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The Green Party at the federal level notes that it is another example of the Conservative administration of Stephen Harper failing to build strong relationships with our closest neighbour and largest trading partner.

“The Alaskan wild salmon and tourism sectors are multi-billion dollar industries that would be decimated by a tailings spill. These concerns have been directly conveyed by U.S. officials to both the B.C. Government and Stephen Harper, but they appear to have fallen on deaf ears,” said Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada and MP (Saanich – Gulf Islands). “This mine is a reckless decision that will endanger the environment and the economy of our neighbours.”

The B.C. Government issued a full permit to Imperial Metals (who also owns the Mount Polley Copper Mine) to operate the Red Chris gold and copper mine on June 21, 2015. The mine is located approximately 130 kilometres from the Alaskan border. Several First Nations communities, as well as major Alaskan water bodies, are located downstream of the mine’s tailings sites.

“As we saw with the Mount Polley disaster last summer, tailings technology is far from perfect. A spill at Red Chris would be far more damaging than the Mount Polley spill due to local geological characteristics.” concluded Ms. May. “The federal government should be more engaged in the interests of strong Canada-US relations.”

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“The failure of some Canadian mining companies to respect the environment and human rights throughout the Americas – from Canada to Argentina – has forced the many communities affected to stand up and protest,” said Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, MP Saanich-Gulf Islands.  “As a Canadian, I am ashamed that the irresponsible behaviour of some Canadian corporations has reached this level that brings our global reputation into disrespect.”

60% of the world’s publicly traded mining companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, accounting for more than 3,200 exploitation projects in over 100 countries.   Canada is the largest stakeholder in the resource extraction industry in the Americas with 37% of total investment.

Too many Canadian-based mining operations have forced people from their homes, destroying communities and livelihoods; they have threatened water and food safety and caused long- term health problems.  As well, they have disregarded indigenous and human rights and led to small-scale miners, union, environmental, and community activists being threatened and often jailed. 

Large-scale mining explorations and exploitations have also led to an irreversible loss in biodiversity.  Despite the fact that resource extraction is presented by the Harper Conservatives and CIDA as good for jobs and economic growth, too often the reality for local people is the opposite.

“Until Canadian mining operations abroad can prove that their impact is truly beneficial – and not just for profits, the Conservatives should divest public funds, including our pensions, from these extraction industries,” said May.  “They should support a Corporate Responsibility Act, such as Bill C-323, that establishes corporate accountability standards, penalizes companies linked to human rights violations, and allows foreign nationals to pursue legal action for damages in Canadian courts.

Mr. Harper should also stop signing free-trade agreements that pave the way for nearly unrestricted extraction.”

The Green Party leader also noted that public institutions, including the Museum of Natural History in Ottawa, Simon Fraser University, University of Toronto, York University, and CIDA, should avoid getting involved with high-profile public relations campaigns conducted by resource extraction companies.

The Continental Day of Action Against Mega Resource Extraction is being organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Solidarity Network (LACSN).  Coordinated actions will range from rallies, demonstrations, and letter writing campaigns to protests in front of mining corporate offices and Canadian embassies.

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I am sad because this bill is worse than any other this Parliament has debated, and that is for two reasons.

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First, without consulting Canadians, the government chose to introduce sweeping changes to many laws that affect environmental, social and economic aspects of Canadian life. This approach is illegitimate and outrageous. The process is unacceptable and an offence to true democracy.

Second, beyond the process that is so offensive, the bill that purports to be a budget bill is, in substance, something quite different. The substance of the changes is equally alarming.

Laws this bad take some explanation. As I have sat through the truncated debate on this process at second reading, what we have had are presentations from the Conservative MPs providing lists of things they like in the legislation, and presentations from the opposition benches providing lists of things we do not like in the legislation. That leaves out a big piece of the puzzle.

We have also been confusing measures that are a budget measures that are not in Bill C-38, things like fighting the deficit. There are things we do not like, like killing the Centre for Plant Health in my own riding, which is necessary to protect the health of the economy, particularly in the grape growing regions and wineries, and killing jobs in national parks, again in my riding of Saanich—Gulf Islands, the Gulf Islands National Park jobs in ecological work.

However, again, these are not in Bill C-38. The debate has been combatting lists. We like this and we hate this.

I want to step back and try to understand what is going on here. Why do we have this enormous package of measures, most of the substantial changes being those that unravel environmental law in our country? 

I have been involved in the development of most of the laws that we now see being unravelled, particularly the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy Act. What I see behind all this is a shift in mindset.

I worked in the Mulroney government. The Progressive Conservatives understood that conserving involved conserving the environment. This is not necessarily the current mindset of the current brand of conservatism, which I find alien from the traditions and roots of people like former fisheries ministers John Fraser and Tom Siddon. Both have spoken out against the devastating changes to the protection of fish habitat in Bill C-38 and the unintended consequences that this will surely have.

This mindset reminds me most of what the former senior economist to the World Bank, Herman Daly, used to describe as “treating the earth as a business in liquidation”, an everything must go mentality and it must be done fast. He offered the opposite view. He said that we needed to understand that the economy was a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, that these things were not in conflict and that it was so wrong-headed to say that we would only get jobs if we destroyed the environment. It boggles the mind.

When we understand that this is the way this entire omnibus budget bill has been prepared, then it begins to make sense. Then we understand the narrative and then we can understand that someone in the PMO picked up the phone, called the Department of Justice or maybe just sent an email, said that it should find all those things for which the federal government is responsible for the environment and find ways to withdraw from them to the maximum extent possible without offending constitutional requirements to protect such things as migratory birds, because we have a convention with the U.S., or fisheries, because that is in the Constitution.

For example, there is no other way to understand why the Conservatives repealed the Environmental Assessment Act and put in place an entirely new act. Most of what we have heard is that they wanted to have timely assessments. I do not think there would be much debate over that.

In 2005 I proposed to the minister of the environment that in order to get a review of the proposed cleanup at the Sydney tar ponds, which itself presented risks, a timeline would be a good idea. In fact, a 12-month timeline was put in place for the joint review panel of the cleanup proposed for the Sydney tar ponds back in 2005. That could be done under the existing legislation. We do not need to repeal the act and start over.

To all these complaints, the Conservatives claim that industry was demanding this be done, I have in front of me a briefing note from the Mining Association of Canada from January of this year in which it praises the current process under Environmental Assessment Review. It says, “the amendments that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act made in 2010 were implemented quickly and competently by the agency” and it has “provided mining project proponents with relief”. It says that for the first time “provincial and federal assessments are synchronized”. This is from the Mining Association of Canada, allegedly one of the interest groups for whom the Conservative government is destroying all of our environmental laws. The Mining Association of Canada says, “our primary interest in the review of the Environmental Assessment Act is to convey support for the new system brought in…and to renew funding for the Environmental Assessment Agency”.

It is critical to understand that the government did not have to repeal the Environmental Assessment Act in order to have a process that worked for all the players. It looks as though this desperate attempt to be in a hurry is where the problem lies. What the government has done is so egregious. The Environmental Assessment Act being repealed and replaced with a whole new scheme that will never get proper review through the process we have in an omnibus project.

The Conservatives are removing what had always been a federal trigger for a proper environmental assessment, if federal money was being spent. That is no longer there. They are removing comprehensive studies. They are no longer there.

There is no real definition of what an environmental assessment would be. We have a reference in the budget document to something called a “standard environmental assessment”, but Bill C-38 has removed all definitions of what the process would look like.

Killing the comprehensive studies and creating panels that can be substituted with the province without criteria, in my view, would have the industry coming to government asking what it had done as the process had worked pretty well. In fact, the Mining Association of Canada says, “very well”. Now we will not know what project has to go to review or what project does not, when we go to the province or when we do not.

At the same time, in order to unravel the federal responsibilities that trigger an environmental assessment, the government has created a crazy scheme for fisheries. It still requires a permit to add substances “deleterious” to fish, but the protections for fish habitat have been removed.

This means, and as we all know this is a real-life example, that if one wanted to have a large-scale project, for instance, to put tailings into an existing lake, we would be better off, if the lake were in a remote area where no one fishes, to drain the whole lake, kill all the fish and destroy the habitat because that would be legal without an authorization. Whereas adding substances “deleterious” to fish into a lake currently would require authorization. This is the ultimate example of haste makes waste.

The bill has not properly contemplated the changes to the Fisheries Act, the Environmental Assessment Act, or the changes to the Species at Risk Act. The bill is out of control through the false notion that we will create jobs through waste and haste.

I remind people that it is now 20 years since the Westray disaster in which 26 men died. There was no environmental review at that time, as it was back in 1988 when the project was approved, but there were warnings. The experts in the department of mines said that the area was too high in methane, but no, the local politicians and some federal politicians wanted those jobs. They wanted them so badly that they overrode expert advice. They said that they had to get that Westray mine built come hell or high water, that they would do it and that they did not want to hear complaints about causes or what might happen to get in the way. Therefore, federal money flowed. We created a bomb and put men in it, and 26 men died.

Now we are creating another kind of bomb. The first speaker on the bill was not the Minister of Finance, but the Minister of Natural Resources who brought forward all the reasons to change the scheme. He said that we must hurry as there was no time to waste. He quoted from the International Energy Agency on the current state of fossil fuel requirements around the world, but he never quoted the warning from the International Energy Agency that if we did not act on the climate crisis, it would soon be too late. The quote from the International Energy Agency from earlier this year is this, “Delaying action is a false economy. As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the ‘lock-in’ of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals”. We must change direction. This bill is putting pedal to the metal to go as fast as possible to a very large brick wall.

Going back to the bomb we built for the men at Westray, we are now building a climate bomb, a carbon bomb. The proposed legislation is so wrong-headed it must be withdrawn in its entirety.

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On March 28^th, the committee met with Dr. Sabrine Luning from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands via teleconference. Like many witnesses who have testified before committee recently she also spoke about the dangers of public private partnerships in blurring the line between local government responsibility and the role of the mining companies. Dr. Luning especially stressed how important it was for local governments and non-governmental organizations to take an active role in development goals, rather than leaving them to mining companies alone. After hearing from Dr. Luning the committee moved in camera to discuss the future business of the committee.

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On Wednesday, the committee met with Anthony Bebbington, a professor of Geography at Clark University in Massachusetts and Brent Bergeron, Vice-President of Corporate Affairs from Goldcorp Inc. Much of the discussion was focused on how mining companies might be able to promote sustainable development that would persist after mining companies had left the area. The witnesses agreed that the key to long term development was the strengthening of local political and economic institutions in these areas, but they differed on exactly how this might be achieved.

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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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Seconded by Elizabeth May September 20, 2012

Click here for the full document.

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