An Eco-Activist Now in Office Confesses Her Government’s Impotence to Help the Environment

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 Canadaís 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 ñ individual, corporation and governments at all levels ñ 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 ñ 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 ñ 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 andhealthy in, will be only slightly more impossible.