The October 22nd meeting heard from three groups of witnesses.  These were Adam Bienenstock, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Bienenstock Natural Playgrounds; Andrea Gabor, President and David Wise, Chair, Policy Advisory Committee of the  Canadian Institute of Planners; and  Jennifer Powley, Coordinator of Our HRM Alliance  and Mark Butler, Policy Director of the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax.

The October 24 meeting heard from four groups of witnesses.  These were Monica Andreeff, Executive Director of the Association for Mountain Parks, Protection and Enjoyment ; Anne Charlton, Director, Parks and Chris Manderson, Natural Area Management Lead, Parks of the City of Calgary;  Michael Rosen, President and Dorothy I. Dobbie, Past Chair, Board of Directors of Tree Canada and Mark Cullen, Chair of Trees for Life – Urban Tree Coalition.

Presentations from all witnesses emphasised the many benefits to be gained from green urban spaces from playgrounds, to small pockets of green, to tree-lined streets, to larger urban parks.  The benefits listed include improved  health and wellness for urban populations especially children who are now experiencing a “nature deficit”, economic benefits as cities improve their liveability, increased real estate values, increased tourism,  societal benefits and ecological benefits from carbon sequestering to water management and filtering.

The witnesses also talked about the need for balance with development and industrialization and business.  They gave the committee many ideas for how the federal government could assist in the rational greening of our cities including creating a National Urban Conservation/Forests Strategy, providing leadership, guidance, research and science,  funds, education and legislation and co-ordination to assist municipalities and other levels  of government reach their conservation goals in urban areas within their jurisdiction.

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Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I fully support the opposition day motion put forward by the New Democratic Party. I wonder if, when addressing the mistakes that are being made to the employment insurance program, we could not just reach back to the spring and include the egregious changes that were made in Bill C-38 that will make it increasingly difficult for Canadians who are dependent on seasonal industries, whether fishing, tourism or forestry, to be able to continue in those industries? It is a real threat to their employers as well.

Chris Charlton: Mr. Speaker, I absolutely agree with the leader of the Green Party. The changes that were made in Bill C-38 to the provisions impacting those who are seasonally employed are absolutely outrageous.

The reason we focused on this particular part of the EI system for today’s motion is that, one, it is a stand-alone discrete item and, two, we in the NDP kind of want to give the minister the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she did not understand her own program. We want to give her the opportunity, in this one very specific way, to say, “You know what? You’re right; there is a mistake in the program design. I recognize it now and I’m prepared to fix it”. That is why we cast the motion as narrowly as we did.

The member is absolutely right. We could spend the entire rest of this Parliament talking about things that need to be fixed with Canada’s employment insurance system.

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It is increasingly clear that the chilling effect of the bully-boy tactic of threatening all non-government groups and all charities with as yet unspecified “new sanctions” (promised at p, 205 of the 2012 budget) is working to silence critics. Where I would expect a phalanx of Executive Directors of the country’s major national conservation and environmental groups blasting back with one voice at the unravelling of decades of environmental protections, there has been a fairly small roar from only the bravest.  This is not intended as any criticism of my former colleagues. When you don’t know what the new rules will be, when you have an obligation to your organization to stay in the black and when money is scarce and threats abundant, it is hard to know how to respond.

Then there is ForestEthics.  Valerie Langer – she of the Kennedy Lake blockade, putting herself in a precarious position chained to a log suspended out over open space, then rallying thousands to the burnt over clear-cuts of Clayoquot Sound over the summer of 1993 to halt the logging of the ancient coastal temperate rainforest, and she, my dear friend of many years – stood up bravely.  Valerie has been working with ForestEthics for years.  Far from the civil disobedience of the early 1990s, she and Forest Ethics had pioneered in market based campaigns, tackling catalogue giant Victoria’s Secret and developing a local economy through toy building with Heiltsuk First Nation.

ForestEthics had found ways to find consensus with the forest industry at the board room tables.  ForestEthics is too effective for the Harper regime. Clayton Ruby has agreed to head up ForestEthics Advocacy – a new organization that will not seek any charitable dollars for its work.  Ruby declared “what we need now is more advocacy for the environment, not less advocacy for the environment.  We need more speech, not less speech.”

The announcement was barely made before the spin doctors of the Prime Minister’s Office issued the following “Info Alert”:

From: Alerte-Info-Alert [mailto:Alerte-Info-Alert@pmo-cpm.gc.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 07:03 PM
To: Alerte-Info-Alert <Alerte-Info-Alert@pmo-cpm.gc.ca>
Subject: Legitimate Charities/Organismes caritatifs
 
Legitimate Charities

After all, legitimate organizations carrying out legitimate charitable activities would have no reason to do anything differently. From: Alerte-Info-Alert [mailto:Alerte-Info-Alert@pmo-cpm.gc.ca]

Right you are.  Only those with something to fear would be willing to stop being afraid.  Only people with something to hide will object to the warrant-less access to their email address and phone numbers and ISP information.  Right, only someone who is doing wrong will object to mandatory minimum sentences or pre-emptive arrest.

And when a conservation group, unsure how to speak in this Brave New World where the 10% legal advocacy by charities leads to endless harassment with threats of loss of charitable status, decides to voluntarily relinquish its charitable status, it will stand condemned by the PMO. 

This is my country. The actions of this PMO belong in some other county.  Maybe one described by George Orwell where an “Info Alert” could be a tool of propaganda and smear. This PMO spends more on “information officers” than any previous PMO.  Talk about abuse of taxpayers’ dollars; this bunch spends $10 million/year in shadowy political operatives and “Info Alerts.”   This PMO does not belong in Canada.

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The second meeting of the week was a continuation of the study of land use and sustainable development. Three different groups, representing a range of perspectives, gave witness, including delegates from the Office of the Auditor General, the National Aboriginal Forestry Association, and the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association. They stated, respectively, that the federal government (through HRSDC and AANDC) had failed to sufficiently foster and support training programs and economic development; that the aboriginal forestry sector must be better enabled to fully realize its potential production capacity, in turn creating prospects for aboriginal youth; and that increased funding arrangements with the private sector were necessary in order to expand Small and Medium Enterprise loans for aboriginal entrepreneurs. Committee members showed broad support for the recommendations of each group, seeing value in all proposals.

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The picket line began on January 11th to prevent the construction of roads by Spray Lake Sawmills who want to harvest 120 hectares of trees in the Castle Wilderness area west of Pincher Creek, near Beaver Mines. The Alberta government has threatened the protesters with trespass citations.

The Green Party of Canada urges the Alberta government to instead consider the value of the forested area in terms of ecosystem services, tourism potential, and water purification, and put in place legislation to protect the area permanently.  “We need to understand that the value of these forests is far greater when they are left standing,” said May.  “Short term industrial exploitation is not worth damaging an area with such immense ecological significance.”

The Castle wilderness area provides one third of all water in the Oldman Watershed, has profound sacred value to the area’s First Nations, contains over 120 provincially rare plant species and 59 species of mammals, and is critical habitat for endangered grizzly bears.

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“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.

“No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”

– From your open letter of today’s date, January 9, 2012.

Dear Joe,

Your letter caught my attention.  I respect you and like you a lot as a colleague in the House.  Unfortunately, I think your role as Minister of Natural Resources has been hijacked by the PMO spin machine.  The PMO is, in turn, hijacked by the foreign oil lobby. You are, as Minister of Natural Resources, in a decision-making, judge-like role.  You should not have signed such a hyperbolic rant.

I have reproduced a short section of your letter. The idea that First Nations, conservation groups, and individuals opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline are opposed to all forestry, mining, hydro-electric and gas is not supported by the facts.  I am one of those opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline.  I do not oppose all development; neither does the Green Party; neither do environmental NGOS; neither do First Nations.

I oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project requires over-turning the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the British Columbia coastline. The federal-provincial oil tanker moratorium has been in place for decades.  As former Industry Canada deputy minister Harry Swain pointed out in today’s Globe and Mail, moving oil tankers through 300 km of perilous navigation in highly energetic tidal conditions is a bad choice. In December 2010, the government’s own Commissioner for the Environment, within the Office of the Auditor General, reported that Canada lacked the tools to respond to an oil spill.  These are legitimate concerns.

Furthermore, running a pipeline through British Columbia’s northern wilderness, particularly globally significant areas such as the Great Bear Rainforest, is a bad idea.  Nearly 1,200 kilometers of pipeline through wilderness and First Nations territory is not something that can be fast-tracked.

Most fundamentally, shipping unprocessed bitumen crude out of Canada has been attacked by the biggest of Canada’s energy labour unions, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, as a bad idea. The CEP estimates it means exporting 40,000 jobs out of Canada (figure based on jobs lost through the Keystone Pipeline). They prefer refining the crude here in Canada.  (The CEP is also not a group to which your allegation that opponents of Gateway also oppose all forestry, mining, oil, gas, etc is anything but absurd.)

The repeated attacks on environmental review by your government merit mention.  The federal law for environmental review was first introduced under the Mulroney government.  Your government has dealt repeated blows to the process, both through legislative changes, shoved through in the 2010 omnibus budget bill, and through budget cuts.  In today’s letter, you essentially ridicule the process through a misleading example.  Your citation of “a temporary ice arena on a frozen pond in Banff” requiring federal review was clearly intended to create the impression that the scope of federal review had reached absurd levels.  You neglected to mention that the arena was within the National Park. That is the only reason the federal government was involved.  It was required by the National Parks Act. The fact that the arena approval took only two months shows the system works quite well.

Perhaps most disturbing in the letter is the description of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline as coming from “environmental and other radical groups.”  Nowhere in your letter do you mention First Nations.  (I notice you mention “Aboriginal communities,” but First Nations require the appropriate respect that they represent a level of government, not merely individuals within communities.)

The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to respect First Nations sovereignty and protect their interests.  It is a nation to nation relationship.  To denigrate their opposition to the project by lumping it in with what you describe (twice) as “radical” groups is as unhelpful to those relationships as it is inaccurate.

“Radical” is defined as “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.”  (Merriam Webster).

By that definition, it is not First Nations, conservation groups or individual opponents that are radical.  They seek to protect the fundamental nature of the wilderness of northern British Columbia, the ecological health of British Columbia coastal eco-systems, and the integrity of impartial environmental review.  It is your government that is radical by proposing quite radical alteration of those values.

Your government has failed to present an energy strategy to Canada.  We have no energy policy.  We are still importing more than half of the oil we use.  Further, we have no plan to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, even as we sign on to global statements about the need to keep greenhouse gases from rising above 450 ppm in the atmosphere to keep global average temperatures from exceeding a growth of 2 degrees C.  The climate crisis imperils our future – including our economic future – in fundamental ways which your government ignores.

By characterizing this issue as environmental radicals versus Canada’s future prosperity you have done a grave disservice to the development of sensible public policy.  There are other ways to diversify Canada’s energy markets.  There are other routes, other projects, and most fundamentally other forms of energy.

I urge you to protect your good name and refuse to sign such unworthy and inaccurate missives in the future.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth May, O.C.
Member of Parliament
Saanich-Gulf Islands

Leader
Green Party of Canada

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