A Commentary by Doug Draper
There was a time – some 30 years ago – when Environment Canada had an international reputation as a leading body in environmental research and protection. And its Ontario region office hosted one of the hottest environmental watchdog teams of all.
Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May was among the first and a very few who have expressed concern over cuts to Environment Canada.
In Niagara, a number of the people that worked in that worked in that office, including directors Bob Slater and Jim Kingham, and more frontline scientists and others like Doug Hallett, Rick Findlay, Tony Wagner and Jeanne Jabanoski, became household names. This was especially so during the early to mid-1980s as public concern grew over the concentrations of dioxin and other toxic chemicals washing down the lower Niagara River from Love Canal, Hyde Park and other waste sites along the U.S. shore.
Environment Canada’s Ontario office, with the support of former environment ministers John Roberts and Charles Caccia for the then-federal Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau, played a lead role in convincing American governments to sign a ground-breaking agreement for slashing the concentrations of industrial poisons gushing into the Niagara River by at least 50 per cent within 10 years. The was goal was more than met and arguably this office helped flushing into the Niagara River and Lake Ontario helped prevent the lower Niagara River and Lake Ontario from becoming a cauldron for killer concentrations of man-made chemicals for generations to come.
That was then and it now seems to be ever so long ago. Now, the new majority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is talking about slashing 776 jobs in environmental protection, climate change, weather and other programs Environment Canada provides across this country, form coast to coast.
“It’s a real shock. It’s so many,” federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May told The Toronto Star in a story this August 4 about the planned cuts. “These are deep cuts into programs and services that are indispensable. They (the Harper government) need to look at these programs and realize these are public safety questions.”
John Bennett, director of the public interest group, Sierra Club of Canada, called the planned cuts a “blatant attack” on the environment. “What it will do,” he said, “is give polluters exactly what they want – a toothless, understaffed Environment Canada with weakened scientific capacity and no enforcement capacity.”
Harper’s Treasury Board President, Tony Clement, who has been directed to cut about $4 billion in costs and who was a cabinet minister in the former Ontario government of Mike Harris a decade ago when it was chopping programs, said the chops to Environment Canada shouldn’t hurt. “In terms of what Canadians expect out of Environment Canada – protecting air, protecting water, those kinds of issues – there ‘s been no diminution,” Clement told the Toronto Star.
Harper governnment rep Tony Clement says cuts to Environment Canada should be no problem.
Actually, Clement, Harper and the government will probably not be criticized very much for the cuts to Environment Canada, and may even be applauded by many who see this agency as a roadblock to unfettered industrial growth in the oil, coal, asbestos and other industries.
More recent surveys show that many Canadians over the age of 40 are more concerned about keeping their jobs and entitlements, including their pensions, health insurance, etc.) when they retire than they are about what shape the air, water and other natural resources on the planet will be in 30 or 50 years from now. Why should they care? It is mostly younger people in their teens and 20s – around my daughter’s age – who are concerned about what shape the planet will be in by the middle of this century, and let’s face it, they are facing enough problems around joblessness and the obscene deficits their elders have left them as it is.
Let’s not forget also that a majority of Canadians who bothered to vote in this past spring’s federal election supported Harper’s Conservatives, knowing that many in the caucus don’t care all that much for environmental regulations and question whether climate change should be taken more seriously than a pitch from a snake-oil salesman.
So even while the Harper government prepares to spend billions on new prisons and fighter jets, why shouldn’t Environment Canada and its programs take a financial blow? I fear that most of the baby boomers in my age group will say hear, hear to this news.
(We encourage you to share your views on this story in the comment boxes below and to encourage your friends and associates to join the growing number of readers regularly visiting Niagara At Large as an independent source of news and commentary in our greater Niagara region.)
Niagara At Large 
These cuts are outrageous.
LikeLike
Hmmm. Tony Clement eh? Needs to cut some fat from Environment Canada, while millions were spent on his riding in Muskoka for gazebos, new runways for the North Bay airport (unused I am told by locals; not one digitary flew in), fancy roadsigns, while the locals, and retailers stayed away in droves during the G20 fiaso that was. Ask anyone in Huntsville how this helped the economy…. but, hey the environment. Doesn’t affect Muskoka, does it?
LikeLike
I’m not surprised by the cuts, but I am disgusted.
LikeLike
Wonderful! We have our own Ronnie Raygun. I am in the 40 plus age group and I DO care about the environment and global climate change. I wish I knew why more people are not concerned. Around the world deserts are expanding, icebergs calving and glaciers melting but “nothing is wrong”. Tell the people that live on the coasts or in the river valleys fed by the glaciers or who live marginally in the expanding deserts. Eventually I suppose we’ll be floating on garbage rafts in the ocean. Shades of mad Max.
Why was this not even an issue in the last election? Just not important. It’s like Al Gore’s statement, put a frog in water and heat it slowly or drop it into boiling water. We won’t clue in until it’s boiling and it’s too late.
LikeLike
Hard to know what to make of this. After seeing billions of dollars wasted by some government scandals, it’s refreshing to see the opposite happening for a change.
LikeLike
And you have only seen the tip of the Conservative iceberg …Wait until the government gets into high gear…. In the late 1950s, as an inquisitive young, man I went to a CCF political meeting at a hotel in Moncton, N.B and am certain the Mounties were monitoring the event. I wonder if I have a file with them… Chuckle.
LikeLike
What is most disturbing about these cuts is that Environment Canada is our warning system against consequences to the environment that are unforseen. To me Harper’s government actions would be akin to the sort of supidity that might had happened in Great Britain had it cut funding for research on defence technologies such as radar in the 1930s of the eve of the Second World War. Problems such as global warming promise a lot of surprises- Canada needs to be prepared!
LikeLike
Three(four?) cheers for Harper. Why suffer through a century or two of odious climate change and then only expire in snail-slow agony, when you can speed up the process? I have thirty-seven SUV-s in my front yard, the
motors humming 24/7. Hurrah for Harper! He loves a quicky. ( :
LikeLike
If the policy wonks at Environment Kanukistan were truly doing a necessary job, then some enterprising individual will do that same job for profit.
Perhaps that person will hire the laid-off employees… IF they’re any good.
If they weren’t performing a necessary job, then good riddance to a bit of government waste, the overpaid public sector “workers”, and their ridiculously expensive and unfunded pensions.
LikeLike
Canadian Environmental Scientist, were doing a marvelous service to all peoples of the world including those few who made derogatory comments as above. A famous gentleman and world Famous Canadian born Economists, John Kenneth Galbraith (In case the few above who are ignorant of his role in restoring sanity back to the world during the Franklin Roosevelt days) stated ………”The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness” and might I add a Creed of Greed and Selfish Entitlement…..It seems that most of Harper’s goons (Male and Female) fit the description to a tee along with those who voted and support his hellish Creed of Greed………… may you all rot in the fires of hell. It seems your me…..me….me fits your live style and to hell with those who do not kiss your asses.
LikeLike