Don’t get me wrong. Scott Vaughan is no Brigitte DePape. He doesn’t hold up a sign reducing our political universe to a single hortatory injunction: Stop Harper. No, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development speaks with the urbane inflections of a man who has spent his life measuring his words against the demands of the facts and the imperatives of mandarin diplomacy. He doesn’t aim to offend, but neither does he cast the appropriate lights and shadows over his file for the benefit of a miscreant government.
Sitting in the national press amphitheater as Vaughan moved effortlessly between English and French like Gordie Howe shifting his stick to shoot either from the left or right, I was struck by the enormity of the Harper abdication on the environment. Failure to comply with the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act was no surprise – the Harperites withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol last December to a chorus of international denunciations.
But it was surprising that Dear Leader’s better course, a sector-by-sector regulatory regime to lower greenhouse gases, had been so utterly abandoned. The Harper government set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 17 percent as of 2020. Citing Environment Canada’s own forecasts, Scott Vaughan reported that emissions will actually rise 7 percent above those 2005 levels by the target date. It seems the only way to get the truth out of this crowd is to audit them.
Speaking as dispassionately as a schoolmaster doing his sums, Vaughan painted a picture of a federal government so slothful in its pursuit of its own targets that to date there are only two federal regulations in place to lower greenhouse gas emissions. All told, they will account for a reduction of between 11 and 13 million tonnes by the end of the decade. That number amounts to a new metric of the pathetic. Canada would have to reduce its emissions by more than ten times that amount to realize the government’s projections.
The Harper plan, like so many rhetorical forays of this government into areas where they really have no interest, is a complete sham. Scott Vaughan’s audit also showed that the government’s ostensible regulatory approach is mere words floating on thin air without any implementation plan. There are only two regulations in place for transportation, and none for oil and gas. Proposed regulations for the electricity sector do not kick in until 2015, meaning any coal-fired plants that are built before that date will offset projected emission cuts.
And then there is the issue of the money. There always is with this regime. The Harper government did zero analysis to establish the cost to the economy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent. On the face of it, that is rather strange. In dumping Kyoto, a host of prime ministerial sock-puppets cited the burdensome costs, some $14 billion. So why not tell us how much we are going to save? Or as Scott Vaughan put it, “We therefore expected the government would have estimated how much it will cost to meet its target and [identify] the least costly options.” It didn’t.
On the subject of money, it is interesting to note that Vaughan has done three audits during the Kyoto period. A total of $9 billion had been allocated by the federal government to the greenhouse gas emission project. But the auditor couldn’t establish how much of the money had actually been spent. Vaughan expected that the government might want to share those real expenditures with parliament. Bless him in his innocence, they would rather have burning bamboo shoots under their fingernails.
How completely has the Harper government walked away from its environmental responsibilities? Decide for yourself. Scott Vaughan found in his audit that Ottawa is on the hook for $7.7 billion in environmental liabilities at 22,000 contaminated sites across the country. Of those, 9,000 on the federal inventory have been closed, meaning no more action, but progress on cleaning up the remaining 13,000 has been painfully slow.
An astonishing 1,000 to 1,500 of these toxic sites sit on underground aquifers. A full 150 of these open contaminated sites are in Ottawa with thousands more on First Nations land. Worst of all, the budget for assessing these thousands of sites containing arsenics and PCBs has been slashed by 68 percent. Vaughan pointed out that Canadians will be paying “for centuries” for these environmental nightmares from the past and urged the government not to “go back and repeat the mistakes of the past.” Harper’s answer is Bill C-38? One project, one review, a quick and dirty 24 months.
Of the pretty fictions and lurid grotesqueries that have come out of the Harper government, few can match its contempt for the environment. It is just one more subject for the PM’s wood-shed politics. Whether it’s auditing David Suzuki ad nauseam or characterizing environmentalists as radicals in the pay of foreign governments as Natural Resources minister Joe Oliver did, the environment for Harper is nothing but a troublesome obstacle to his corporate hero-worship and political unilateralism. That’s why he chose a former TV meat-puppet who will read whatever is in the teleprompter as his environment minister. That’s why he didn’t fire that minister when he accused environmentalists of “laundering” money, relying on the paranoid droolings of Senator Nicole Eaton as his source.
Fear and fraud can only hold back the facts for so long. When the dam finally breaks, it will be Canada’s public servants who will deserve a large part of the credit.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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