But the government suggests it can now get this advice from the Internet and stakeholders.
The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, created under former prime minister Brian Mulroney's government in 1988 in the lead-up to the 1992 Earth Summit, was one of the first forums to bring together business and environmental stakeholders to provide non-partisan research and advice on federal policies.
But members of the government, including Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Environment Minister Peter Kent, applauded, grinned and chuckled in the House of Commons Friday as NDP MP Dennis Bevington slammed Thursday's federal budget for pulling the plug on the panel that employs about 30 people.
``The reality is that the round table was created one-quarter of a century ago,'' Kent said in the Commons. ``It was created before the Internet, when there were few such sources of domestic, independent research and analysis on sustainable development. That is simply no longer the case. There are now any number of organizations and university-based services that provide those services.''
The government has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for Environment Canada, along with grants for scientific research in universities. It also used Thursday's budget to launch an $8 million campaign at Revenue Canada to investigate and crack down on environmental groups and other charities that do research and analysis on conservation issues and sustainable development.
``This can set us back years and years,'' Bevington said outside the House of Commons, adding that the government is also allowing a major arctic research station to shut down. ``It's the buffoon attitude.''
A pro-oil industry lobby group as well as an organized group of climate change contrarians with previous industry-driven funding have praised Flaherty's budget for launching an attack on environmental groups and sidestepping scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming.
Alex Wood, a former CEO of the round table from 2006 to 2008, noted that the panel, enshrined through legislation that was adopted in 1993, has helped develop evidence-based policy options that guided government decisions.
``To me it leaves a huge policy vacuum because the government has been kind of hard-pressed to develop ideas on certain topics,'' said Wood, now a senior director of policy and markets at Sustainable Prosperity, a think tank based at the University of Ottawa. ``It's not just this government, but previous governments as well and the round table has always been the source of some innovation on policy that you certainly continue to need in Canada.''
For example, Wood said that statistics measuring environmental indicators on issues such as water quality or greenhouse gas emissions were inspired by the panel's research. He also said it helped the cities and provinces develop strategies to clean up abandoned industrial sites.
The panel completed a series of research projects for the government in recent months and years, including a groundbreaking study last September that estimated climate change impacts could cost the Canadian economy up to $43 billion per year by 2050.
The round table's recent research has been featured in a recent report released by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a partnership of governments set up to assess the latest scientific evidence about the climate.
While Flaherty described his budget as a long-term plan, it did not include any new measures to address the anticipated economic and ecological impacts of global warming in Canada.
Liberal environment critic Kirsty Duncan described it as an ``inaction plan'' for the environment.
``The government severely cut the budget to Environment Canada, cancelled the national round table, took aim at its critics, gutted environmental legislation which protects the health and safety of Canadians and has continually muzzled government scientists,'' said Duncan in the Commons. ``Why the war on the environment, the destruction of 50 years of safeguards and the failure to understand sustainable development?''
The environment minister responded that Duncan was ``doing her best to find something to complain about with regard to the environmental chapters in the budget.''
Kent declined to answer questions from Postmedia News. His office noted that some of the panel's reports came from ``a large number of environmental NGOs, think tanks, (and) university-based research units'' that have grown significantly since the round table was established.
Green party leader Elizabeth May, a former vice-chairwoman of the panel, suggested the government didn't want to hear ``inconvenient advice'' from the panel warning that ``there are billions of dollars in costs to our economy from ignoring the climate crisis.''
``So this is a budget which is using every tool that they can, they can't censor the media yet, but going forward to silence the voices of critics,'' May said.
The round table's current CEO, David McLaughlin, also Flaherty's chief of staff in 2006 and 2007, has declined to comment on the government's decision.
Original Article
Source: vancouver sun
Author: Mike De Souza
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