Green issues threaten to give Harper a black eye

While the Harper team has worked hard to keep hot-potato items such as gay marriage and abortion off its agenda, it now has a new policy nemesis: the environment.

As Conservatives move to implement their jobs-and-growth plan, they’ve predictably attracted significant blowback from environmentalists.

And activism by green-minded groups protesting giant resource-related projects such as Alberta’s oilsands and the Northern Gateway pipeline in turn has prompted the government to introduce legislation and regulations in a bid to restrict the activists’ effectiveness.

The yin-yang interplay catapulted the environment into the forefront in Ottawa this week, as opposition parties lined up to condemn a 420-page omnibus budget bill, brimming — inappropriately, they contend — with environmental provisions.

And in the midst of that fuss, federal environment commissioner Scott Vaughan released a report slamming Conservative inaction on climate change policy. The report also notes Ottawa is facing a $7.7-billion bill for the cleanup of some 13,000 contaminated federal sites such as abandoned mines and military installations.

The environment is a tricky issue and the Harper Conservatives are getting on the wrong side of it.

When the economy is iffy, most Canadians are prepared to look the other way when it comes to C02 levels and remote tailings ponds.

But, in inadvertently developing a reputation for being rabidly anti-green, the Harper government has done itself a disservice. It has left the broader public with an impression that absolutely no one is minding the federal environmental shop.

Folks who are not particularly environmentally activist, but who enjoy living in a country with clean air and unsoiled beaches, are apt to become a little nervous.

Conservatives should have picked an environ- ment minister who had some record of interest and activity in matters pertaining to his file — someone who at least could do the necessary PR and offer verbal if not legislative reassurances.

Instead, Harper appointed Peter Kent, who has dismissed Vaughan’s report as being out of date.

Kent is the same minister who mused recently about “laundered money” from offshore making its way to green charities in Canada. He was not kidding.

That absurd statement was reminiscent of the socalled “bimbo eruptions” — extremist remarks by backbenchers relating to homosexuals or to abortion — that once so plagued the now-defunct Reform party.

Then there was Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who last January, did yeoman service in helping create the government’s extremist image on the environment with his issuance of an open letter about the Northern Gateway pipeline through B.C.

The letter slagged “environmentalists and other radicals that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade.”

Harper ministers have made much of the notion that foreign money is helping finance the operations of some Canadian charities.

But the public reasonably questions whether that’s any big deal, given that offshore corporate interests equally have a huge hand in domestic resource development.

Regardless, at a time of widespread spending cuts, the government has found $8 million in its budget for the Canada Revenue Agency to investigate and remove charitable status from groups dispersing more than 10 per cent of their budgets on political activism.

Indeed, about a third of the government’s omnibus budget bill deals with environmental measures that will speed up and streamline regulatory reviews of resource developments.

Packing so much into one bill obviously thwarts comprehensive scrutiny by MPS of any proposed legislation, giving less confidence to Canadians that the environment is being safeguarded.

As a policy issue, the environment is fast becoming the Conservatives’ bete noire.