Let’s Just Get It Over With And Shoot Environment Canada Dead

A Commentary by Doug Draper

There’s an old line that goes; “They shoot horses, don’t they?”

It’s a line I don’t like that applies horses that have become so badly injured or infirmed in the eyes of their owners that they are no longer earning their oats. So out comes the gun and BANG! It’s over.

Well, I’ve been putting off saying this because of some age old reverence I have for a once-proud federal agency called Environment Canada, but perhaps it is time that the same line applied to it. I mean what is the point of Canada pretending that it still has a federal agency that plays some real role in environmental surveillance and protection when that agency has had all of the guts it needs to get the job done ripped out of it?

So let’s be honest. If Canadians support a federal government that has little or no use for environmental protection – a government that goes so far as to call any individual or group that places environmental protection above unfettered tar sands expansion an “extremist” or “adversary of Canada” – why bother having a federal environment department? Why not shut Environment Canada down now and save the taxpayers of the country however hundreds of millions of dollars it is costing to keep this ghost of a once vital voice for our natural heritage running? They shoot horses, don’t they?

Not that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper is solely responsible for the demise of Environment Canada. The Harper government is simply driving the last spike into the heart of a department that has been lacerated over and over again by successive federal governments for years 

For the better part of the past two-and-a-half decades, going back to the years Brian Mulroney and his Conservatives were governing the country, and all through the Liberal years of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, it has been a slow but sure march toward death by a thousand cuts for Environment Canada. The Mulroney government at least pretended to care about environmental protection and, to some extent, it actually did. But the federal Liberals, beginning with Hamilton, Ontario’s own Sheila Copps who turned out to be one of the first of the worst environment ministers, up to and including the current minister, Peter Kent, that this country has ever had, just let Environment Canada circle the drain.

What is so tragic is that Copps, who also served as Canada’s deputy prime minister during her tenure in the environment portfolio, had an opportunity to embrace recommendations by the International Joint Commission, a century old Canada/U.S watchdog group on the Great Lakes, to phase out the use of industrially produced chlorinated chemicals that spawn poisons like dioxin and cancer causing chlorobenzenes, but she and the prime minister she was working for at the time (Chretien) failed to seize that opportunity. What was particularly impressive about this progressive set of recommendations at the time is that they came from IJC commissioners appointed by the Conservative government of Mulroney in Canada (including a former Ontario Conservative MPP and deputy premier from the Niagara area, Bob Welch) and by the Republican government of Ronald Reagan in the United States.

Peter Kent. The worst environment minister Canada has ever had. One might call him Environment Canada’s undertaker

Yet Copps dismissed these important recommendations with no show of remorse as she watched the Liberal government she played patty cake for continue to decimate an Environment Canada that back in the 1970s and 1980s was regarded as one of the best agencies of its kind in the world and that (among other things) played leading role in identifying and addressing the pollution threatening the Great Lakes.

Had it not been for Environment Canada back then, with the support of the Liberal Pierre Trudeau government and short-lived Conservative government of Joe Clark, it is not likely that an unprecedented agreement would ever have been negotiated and signed between Canada and the United States to stop the hemorrhaging of some of the world’s deadliest industrial poisons to the Niagara River and Lake Ontario from notorious dumpsites like the Love Canal and Hyde Park in Niagara County, New York.

Of course, that was back at a time when polls showed a majority of Canadians placed environmental protection right up there with jobs and the economy as issues they were concerned about. Such is not the case today and we have a Stephen Harper government that views environmental protection as an obstacle to growth.

The Harper government has continued to cut and gut what is left of Environment Canada’s budget, including its research programs on water and air quality, on climate change and other areas that might once been of interest and concern to Canadian citizens. It has muzzled what remaining Environment Canada scientists there are, reduced the federal agency’s involvement in environmental reviews of oil pipeline and other projects, and gutted the federal Fisheries Act, one of the most powerful tools the agency had for prosecuting parties contaminating the country’s watersheds. 

Most recently, it has transferred most of the responsibility for setting standards for greenhouse gas emissions to the country’s provinces – a move that says the federal government is getting out of the business of setting and enforcing environmental standards. 

That is the final straw. If a federal government is going to abdicate – to use a word a Globe and Mail editorial recently did on this topic – its responsible for national oversight when it comes to environmental protection, there is no further use for a federal environmental agency. 

In other words, we might just as well deep six Environment Canada which should also mean, and this is the only good part, the end of Environment Minister Peter Kent, who is the worst of the worst who has ever served in Canada’s environment portfolio in my more than three decades as a writer in this area.

I feel terrible writing about Environment Canada this way because it was once such a heroic, leading-edge organization. But that is gone. They shoot horses, don’t they? 

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