Agreement and how it could be used to prevent the export of Canada’s resources at the expense of Canada’s environment.
Hydro-Québec, which cannot expand its uneconomic dam building as quickly as it would have liked, is a loser as a result of this chain of events, as is the development-at-all-costs Quebec government, which habitually used below-cost power to lure foreign investment. But not the Quebec economy or the Quebec people. Quebec consumers will no longer be overcharged for the benefit of Norsk Hydro, the Quebec Crees will face one less threat to their homeland, and the environment will be spared unwarranted emissions from the magnesium plant.
The existence of such trade remedy laws will make provincial governments across Canada balk at throwing away taxpayers’ money, and the environment, to attract multinationals, helping to raise the caliber—and ultimately, the viability—of foreign investments made in Canada. These trade remedies will help prevent other provincial governments from subsidizing domestic polluters as well, and in this way gradually lead to an environmentally sounder economy. As Hydro-Québec’s chairman, Richard Drouin, put it several weeks ago, in referring to the trade dispute, “I wouldn’t want to repeat that.” Other utilities in Canada would echo that sentiment.
Canada doesn’t lose all its trade disputes, of course—in fact, Canadian industries have been winning their share of disputes with U.S. industries since the free trade deal was signed, showing the protectionism in many American companies, who have nothing to teach their Canadian counterparts about free or fair trade. Happily for the environment, Canadian wins have benefited relatively benign sectors such as farming—recently, Canadian pork producers won their long-standing battle against U.S. protectionists—and our industry’s losses have curbed Canada’s over-sized and environmentally damaging resource sector.
With the new North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which specifically discourages the lowering of environmental standards, the environment is taking another step forward. But even before these environmental assurances were written into NAFTA, this broad trade deal enjoyed the support of Mexican environmentalists; they understood intuitively that free trade with Mexico’s two northern neighbours could only raise Mexican environmental standards, as higher Canadian and U.S. standards are imported into Mexico along with other products and processes, and as Mexico’s environment becomes subject to international scrutiny. In fact, to improve the country’s image in negotiating free trade, Mexico’s government dramatically improved environmental standards, forcing outdated and highly polluting industries in the Mexico City area to clean up or be closed down (and many were). Once the deal is ratified, and with the world watching, Mexico’s incentive to keep raising standards can only increase.
Let’s hope that the new year brings not only an end to the hard recession but also lasting environmental progress through new ways of doing business that allow us all to do well without doing harm.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director
Economic union's environmental potential (1992)
Constitutional Debate
Why the Economic Union Would Help Protect Canada's EnvironmentDear Friend:
As you know all too well, Canadians will soon need to decide the future of our country through the makeup of our new constitution. None of the government’s proposed constitutional changes were designed with the environment in mind but some changes will certainly affect the environment. I am writing you to explain why one proposal in particular—the economic union—would benefit the environment, and so deserves your support.
The economic union is designed to eliminate trade barriers between provinces, to promote competition and to allow Canadians to trade freely with one another. Although I believe that such competition, on balance, will benefit the economy, my purpose here is not to weigh the economic gains and costs—those will, I am sure, be examined at length in the run-up to the constitutional decisions. Instead, I want to discuss what economic union would mean to the environment, because otherwise this issue may not come to the attention of you and other Canadians—so far, certainly, this matter has been all but ignored.
The nations of the European Economic Community, after much constitutional wrangling of their own, several decades ago decided to form an economic union, and have been strengthening it ever since. The results are, with some very minor exceptions, overwhelmingly positive for the environment. Countries with weak environmental records, such as the U.K., Spain, and Italy, have been forced to raise their standards to meet those of the European Community. In the U.K., for example, which had one of the western world’s lowest water quality standards, the water utilities have been making enormous investments in sewage treatment, and successfully forcing industrial polluters and farmers (whose pesticides and fertilizers make them serious polluters) to clean up their own act. The U.K.’s coal-burning utilities are similarly reducing their emissions, to meet European acid gas regulations. Standards in the most polluting countries are being harmonized upwards, to meet European requirement that standards be set at “high” levels.
Countries wishing to set even higher standards for themselves may do so, as long as the purpose is environmental, and not to unfairly limit trade. When the U.K. and a coalition of foreign beer manufacturers took Denmark to court, arguing that a Danish law (requiring that bottles be returnable) constituted an unfair trade barrier designed to limit beer imports, the court ruled in Denmark’s favour: although the court agreed that the Danish law did constitute a trade barrier, it upheld the law’s main provision, finding that the law’s environmental benefits justified the constraint on free trade. This landmark case established the precedent that environmental goals form legitimate grounds for curbing economic interests.
Economic union among Canada’s provinces is likely to do the same thing—to lead to common environmental standards that prevent one province from using its territory as a refuge for polluting industries. Industries wouldn’t be entitled to such environmental subsidies any more than they would be to financial subsidies, and standards would tend to rise to match those of more stringent provinces.
But an economic union would benefit the environment for other reasons, quite apart from harmonizing standards upwards. Economic efficiency tends to mean doing more with less—using resources more efficiently—and that generally furthers environmental goals. Due to competition and efficiency, less copper is now needed in telecommunications and fewer copper mines need to be developed; with the introduction of competition, oil refineries polluted far less, thanks to more efficient processes that put less of the petroleum into the air; airplanes and trucks similarly improved their efficiency under the discipline of deregulation.
In Canada, where industry is subject to more economic regulation than many other parts of the developed world, our environmental standards lag far behind: we produce more garbage, consume more energy, emit more pollutants, than most western countries. A strong economic union provision in our constitution which applied pressure for environmental and economic efficiency improvements would be a highly significant step in the right direction.
If you agree that the environment can be protected through an economic union, please make your opinion felt by writing the Right Honourable Joe Clark, Minister of Constitutional Affairs, and urge him to persevere in making the economic union as strong as possible. Also help us identify and reach other Canadians who should be receiving this letter by filling out the enclosed form.
The current constitutional round is being dubbed “The Canada Round” because it will be addressing the needs of all Canadians. Let’s make sure “The Canada Round” also becomes “The Environmental Round,” by working to incorporate the economic union into the constitution.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Solomon
Executive DirectorP.S. No postage is required to write to Mr. Clark. His address is:
The Right Honourable Joe Clark Minister of Constitutional Affairs House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
Preserving the Carmanah Valley (1991)
Dear Friend of Environment Probe:
Canada is blessed with one of the natural wonders of the world, the magnificent Carmanah Valley in British Columbia. Home to 30-story-high Sitka Spruce, the tallest in the world; to Red Cedars that are 1,000 years old; to Western Hemlock that are among the largest in the world; and to majestic Cypress that were alive when Christopher Columbus discovered North America, this virtually untouched valley is one of the world's last remaining temperate rainforests.
Most Canadians would consider the Carmanah, known as Khrowbodewah (the beginning) by the Nitinat Indians, to be absolutely priceless, and deserving of preservation at any cost. But a few influential people in the forest industry and in government circles disagree. Clearcutting the Carmanah is necessary for economic development, they say, because without such clearcuts, our standard of living is threatened.
For this reason, Environment Probe decided to investigate the economics of logging the Carmanah: we wanted to see how "profitable" logging would be. To our surprise, our study of the Carmanah is the only one that exists: from our dealings with the B.C. government, which owns the Carmanah, and with MacMillan Bloedel, who was given the right to log it, we know that neither has yet analysed the Carmanah's profitability.
Here are our findings: the British Columbia government will probably receive less than $2 million over the 70 years MacMillan Bloedel is expected to take to clearcut this valley. (This figure is in 1990 dollars). That comes to about $80,000 in income to the government per year or less than 2 cents per B.C. citizen, and less than one-third of a cent per Canadian citizen, if the Canadian economy as a whole is measured.
MacMillan Bloedel also has little to gain - a $2 million profit if log prices stay at current levels, which are near historic highs, and less than $1 million if log prices revert to their historic average. That amounts to a 2.4% return - less than it would earn in a bank saving account. But the Carmanah's profitability has little to do with MacMillan Bloedel's desire to log it. The Carmanah is a small and relatively unimportant part of a larger, more profitable area. Due to British Columbia's forest regulations, the giant forestry firm must commit to clearcut the Carmanah to be entitled to clearcut the larger area at its present rate.
Rather than logging the Carmanah, MacMillan Bloedel would do better logging elsewhere, such as in second-growth forests that don't have such great ecological significance. Managed intensively and sustainably, as Scandinavia has done for decades, the second-growth forests would also provide far more jobs for the logging communities whose livelihoods depend upon the forest, putting an end to the continual threats of economic ruin that they face. Destroying the Carmanah is a poor way, and a divisive way, to create jobs. In fact, there is hardly any social or economic justification for logging the Carmanah, and there certainly is no environmental justification.
We are presenting our study to the British Columbia government - which will soon be examining how best to log the Carmanah - with a request that it re-evaluate its decision to allow MacMillan Bloedel to log the valley at all. We are also asking the government to exempt MacMillan Bloedel from the requirement that it log the Carmanah, and we are explaining our position to MacMillan Bloedel, because we don't want the forest industry to fight measures that make sense from an economic, let alone from an environmental, point of view.
But we are putting most of our faith in the good sense of the Canadian public: we have time for a reasoned public debate over the Carmanah, and we should make the most of it. Few Canadians, even those with no special concern for the environment, would contemplate ruining our priceless heritage once the facts of the matter are known.
Please support our efforts to distribute these facts far and wide with a generous donation, and please also write to Premier Bill Vander Zalm, c/o Legislative Buildings, Victoria, B.C., V8X 1X4. As Canadians who must all pull together to preserve what's precious about our country, we all have a responsibility to act when a national treasure such as the Carmanah is threatened.
Sincerely,
Adam White
Forest Researcher
Reforesting Canada (1990)
Dear Friend:
Let me share with you some comments made by Adam Zimmerman, Chairman of Noranda Inc., after the Australian government denied his firm the right to build a polluting pulp mill in the Tasmanian forest.
Environmental requirements are "wild down there," he said in disbelief, holding Canada up as an example of a much more reasonable country. When a corporation comes to Alberta looking to exploit forest resources, he explained, the government "kisses them on both cheeks and gives them grants."
Mr. Zimmerman made this comment approvingly, but to us it exemplifies what's wrong with Canada's forest industry: our governments not only adopt weak environmental standards; they also use tax dollars to accelerate the rape of our forests. Without those tax dollars and other subsidies, most of the degradation of our forest lands would never occur.
Alberta - as Mr. Zimmerman states - well illustrates this. A flurry of government grants, sweetheart loans and loan guarantees - plus next-to-free trees - are being given to 13 Canadian, American, and Japanese corporations to induce them to help tear down Alberta's forest lands. Without those grants the companies could not afford to destroy our forests.
As Canadians know all too well, Alberta is not alone in subsidizing the destruction of Canadian forests. Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia - in fact, most of our provincial governments - do so at a cost not only to the environment but to provincial economies as well. Because of Canada's virtual giveaway policies, the value of our trees is cheapened. Parts of trees that others process are considered waste by our loggers and left behind to rot, resulting in far fewer jobs per tree felled than occurs in the U.S. and European countries like Sweden, which also have more modern and less polluting forest industries. Although Sweden and the U.S. are far from perfect, their forest stocks have been increasing while ours are in serious decline.
Our provincial governments, echoing the Norandas and MacMillan-Bloedels of this land, say Canadian taxpayers need to subsidize these firms to enable them to compete with the Americans, because our northern trees take longer to mature. But the Swedes are competitive - without government subsidies - and they have a growing cycle as long as ours. While our industry is closing down sawmills and other forest operations in communities across the country because of shortages of wood, Sweden, Finland, and others have sustainable forest industries that keep expanding without fear of being wiped out through deforestation.
In Scandinavia, as in other regions that have sustainable forest practices, the forests are managed mainly at the local level, either by village or tribal communities or by individuals, generally farmers, who tend their trees as conscientiously as they do their crops. Remote governments and multinationals play a much smaller role.
But Canada is woefully out of step with the countries that have successful forest management practices. Governments and multinationals hold all the cards here while the small woodlot owners, farms, and native people have little or no say.
If you believe Canada should be doing better - for our environment and for our economy - there are many things you can do. Join local conservation groups. Ask your elected representatives why Canada is paying to destroy its own forests. But most of all, inform yourself, your friends, and your co-workers about the wrong-headed forest policies of our governments. Although public opinion polls show that 95% of Canadians feel deeply for their forests, most of us do not recognize where the problems lie, and so are unable to evaluate government policies.
Canada's forest record - perhaps the worst among the Western nations - needs to be understood before meaningful reform can take place. We need no more Band-Aid solutions, such as token reforestation programs or "provincial parks" that are at the mercy of loggers. What we do need are more federal and provincial parks to protect our vanishing wilderness, and for these parks to be "off-limits" to commercial logging; we need an end to corporate subsidies; we need to respect the land rights of native peoples, whose track record at protecting forests is unparalleled; and we need to put more trust and power in our citizenry by distributing some or all of the remaining Crown land to those individuals - everyone from "forest farmers" to cottagers - who want it and will manage it sustainably. To ensure that the land is distributed equitably, each province should hold public hearings to determine the manner in which the land distribution should occur.
The vast majority of Canadians love our forest land and would manage it well - certainly better than our governments and corporations have.
Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director
P.S. Enclosed along with this letter is a related article which the Wall Street Journal asked me to write. If these were helpful to you in understanding the forces behind deforestation - and in understanding that with sound policy we can sustainably manage our forests for all Canadians, for all time - please help us reach others by supporting us with a generous, tax-deductible donation. I promise you that your donation will get results - while there are still forests left to save!
Friday, August 25, 1989
By Lawrence Solomon
Wherever trees grow on private land, forest owners seem to draw the ire of their governments. The government of Ontario has a problem with the way many of its small, private woodlot owners tend their forests: They won't cut down their trees. The government's surveys conclude that these smallholders - mostly farmers, professionals and retirees, who control more that 10 million acres of timberland - have what government experts call "a rather indifferent attitude" toward their land.
The Ontario government, like governments in wooded areas everywhere, wants to stimulate the exploitation of its forests. But no matter what it tries - and that includes everything from free advice and harvesting services to tax holidays for those joining a government Woodlot Improvement Plan - most woodlot owners refuse to clear-cut their private forests for personal gain, or even to harvest their older timber at the accelerated rate the government favors.
Don't Blame the Private Sector
Deforestation and the degradation of Ontario's forest lands make the papers every day in Ontario, but it isn't the private sector, which owns less than 10% of Ontario's timber, that is to blame. The deforestation is occurring in the government's land.
While governments act like capitalists, seeing trees as piles of lumber and talking of economic growth, woodlot owners often attend to more spiritual needs: cross country skiing, hunting, birdwatching, or simply the pleasure of owning a piece of wooded land. When they do sell their trees, they tend to avoid clear-cutting and they hold out for prices that are typically two or three times those set by the government for timber.
Sweden has more standing forest today than at any time in its past; bogs have been reclaimed and reforestation is mandatory. Unlike Canada, most of the forest land is privately owned, but the government of Sweden, too, has a problem with its small woodlot owners: Sweden's forest industry has become a major importer of wood because the smallholders don't want to cut down their trees fast enough.
Each year, Sweden grows 100 million cubic meters of wood while harvesting only 70 million cubic meters, leaving a large and growing surplus on private ground. This surplus has also stimulated a national debate over whether to "use the carrot or the whip" to get the woodlot owners to see things the state's way, says Anders Luden, agricultural attache at the Swedish embassy in Washington.
Sweden's forest industry - the country's second-largest industry and largest net foreign-exchange earner - is strictly, and from the government's point of view successfully, managed as an economic resource. Woodlot owners are required to reforest, but they are also required to harvest at least half of their trees within a decade after they mature. Wild, unmanaged standards stands are forbidden, lest the nation's economy be hurt.
But these smallholders still exercise too much control, asserts Mr. Lunden, explaining that the country's forest management plans are being thwarted by the he smallholders' growing affluence, which allows them to forgo the income that harvesting would bring.
Neighboring Finland also has a huge forest industry and, like Sweden, has more forest than ever before. Five years ago, when the industry was importing 30% of its wood, the Central Association of Forest Industries, a trade association, blamed its woes on the ignorance of many of the country's 300,000 small woodlot owners, who were refusing to cut their wood out of "their gut reaction ... to leave the trees alone, even though the forest environment actually deteriorates without judicious felling." The industry lamented being "reduced to importing wood, while all the time we were surrounded by trees ready to be felled."
The Finnish government agreed that the small woodlot owners posed a problem: New government and industry measures - augmenting a pre-existing policy that taxed the recalcitrant woodlot owners on the amount they would have earned if they had harvested their trees - have since reduced imports to about 10% of the total wood used. But because increasing numbers of Finnish forest owners live in urban areas, and derive a yield from their woodlots that can't be measured solely in board feet, industry and government fear a resurgence of smallholder intransigence.
In Third World countries, too, the state encourages the plunder of the forest while the traditional owners of the forest - whether individual property owners or more often, small village or tribal communities - vainly attempt to stave off remote governments. In Brazil's Amazon basin, the government has subsidized the tearing down and burning of a forested area bigger than all of France over this past decade, according to the World Bank. Subsidies of various kinds have deforested other regions of Latin America, several Asian countries, and much of Africa, often after decentralized forest holdings fell under central government control.
Federal ownership of almost 200 million acres of forest land has served U.S. forests poorly since World War II, when large-scale commercial harvesting began in the forests taken into the national trust by President Theodore Roosevelt earlier in this century.
Much of this silviculture is unprofitable: The logging on more than half the Forests Service's lands loses about $100 million a year. Much of this loss is incurred in the Rocky Mountains, where logging on unstable soils and difficult slopes boosts both harvesting costs and wilderness damage. Overall, however, the Forest Service turns a profit, primarily due to its highly lucrative but irreplaceable coastal rainforests, which are being logged at record rates to keep Northwest sawmills in business. The Wilderness Society fears that America's remaining rainforests, most of which are controlled by the Forest Service, could disappear within 15 years.
Because governments around the world have such an abysmal record, environmentalists like the World Resources Institute, a U.N.-funded Washington think tank, have come to favor returning state lands to private landowners, and local communities, which, on the whole, have maintained their lands far better. Private owners don't cut at a loss, they don't cut for employment reasons, and they manage their forests not as an undifferentiated commodity but as multi-purpose properties with timber being but one asset.
Governments have differing reasons for exploiting their forests: In Ontario, where the government sells its trees to logging companies for an average of 85 cents apiece, the purpose is the maintenance of forestry jobs; in Brazil the Amazon was seized from local inhabitants under land re-distribution, then harvested or burned for agricultural production; in Scandinavia the forest is little more than a feedstock for the forest products industry.
But whatever the government's motive, the result is generally the same: Forests meet a premature end, the plant and animal species nutured by overmature trees suffer, timber gluts the marketplace and the price of wood is artificially depressed.
No Incentives
These low prices further discourage proper management of forest lands. Because Ontario loggers don't own their land, and the government loses money on every tree it harvests, neither has an economic incentive to replant. The government has scant political incentive either. Other than token planting programs to demonstrate a concern for reforestation, the government presides over the deterioration of its holdings, since the chief political benefit of new stands to harvest - credit for forest products jobs - would go to the complete strangers who would be in power 80 years later when the trees mature.
Were governments to maintain only true wilderness areas (or to turn these over to conservation organizations), and then return the balance of their forests to private hands, and to the indigenous communities that have successfully managed them since time immemorial, the value of forest lands would climb to recognize their true market value: not only their worth as logpiles put also their recreational value, their development value, their ecological value, and their spiritual value to individuals from so many societies - including our own - around the world.
Turning free trade to the environment's advantage (1989)
Dear Friend,
Whether you voted for or against the free trade deal, now that free trade is a reality it's incumbent upon all of us who care about the environment to do everything we can to make the deal work for us. The next 60 months - during which our government will be back at the negotiating table to hammer out the meaning of subsidy - will be decisive in our environment's future: These negotiations will determine whether or not our forests are spared, whether we can continue to subsidize environmentally destructive coal and nuclear plants, whether free trade means fair trade or whether it means an acceleration of the rape and pillage policies of the past.
We all know about the free trade deal's potential to add to the pressure to exploit our resources, but let me tell you about its potential to work wonders for us, because never before have Canadian environmentalists had such powerful allies.
Consider this scenario in the upcoming negotiations: The influential U.S. lumber lobby, which has suffered at the hands of subsidized Canadian exports for decades, argues that the Canadian provinces, which own our forests, have been handing out logging licences for a song to Canadian forestry giants like MacMillan-Bloedel. As a result of these cut-rate contracts, the lobby points out, Canada has been deforesting its lands as fast as Third World countries while the U.S. has as much forest land today as it did at the turn of the century. Joining the fray on the side of the U.S. lumber barons are Canadian environmentalists and our native peoples who confirm the damage that subsidies have wrought. The negotiators rightly decide to consider these Canadian subsidies unfair, with the result that deforestation is slowed or halted in Canada.
This scenario could be repeated in coal, potash, and other resource sectors, and similar scenarios could also apply to scores of environmental standards in Canada and the U.S., which are expected to be harmonized by the free trade deal. Because Canada's standards tend to be lower than those in the U.S., harmonizing our standards to theirs will typically mean cleaner air for us to breathe and cleaner water for us to drink.
None of this will be automatic. Business on both sides of the border can be expected to lobby for lower standards and provincial governments can be expected to continue to push subsidies for environmentally destructive megaprojects - despite the boom and bust cycles they bring - because megaprojects still buy votes.
But "megaproject" is also becoming a dirty word. If we can continue to show how counterproductive they are, and to point to the success of the sustainable sectors of the economy, such as small manufacturing and the service industries that are responsible for most of the country's job growth, we may replace the current megaproject mentality with regional development policies that are environmentally sound.
The challenges are enormous, but so is the potential to do lasting good. Because so much is at stake at this pivotal time in our history, I have asked Environment Probe - a newly created project of the Energy Probe Research Foundation - to concentrate its efforts on this task. I am delighted to say that one of the country's leading environmentalists, Lawrence Solomon, will be heading the effort.
If anyone understands the environmental pros and cons of the free trade deal and what we must do to capture all the opportunities in it, it's Larry, a founder of Energy Probe and one of Canada's foremost authorities on the environment. He's been studying the deal's implications for three years, and recognized its positive aspects as far back as 1986, in a syndicated column I'm enclosing here for your interest. Larry is also the author of the Conserver Solution (Doubleday) which popularized the Conserver Society concept so many of us believe in. Much of what that book advocated a decade ago has come to pass, and the principles it set out for sustainable development are almost identical to the policies now prescribed for us by the recent UN Brundtland Commission.
But past accomplishments will not finance our future operations. If Environment Probe is to succeed in its mission, it needs your support. As a nation, we decided in the last election to give free trade a chance. Let's give the environment a chance too - the very best chance it's likely to have in a long, long while - by giving Environment Probe the means to turn the free trade deal to our advantage.
Sincerely,
Walter Pitman
P.S. Please be generous with a tax-deductible donation today. Environment Probe's work is our best bet for the environment to come out a winner in the free trade talks ahead.
Free trade an opportunity for Canada to improve environmental standards
by Lawrence Solomon
Nationally Syndicated
(This version was originally published June 14, 1986 in the Kingston Whig-Standard.)If we had free trade, says economist Miles Richardson, we might save Lyell Island. Lyell, a wilderness heritage of unparalleled beauty, is no ordinary island, and Richardson is no ordinary economist. He is the president of the Council of the Haida Nation and a leader in the fight against the British Columbia logging giants eyeing the forests on Lyell, South Moresby and other islands in the Queen Charlottes, where the Haida have lived since time immemorial.
And while Richardson is more than skeptical that a free trade pact would protect his people and their culture any better than previous white man's treaties, as far as keeping the loggers at bay: "That would be the first round effect".
Free trade is not often associated with environmental issues, but the Lyell Island controversy points why it should be in the case of a pact between Canada and the U.S.
Free trade, at least in theory, would outlaw any break - including lax environmental regulations - that one industry gets and a competitor across the border doesn't. In the case of lumber, where the B.C. government has been subsidizing multinationals such as MacMillan Bloedel to encourage more logging, the subsidies would end and logging would be cut back - pleasing both the American forest companies whose lumber markets have been whittled away by our exports, and the Haida and others who want to save our rapidly disappearing forests.
But the timber issue - which keeps threatening to scuttle free trade talks - is only one of many where the Canadian environment could be a winner. At the "Shamrock summit" held last year in Quebec City, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan agreed that free trade negotiators would discuss equalizing regulations so the two countries would compete fairly. Regulations, confirms Grey Hamilton, a spokesman in Canada's Trade Negotiations office, include all environmental regulations. "Everything will be on the table."
Such sweeping changes to the status quo make the Canadian Labour Congress, one of free trade's main foes, see red. In a recent wide-ranging position paper attacking free trade, they argue that unacceptable U.S. regulations "would be imposed on the Canadian scene."
But at least in the area of the environment, that imposition would be surprisingly welcome to Canadian environmentalists, who recognize that, in most cases, U.S. environmental regulations protect the environment more effectively than our own.
"The U.S. is ahead; I'll give them their due," says Adele Hurley, co-director of the Canadian Coalition for Acid Rain, who credits Americans with a heightened concern for the environment. "Earth Day happened there. It sure wasn't here."
Hurley, who does battle with industry and government on both sides of the border, finds that in most issues she's worked on - lead pollution, nitrogen oxides, hydro-carbons - "Canada is way behind the U.S. and tries to pretend it isn't." Even in the case of acid rain, where Canadian government has been insisting for years that the Americans cut back on their sulphur dioxide emissions, Canada was behind "until about three months ago, when the Peterson cabinet in Ontario brought in regulations that put us in the lead."
Pollution Probe's Kai Millyard joins Hurley in giving the Peterson government high marks for protecting the environment, but says it's hard to give Canada as a whole a passing grade because "standards vary widely across the country," unlike the U.S. where federal standards often hold sway.
And when it comes to water quality - where Pollution Probe has led the fight against pollution for the last decade - there's no contest between the two countries. "The Americans are ahead," he says. "They have a much more vigorous program for controlling direct industrial discharges and discharges into waterways via sewer systems than we do anywhere in Canada."
Americans are also "definitely ahead" when it come to controlling auto emissions and toxic chemicals, according to Ray Vles, executive director of the Canadian branch of Friends of the Earth, an organization with offices in 30 countries.
These environmental groups and others offer different reasons for America's lead in the environment, but they are all of one mind over what's at the top of the list: U.S. citizens' groups have more power - not only because U.S. regulations are tougher, but because U.S. citizens have better access to the courts.
"In the U.S., citizens can go to court to compel administrators to do their duty," explains lawyer Joe Castrilli, a director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association. In Canada, where most matters are left to ministerial discretion, citizens are at the mercy of political whims.
Even where clear obligations do exist, Canadian environmentalists are shackled by the difficulty of getting the right to sue in environmental matters, and by the fear that if they lose in a case against the high-priced lawyers of large corporations like MacMillan Bloedel or Union Carbide, they could have to pay tens of thousands in legal fees. In the U.S., says Castrilli, environmentalists have the right to sue, they have a freedom of information act that's superior to ours. "Putting it all together, you can see why the Americans have a very dramatic impact on environmental protection."
The Canadian Environmental Law Association, which arguably knows more about our system of environmental regulations than any other body in Canada, drafted an "Environmental Bill of Rights" in 1974, a manifesto outlining measures necessary to preserve our environment. No Canadian government has yet adopted this bill, but ironically much of it may be swept in if a comprehensive free trade pact is ever signed."Our Environmental Bill of Rights is largely based on protections generally available to U.S. citizens," Castrilli says.
Free trade, of course, is not the only way to get Canadians to clean up our act. Our government is free to upgrade environmental standards on its own, as happened recently in the case of car exhaust, when Ottawa decided to match the more stringent U.S. standards. This move pleased Canadian environmentalists, who had been fighting for it for years, but did it help Canada's free trade negotiators? "The answer is obviously yes," says Grey Hamilton, who is grateful to have one less obstacle to getting free trade talks on track.
Whether or not those talks get derailed remains to be seen, but if they do proceed, one item that should be kept on the negotiating table is the environment. So far, in all the muddle about who would win and who would lose from free trade, the Canadian environment seems to be the one constituency that clearly stands to win.
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