 This morning the CBC had an extensive interview
with Ontario's Minister of the Environment, Laurel Broten. Broten used
to be an environmental activist, protesting on Parliament Hill against
various social and environmental outrages and the negligence and
indifference of the federal government. Aside from the fact she is a
generation younger than I am, her history isn't all that different than
mine. Serendipity took her out of professional practice and into
politics.
Since she became environment minister, she's been
under enormous pressure to deliver on her rhetoric, and is finding that
it isn't all that easy to do. She has had to defend a host of unpopular
and environmentally destructive provincial government policies:
- Backsliding
on the promise to close the province's coal-fired generators, which are
Canada’s greatest polluters; she claimed that the technology to replace
them with renewable and other non-polluting sources of energy is not
yet up to the task, and it will take another 10-20 years to do so
- Defending
the province's decision to invest additional money in nuclear power for
the province, despite the dreadful record of the existing nukes, their
astronomical cost, and the safety and waste disposal risks associated
with them
- Being accused of having a double standard when she
criticized the US for not reducing emissions in the six Duke Energy
private coal-fired energy plants that dump most of their toxins in
downwind Ontario
- Inaction in the face of Toronto's decision to
buy a huge landfill site near London Ontario (adjacent to First Nation
lands) to serve as a dump site for Toronto garbage that Michigan is
justifiably no longer accepting
- Allowing toxic paper mill
sludge to be spread on Ontario lands with no control or oversight,
despite a report commissioned by the province suggesting that the
sludge needed to be decontaminated first
- Allowing the giant Lafarge Cement corporation to burn a massive quantity of tires on its site as an 'experiment'
What
was most remarkable about this morning's interview was that the once
idealistic activist Broten was reduced to delivering platitudes and
admissions of lack of control, ideas and alternatives, in the face of
pointed questions from the CBC reporter. She essentially confessed that
the provincial government sees no alternative but to continue to burn
dirty coal for at least another decade and to build more nuclear plants
(although the administration of the provincial nuclear power agency has
been so bad that they've fired the last two sets of executives, paying
them a fortune in severance, and although we are still paying a
surcharge in our monthly electricity bills for the massive debt
accumulated by the previous nuclear power agency). And, though she's a
lawyer herself, she essentially acknowledged the impotence of the
provincial government to exercise any authority over the pollution and
waste of the private sector, to help us achieve our Kyoto targets,
which her government is supposedly striving to achieve.
The CBC
host pointed out a recent report that claimed that, even if all the
coal-fired energy generating plants in Canada were shut down, and even
if the atrociously polluting Alberta tar sands project were shut down,
Canada still would only be 10% closer to achieving its Kyoto targets
than it is today. What is the provincial government doing, he asked, to
ramp up the efforts of everyone – individual, corporation and
governments at all levels – by sufficient magnitude that the world we
leave our children and grandchildren will not be poisoned? The evasive
answer from the activist environment minister, which could under
different circumstances have been you or me, was essentially nothing.
They're doing all they can. They can do nothing more.
This is
not a conservative government running interference for greedy
corporatists. This is a small-and-capital-L liberal government with
high ideals, facing the grim reality of an unforgiving North American
NAFTA marketplace where governments are compelled not to exceed the
lowest environmental standards of all signatory governments or face
billion dollar lawsuits for illegal restraint of trade. They are facing
corporations, mostly foreign-owned corporations with no loyalty to
Canada or Canadian workers, who have accepted huge subsidies and grants
to locate and supposedly bring jobs to Ontario but who would leave
Ontario tomorrow at the drop of a hat in favour of a regime with more
lax environmental and social standards. They are facing voters who
would short-sightedly (and probably will, this October) vote them out
of office and vote in instead a conservative regime that plans to
dismantle what pitiful social and environmental regulations exist in
the province and bribe the people with their own money (tax cuts mainly
for the Conservatives' rich friends and campaign benefactors, disguised
as across-the-board tax cuts, financed by deregulation and deficit
spending – sound familiar?) And they are facing a powerful Chamber of
Commerce lobby whose dominant big businesses lie and bully small
businesses into believing that what's good for the giant corporations
is good for the entrepreneur – when the truth is the exact opposite.
In
the face of this power, corporatist wealth and citizen ignorance, the
people of Ontario in October will have to choose between these impotent
and disappointing Liberal incumbents, a Conservative party with
enormous money behind it driven by a soft-pedaled Bush-style right-wing
economic ideology, and an NDP party whose poor track record and
chumminess with organized labour leaves them untrusted by the majority.
In our archaic first-past-the-post election system, the Conservatives
need only 35% of the vote to gain a majority, and set back
environmental and social progress by decades, just as the last
Conservative regime did and just as the current federal Conservative
minority is doing. Current voter polls suggest they will succeed in
doing so.
Those of us who know and care will shrug and
acknowledge that, since the Liberals were impotent despite the zeal of
people like Broten, the result will be only slightly worse than it is
now. And that achieving what we need to achieve, to create a world for
our children and grandchildren that we, and they, can be proud of and
healthy in, will be only slightly more impossible.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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