Your environmental rights (not) at work in Ontario

The last month has seen an extraordinary dismantling of Ontario’s environmental initiatives. This includes the cancellation of the cap and trade framework, which is the centrepiece of the provincial Climate Change Action Plan.

Dismantling cap and trade — which was not a carbon tax but the market mechanism in place to cap the amount of emissions industry could emit and disburse proceeds to initiatives that could further reduce pollution — has significant economic and social repercussions for Ontarians. This includes, but is not limited to, the likely formidable legal cost to dismantle these agreements in court. There is also the cancellation of funds earmarked for school and social housing retrofits, municipal bicycle and waste reduction infrastructure projects and many others employing individuals across the province.

This is on top of separately cancelling 758 renewable energy projects, including projects planned by homeowners, schools and small business. Also worthy of your attention is how the government went about repealing cap and trade. Under the Environmental Bill of Rights (EBR), the Ontario Ministry of Environment is required to post notice of environmentally significant proposals on the Environmental Registry. Proposals are to be posted on the Registry for a period of 30 days. The point of the EBR, and this process, is to ensure detailed, specific consultation with all of the people of Ontario on each environmentally significant government decision.

When the ministry cancelled cap and trade, it did so without first posting a regulatory proposal for public consultation to the Environmental Registry for a 30-day period. This means this major and environmentally significant change to existing policy was done without allowing any Ontario citizen the opportunity to comment, which is the point of the registry.

What the ministry did instead is post an exception notice comprised of a pithy few sentences buried in an older version of the registry. To defend its use of an exception notice, the ministry cited that “the recent Ontario election was a process of public participation that was substantially equivalent to the process required under the EBR.”

This is an extraordinary declaration. Our Ministry of Environment has indicated that a provincial election is the same thing as giving every Ontario citizen the opportunity to comment on an environmentally significant decision that may affect them. Apparently the last provincial election is proxy for forfeiting our specific right to participate in the EBR process, which was established 25 years ago to allow better public participation and greater accountability of government in environmental matters.

What is next? More exception notices dismantling all environmental regulation built in Ontario since the start of EBR in 1993? Perhaps this a fitting outcome given we elected a party that publicly campaigned on getting rid of the carbon tax, a tax that we did not even have in the first place.