This week, there are some important and free events for you to learn how Canada and the Great Lakes will be impacted by sweeping environmental policy changes.

Argonaut Rowing Club, Toronto, ON

First Unitarian Church, Hamilton, ON

Great Lakes United is offering a free public issue briefing Thursday, May 17 at 12:00pm EDT regarding the proposed Fisheries Act rollbacks. Mark Mattson of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper will be leading the presentation. Reserve your spot now by contacting Lauren Cheal by email at lcheal [at] glu.org.

Dupuis Auditorium @ Queen’s University, Kingston, ON

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Chris Grooms, a member of the Kingston Field Naturalists, said it appears the intent of the proposed changes “is to weaken all the regulations.”

“They talk about efficiencies, that the environmental assessment process will be quicker and more efficient, but it’s all about weakening things,” said Grooms. “There are signs that they’re planning to exploit natural resources such as oil.

“It’s not about sustainability in the long term.”

The federal government has come under fire from environmental groups who say that putting the changes in the omnibus bill is an attempt to hide them so that Canadians won’t notice.

Bill C-38 — the Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act — introduces, amends or repeals nearly 70 federal laws.

About 150 of the pages in the 431-page budget bill involve rewriting federal environmental laws.

“It’s yet another kind of sign that the government sees the existing regulation structure and the broad environment is challenging to business,” said Warren Mabee, the director the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy. “They want to make things more business friendly and in the process created some waves. People are upset about how the government is going about this.”

The Conservatives, who hold a majority, voted last week to limit debate on the implementation of the bill, leaving all MPs with less than a week to debate it at second reading stage before it heads to committee.

The changes would affect, among others, the Environmental Assessment Act. To speed up approvals for projects such as pipelines, the government proposes scrapping the act and giving powers to the federal environment minister to decide which industrial projects have adverse impacts on the environment that require a review.

The Conservatives want to eliminate the existing law that requires environmental assessments for any project that receives federal funding, affects federal lands, is proposed by the federal government or is triggering provisions of an existing environmental law such as the Fisheries Act.

“One of the problems is that so many agencies need to be involved (in a hearing): Fisheries, Industry, Environmental,” said Mabee. “They’re looking at clearing up the overlap and trying to designate a lead agency to take control.”

The proposed changes would also affect the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act and the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act.

“All the acts are big, complicated pieces of legislation to begin with,” said Mabee. “To slash and burn, to take out pieces and to replace them with (processes) to make things go faster may do more harm than good.”

Grooms is particularly concerned over proposed changes to the Fisheries and Species at Risk acts.

In the latter, endangered or threatened species in Canada will see reduced protection under the bill because companies will no longer be required to renew permits on projects that threaten critical habitat of species listed under the act. Under the changes, the National Energy Board would be exempt from a requirement to impose conditions to protect critical habitat under a project that it approves.

“They’re not doing enough to protect the Species at Risk Act,” he said. “We’re losing forests and all kinds of wildlife habitat.

“This is not part of the sustainable picture.”

The Fisheries Act will no longer be required to protect fish habitat and instead would focus on supporting “commercial, recreational or aboriginal fisheries.”

“It’s one of our strongest pieces of legislation,” said Grooms of the Fisheries Act, which dates back to Confederation. “It was written well, at a time when people understood that fisheries helped sustain us. It was part of our economy and natural heritage.

“It was relied upon by all sorts of conservation bodies to protect upland habitat that would affect fish habitat. A lot of that might be jeopardized.”

Mabee said there’s nothing wrong with making regulations more efficient, but warned it could have an adverse affect.

“One of the best things about (the bill) is that it has the potential to streamline regulations that in many cases have overlapped and made things difficult over the years,” he said. “No one group had the lead over the other groups.

“The danger is that you throw the baby out with the bath water. To streamline things, you end up causing damage to the environment.”

Since the Conservatives have a majority, Grooms is resigned to the environmental changes being passed.

“It doesn’t look good until there’s a change in government,” he said. “The problem is with the attitude of our government. We need a more balanced approach. We need a minority government or one of the other parties (in power).

“The government has a seeming ideological drive.”

The bill would also limit charities, including environmental groups, that advocate for better laws and policies from spending more than 10% of their funds on political action. The bill would also shut citizens’ groups out of environmental reviews for pipelines.

“If they weaken these groups, it’s bad for society and bad for the environment,” said Grooms.

View original article here.

Canada’s decades-old federal Fisheries Act – a piece of legislation that was actually approved and embraced with pride by the former Conservative government of Brian Mulroney – is being “overhauled” by a Harper government that has, of late, been doing a great deal of scrapping and overhauling of environmental rules it feels are standing in the way of resource exploitation and development. 

The Fisheries Act has proved to be an effective tool over the years for everything from controlling development that might destroy critical spawning grounds to prosecuting industries discharging toxic wastes into waterways. Given the act’s effectiveness, it was probably just a matter of time before this Conservative government, which has gone on record calling environmentalists enemies of the state, went after it with a meat cleaver.

In an insulting attempt to dampen fears that the legislation will be defused completely, Harper’s fisheries minister Keith Ashfield recently insisted that whatever the government does to Fisheries Act, it will still be there to protect “important (fish) habitat.” And who is going to decide which fish habitat is important and which ones are not? Some bureaucrat the government has muzzled from making any public comment in the federal fisheries department? Will it be Harper and his cabinet?

The bottomline is it is hard to fathom anyone short of God deciding what an important fish habitat is? Anyone who has taken an Ecology 101 course might know that fish play a critical role in a very intricate and fragile web of life and food chains that includes we humans. Mucking around with it can impact the health and welfare of all of us in ways that may be subtle in some cases, but could be catastrophic. 
Yet this kind of insight into our environment and our dependency on keeping it relatively clean and healthy does not seem to have a place at all in a government intent on grabbing for any short-term gains from exploitation over responsible environmental stewardship.

So thank goodness some groups are beginning to take notice of what Canada’s Harper government might do to a leading-edge piece of environmental legislation like the Fisheries Act and its responding to it. Great Lakes United, a Canada/U.S. coalition of public groups headquartered in Buffalo, New York, and Lake Ontario Waterkeepers is offering we, the people, an opportunity to participate in a free issue briefing this May 17 on the implications of all of this. Please read the group’s notice below for more details. 

View the original article here.

The Honourable Denis Lebel, Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, today announced the appointments of Mr. Joe Allison and Mr. Norman Mackie to the board of directors of the Oshawa Port Authority for three-year terms.

Read the full story via Transport Canada | Appointments to the Oshawa Port Authority.

Great Lakes United is offering a free public issue briefing Thursday, May 17 at 12:00pm EDT regarding the proposed Fisheries Act rollbacks. Mark Mattson of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper will be leading the presentation. Reserve your spot now by contacting Lauren Cheal by email at lcheal [at] glu.org.

Join Waterkeeper and Great Lakes United for a free issue briefing on the proposed changes to the Fisheries Act. Lake Ontario Waterkeeper President, Mark Mattson, will speak about impact of the sweeping amendments proposed to the Fisheries Act in Canada in a budget implementation bill (Bill C-38) being considered by Parliament.

Join us for a discussion about these potential changes, the impact they will have on fisheries and watershed across the Great Lakes and beyond, and what these changes may mean for the environmental community.

Fisheries Act: Proposed changes and environmental implications
The Canadian government has presented a new budget that includes sweeping amendments to the Fisheries Act. This is an issue that directly affects the quality of life of all Canadians, and greatly impacts the Great Lakes region. Habitat protections for fisheries help protect watersheds for people, and the Canadian government is seeking to substantially weaken those protections.

Amendments to streamline the Fisheries Act to promote industrial development and economic investment would replace the existing single, established, and largely effective national standard to protect fish and fish habitat with a patchwork of unknown provincial policies. In its haste to make changes, the government did not consult experts at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, scientists, experienced environmental lawyers, or hunting and angling groups. It’s not clear that they consulted First Nations. Many prominent environmental groups across Canada have spoken up to oppose the changes, as well as more than 600 scientists.

This event is free and open to the public. Please feel free to pass the invitation on to anyone who would be interested in the topic.

Webinar Details:
Title: Fisheries Act: Proposed changes and environmental implications
Date: Thursday, May 17th, 2012
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Location: This is a virtual issue briefing, to participate you simply need a telephone and access to a computer capable of displaying a .pdf document.
Panelist: Mark Mattson, President, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper

This session will include an interactive Q&A with Mark Mattson. You will receive further call-in information (by email) as the event approaches. All you need to participate is a phone and a copy of the .pdf file.

Register now by emailing Lauren Cheal at lcheal [at] glu.org.

Great Lakes United—Union Saint Laurent Grands Lacs is pleased to offer this service to the public. 

For more information about this, or any of GLU’s past issue briefings, please visit http://www.glu.org/en/issuebriefings.

The revelations beg the question of why the contamination at Hamilton’s airport wasn’t investigated years ago by Transport Canada, and why the federal government has so far taken no responsibility in the cleanup. Instead the Mount Hope pollution was discovered accidentally when scientists tried to use Lake Niapenco in the Binbrook Conservation Area as a clean control site for comparison with heavily polluted areas such as Hamilton Harbour

Citizens at City Hall – CATCH – Feds knew about airport PFOS pollution.

The Honourable Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, announced today the Government of Canada’s response to the recommendations made in the Environmental Assessment Report of the Joint Review Panel (JRP) for the Darlington New Nuclear Power Plant Project.

Taking into consideration the JRP’s recommendations and the implementation of proposed mitigation measures, the Government has determined that the project is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.

Read the government’s press release via Government Accepts Recommendations of Joint Review Panel for Darlington New Nuclear Power Plant Project | Natural Resources Canada.

The family had asked my law firm what we could do about the landfill leachate from a major Ontario city dump that was destroying habitat. No one from the City, the waste company or government had offered to help them. Now everyone in the room — his wife and mother at the wood stove, his sons and daughters and grandkids around the table — was keenly awaiting what I had to say. 

I asked: Are there any fish in the fields, ditches or nearshore?  The family told me the bay was once the best fishing area around and that fish still spawned in the fields and ditches every spring. 

I asked: Can I get access to the water draining from the dump to sample as it runs onto your land? The family told me the exact locations where the water bubbled up on the dump walls and ran year-round onto their property. 

I answered: I can help.

We documented the fish in the ditches and the bay. We sampled the leachate (it was toxic). We contacted government authorities and the company, alerting them that we had evidence the dump was in contravention of the Fisheries Act. Immediately, they took action to stop the pollution. To this day, that area on the river is protected from landfill toxins.

My story is not unique. It has been played out across Canada thousands of times. When evidence of a Fisheries Act contravention was compiled, the harmful acts were almost always stopped.

Even when government or industry did not act, the Fisheries Act allowed citizens to enforce the law independently. In fact, the Fisheries Act says that, if convicted, a polluter pays half of the fine to the individual who brought the charges. This is meant to “encourage the public to participate in the protection of community resources.”

Such citizen-led actions form an important part of Canada’s environmental protection laws. In the past 16 years, I have personally been involved in investigating legal actions against the Cities of Kingston, Hamilton, Moncton, Montreal, and Toronto as well as the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Ontario Hydro, OPG, DTE and other polluters for Fisheries Act violations. That work resulted directly or indirectly in clean-ups on the Cataraqui River, Humber River, Moira River, Petitcodiac River, St. Clair River, Lake Ontario, St. Lawrence River and other waters across Canada. 

All of this was possible because the Fisheries Act made it illegal to pollute or destroy fish and fish habitat in Canada. The offenses under the Act were criminal in nature, meaning enforcement was free from political interference or economic lobbying by industry. The laws protected every community, regardless of the size of the project, the abundance of fish, or the “economic value” of nature. 

That is all about to be wiped out. The budget implementation bill that Parliament is considering now radically changes the Fisheries Act. Under the new law, cabinet ministers and industry will have unprecedented influence over fish and fish habitat policy. 

Under the new law, decisions about which Canadian communities deserve protection will be made based on political and economic factors. There is no role for science or the rule of law. 

The consequences of the changes will be felt immediately. Will Lake Ontario’s fish be protected? Or will our small commercial fishery be deemed “insignificant”? Will we see sewage treatment plant upgrades in Vancouver, Victoria, or Halifax? Or will environmental benefits be deemed “insignificant” in light of the cost? Clean-ups like the ones we saw at the dumpsite beside the farmers field will most certainly be things of the past. 

When I read about the changes, I know that every farmer, hunter, angler, and community member who loves access to swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters will lose out.

I know that, if I was a young environmental lawyer sitting at that kitchen table today, I wouldn’t be able to offer the same help I did all those years ago to the farmer and his family. That breaks my heart.

Federal and provincial governments are currently promoting the benefits of streamlining environmental decisions, but largely ignoring the benefits of streamlining public access to information related to those same decisions for environmental groups. As environmental approvals are sped up, the pace at which information on harmful projects becomes available will lag farther and farther behind.

Read the full story via The costs of hiding environmental information | rabble.ca.

C-38 also guts the Fisheries Act’s habitat provisions.  “Apparently, the only important fish are those that are ‘commercial, Aboriginal and recreational’ and, once again, the biggest problem is the creation of equivalency so that the Fisheries Act and its regulations do not apply in the provinces,” said May.

via Budget Implementation Act is Gutting of Environmental Laws in Disguise | Green Party of Canada.