Four Former Ministers Speak Out – More Dispatches On Harper’s War On Our Environment

A Commentary by Doug Draper

If there is any chance there is a God looking over the best that Canada can be, then please God, bless them.

Former Canadian federal fishery ministers Tom Siddon and John Fraser. Image courtesy of the Hill Times at http://www.hilltimes.com/ .

When I say ‘them’ I am talking about four former federal ministers of fisheries for Canada – Tom Siddon and John Fraser, who both served in the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, and Herb Dhaliwal and David Anderson, who served in the Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin – who have collectively written a letter late this May to the “Conservative” government of Stephen Harper, urging it not to rip all of the teeth out of one of Canada’s most important pieces of environmental protection legislation, the federal Fisheries Act. 

This letter was brave and non-partisan, and came direct from the heart and from years worth of experience of retired politicians and cabinet ministers who have nothing politically to lose or gain any more. And it was a heroic plea to a Harper government that – now emboldened by a majority of parliamentary seats – is showing its true colours. In this case, it is showing itself up to be the radical force its ‘Reform Party’ insurgents  always wanted to be in destroying Canada’s environmental legislation for the sake of the shortest term interests of tar sand and of any and all other natural resource exploitation.

The Harper government’s proposed changes to the Fisheries Act, contained in an omnibus bill aimed at gassing many other of Canada’s environmental protection programs, “will inevitably reduce and weaken … habitat protection provisions” for our countries fisheries,” say the former ministers in their letter. It amounts to “using a sledgehammer to swat a fly,” the letter adds.

If residents in our greater Niagara region may be asking; ‘Why should we care?’, the federal Fisheries legislation has been used effectively in this area to control discharges of harmful pollutants to watersheds as significant to the Great Lakes as the Welland River and Twelve Mile Creek systems.

There are concerns, as have been reported, by members of farming communities in Niagara and other regions of the country of this legislation potentially making it hard for them to clean out irrigation ditches if or when there is some reason to believe fish are now inhabiting them. One spokesperson for the farming community, featured on a CBC new clip, said it can take up to two years or more to get permission to clean these irrigation channels if authorities deem there are fish in them.

But surely there is a way to deal with farmers’ concerns over irrigation or drainage ditches without gutting this important legislation or, to put it another way, throwing out the fish with the irrigation water? Can’t we put our creative minds together and figure out a solution to that without destroying a law that is one of the most progressive laws of its kind in the world for protecting the quality of waters and the life forms right up to an including humans that they support. 

Surely too, there are at least a few in the caucus of the government of Harper, however much of a dictator he is and however much of an extremist he is on killing environmental protection laws, who have children or grandchildren of their own who are going to have to make it on this planet, whatever shape we leave it in, long after we are gone? Why don’t any of them  have the courage former Conservative Party stalwarts like Siddon and Fraser, who also served as a federal environment minister during the short-lived government of Joe Clark,  do to stand up for responsible stewardship? 

Can’t they put the interests of the Canadian people and our environment ahead of Harper’s radical, right-wing ideology?

As Siddon put it in a recent statement;  “In the old days, whether we were Progressive Conservative, or Liberal, or environmentalists, or Greens we had the heart and soul – the values of Canada – at the top of our agenda. Whereas this government seems to place the pocketbook at the top of their agenda,” he complained.

Fraser had this to say about the omnibus bill that the gutting of the Fisheries Act and other environmental policies is embed in; “Unless there is some excuse, some kind of national emergency, I don’t think an omnibus bill is appropriate procedurally. … “The point [is] … you’ve got to vote either for the whole thing or against it. That’s bad democracy.”

Bad democracy indeed! With the permission of The Hill Times newsweekly which you should visit regularly if you care about what is happening in our country on the federal scene, we thank that publication for allowing us to use the image, above, of the former fisheries ministers and we invite you to access a recent article that publication wrote on this issue at  http://www.hilltimes.com/news/news/2012/05/28/feds-trying-to-gut-fisheries-act-under-the-radar-say-two-former-federal-conservative/30896 .

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