Environmental protections are under attack by the province

As befits a newspaper that reports on and supports the community it serves, the Peterborough Examiner’s editorial page position has been pro-sustainability and environmentally responsible for as long as my very early memories allow.

Drew Monkman and other columnists and countless letter writers show their support of the natural world. And the paper’s opinion pages are international in scope, but local in focus: in their February 2020 Examiner guest column, Katie Krelov and Carling Dewar expressed concern about logging in the old-growth Catchacoma Forest. That remains an ongoing threat to a sustainable county.

(The Examiner isn’t without balance: a rebuttal column by the logging company’s Svetlana Zeran followed.)

Our city is forest-rich and water-blessed, and we are both more healthy and communityminded for the embrace of the natural world. Enter the Examiner’s Nov. 13 editorial, which decries Premier Doug Ford’s pandering to private commercial interests at the expense of the environment.

Canadians have watched the decimation of forests in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and the downgrading of environmental essentials in the U.S. And many of us feel, “we’re better than that.” But apparently under Doug Ford’s regime, we are not: the value to human health and prosperity of prolific forest and healthy oceans are incalculable, and to see the former threatened in Peterborough’s own backyard is upsetting.

Under Ford, those who recognize the essential role the natural world plays in human survival have their work cut out for them. In a town hall hosted by Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith and attended by Finance Minister Rod Phillips, Ford was a surprise cheerleading telephone guest touting Ontario’s recent budget. Shortly after 7 p.m., our premier declared for all to hear, “I’m a businessman first and an elected official second.”

Where does that leave the environment? Or citizens’ other non-commercial concerns?

But it gets worse. By some accounts, the sneaky elements of the Progressive Conservative budget proposal include not only Schedule 6, but Schedules 8 and 40, all of which downgrade environmental protection. Add to that, the auditor general’s current scathing report and Smith’s role as parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Energy, Northern Development and Mines.

Here’s hoping that the protest against the Ford government’s savaging of the environment meets widespread resistance from all sane quarters. Survival isn’t priceable.

Peter Currier, Wolsely St.