When will government - of all political stripes - start to understand that it is the exploitation of the environment that has got us into this mess in the first place?
So what is their remedy? Exploit it some more!
Granted, this new move may skip around some duplication, but Environmental Assessments acted as safeguards for the Environment, which seems to be the first victim to "growth" and thus deserves such safety nets.
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Prentice accused of using failing economy to sidestep environmental assessments
Published: 2009-03-21
Conservationists accused Jim Prentice of gutting the environmental review process in favour of jobs Friday, saying his plan to excuse certain projects from federal scrutiny will endanger sensitive habitat and wildlife.
Members of several ecological groups confronted the federal environment minister at a funding announcement in Halifax and said Ottawa is focusing on job creation and economic growth at the expense of environmental protections.
Mark Butler of the Ecology Action Centre said the minister’s plan to limit the number of public projects that will undergo federal environmental assessments runs counter to increasing international efforts to protect threatened ecosystems.
"This government doesn’t have a very good environmental track record, so when they take the axe to this act we don’t have a lot of confidence," he said.
"I have a somewhat dim view of the environmental assessment process and it could be improved, but you don’t improve it by gutting it."
The assertions are the latest from critics who claim the Conservatives are simply using the economy as an excuse to weaken the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and greatly reduce the number of reviews done every year.
Prentice had said earlier that he was surprised to learn the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency does about 7,000 assessments a year. That is in addition to reviews conducted by provinces and municipalities.
Reports leaked this week said the department is interested in cutting that annually to as little as 200.
John Baird, the federal minister in charge of infrastructure, said last month that the streamlining would eliminate 90 per cent of the reviews Ottawa does by instead relying on the provincial assessments.
On Friday, Prentice said it’s not yet clear which projects will be exempt from the federal process, but ones not thought to have any negative environmental impact — like a "green" wastewater facility — would be excused.
He insisted the "streamlining" would create jobs and speed up projects linked to Ottawa’s $12-billion infrastructure spending that could get bogged down in the review process.
"We need to make sure that the money we’re investing is invested quickly in public infrastructure," he said. "This will expedite the process (and) eliminate the duplication."
But conservation groups said they weren’t consulted on the issue and will be left in the dark on what projects won’t undergo any kind of federal assessment.
Gretchen Fitzgerald of the Sierra Club said they will know far less about how industrial development affects the environment and endangered species. Citing a quarry project in Digby, she said a key question involved its impact on the rare North Atlantic right whale.
"A lot of those issues about end species will not be discussed if you deregulate the environmental assessment act," she said.
Butler said Prentice and the federal government as a whole are using the recession as a justification for dismantling the federal act and other protections that stand in the way of business.
"I think it was highly opportunistic," he said. "They use it as a cover to make these changes . . . so we’re worried."
1 comment:
If our generation were to expend more effort educating their children to seek ways of doing that don't require electricity than we could reduce co2 emissions very quickly.
What is needed is a new breed of politicians/leaders with the vision to rationalize this as a viable approach to a solution for the future.
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