Ford government out of touch with citizens on climate change

As a committed environmentalist, I was much relieved to learn that Schedule 10 of Bill 66 has been withdrawn due to intense pressure from the public.

This legislation would have given municipalities the option of creating bylaws without public consultation that would have enabled them to approve development while bypassing sections from other provincial policies and acts, such as the Places to Grow Act, the Clean Water Act and the Greenbelt Act.

What still disturbs me, though, is that this legislation was introduced at all.

It had already been made clear by Ontarians that they would brook no dismantling of Greenbelt protections after learning that Premier Doug Ford, contrary to his election promise, was heard discussing just that with developers.

Also disturbing is the response I received from my MPP after lodging my protest against the bill.

In her letter, MPP Jane McKenna insisted that “the government has been clear in our commitment to protect our water and the Greenbelt. We will not support development proposals in contrast with that commitment.” If that were the case, why then draft this legislation at all?

To expect citizens to believe it was simply a measure to reduce red tape stretches credibility — and, I would argue, borders on disrespect for Ontarians.

That this government would attempt to include this legislation as a section of a larger bill begs the question of whether they hoped it would go unnoticed.

But it also begs a larger question: Is this party in touch with Ontarians? Going by the public backlash, maybe not.

And certainly not in my community, where the result of last fall’s municipal election, in which five of seven members of council were ousted, showed that residents wanted a change from a City Hall that was seen to be catering to developers and ignoring voters’ concerns.

To their credit, the new Burlington council unanimously passed a resolution brought forward by Mayor Marianne Meed Ward to, in Meed Ward’s words, “take a unified and formal position on protecting the Greenbelt and access to clean and safe drinking water.”

Other municipalities, including Oakville, Hamilton, Toronto, Waterloo, Kitchener, Guelph and others also voiced objections to the proposed legislation.

No small thanks are due to the diligence of those municipalities and the many citizens whose protest of this legislation pushed the government into rethinking it.

But we cannot afford to let up on our collective diligence: We must now grapple with the new “Made in Ontario Environment Plan.”

This document was released on the heels of the report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warns we must hold to a ceiling of 1.5 degrees of warming in the next 12 years to avoid catastrophic climate change.

This means we now need an even more aggressive Ontario Climate Change Action Plan than previously.

But according to Dianne Saxe, the provincial Environmental Commissioner, this plan is only about one third as ambitious as the previous one.

Saxe states that the cap-and-trade system — a market-based carbon-pricing model put in place by the previous government — was beginning to see results.

Ironically, though, it was scrapped and will be replaced with a proposed regulatory model that Saxe explains is actually a form of carbon tax.

A further irony is that the proposed model partially emulates the very federal carbon tax that Ford wants to spend about $30 million of taxpayers’ money to fight in court. The new plan is short on support for green energy development and electric vehicle adoption, and vague on details.

What it adds up to is this: The government of Ontario is out of touch with the environmental exigencies Ontarians are facing now and which will only grow worse if we continue on this path.

And with the impending removal of the independent Environmental Commissioner role, Ontarians will now have no one they can rely on to explain what’s at stake.

No one to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t.

And no one to champion what must be done to safeguard our future.