Environmental groups cry foul
Say Ottawa is favouring oil companies, threatening health of Canadians, planet
OTTAWA – The Harper government’s budget tossed roses to Western Canada’s natural resource-based economy on Thursday and lobbed a political grenade at the environmental movement.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced a long-promised blueprint to streamline the environmental review process, but a starkly different message was sent to environmental groups that are waging an intense battle against the oilsands sector.
The budget commits $8 million over the next two years to help the Canadian Revenue Agency target registered charities that the government believes are too overtly political.
The money will be used to “improve transparency by requiring charities to provide more information on their political activities, including the extent to which these are funded by foreign sources,” according to budget documents.
One federal official said $3 million of the $8 million will go to “education and compliance,” with the “lion’s share” of that $3 million to cover the cost of stepped-up audits.
Flaherty’s speech described Canada’s natural resources as a “massive” asset, with the oil and gas, mining and forestry sectors employing roughly 750,000 Canadians and driving economic growth across the country.
The budget puts Flaherty on a collision course not only with the environmental movement, but also with the new official Opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair.
Mulcair has said Canada’s high petro-dollar, fuelled by federal government policies to artificially prop up the oilsands industry, are ruining Canada’s manufacturing sector, located primarily in central Canada.
The budget also proposes to eliminate a key federal advisory panel on business and environmental issues which is headed by David Mclaughlin.
The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, originally established in the 1990s to advise the prime minister, regularly produced reports that challenged the business and en- vironmental policies of the government, particularly regarding climate change.
The budget is also proposing to invest $60 million over two years for a few environmental initiatives, including about $2 million in funding to encourage clean energy generation and $50 million over two years in resources to support its legal obligation to protect species at risk.
The new spending comes as Ottawa is reducing budgets at Environment Canada – as well as other related investments on environmental protection and research – by hundreds of millions of dollars, while maintaining several exploration and development tax incentives for the oil and gas sector that Flaherty’s department recommended eliminating in a secret memo that was leaked in 2010.
Quebec environment groups panned the budget, charging it makes huge concessions to the oil and gas industry, and severely limits the public’s ability to speak up on large projects that have environmental and human health impacts.
“In a budget that seems to have been written for, and even by, big oil interests, the Harper government is gutting the environmental protections that Canadians have depended on for decades to safeguard our families and nature from pollution, toxic contamination and other environmental problems,” said Steven Guilbeault, deputy director of Montreal-based Équiterre.
“Changing the rules to favour oil companies and projects that elicit outrage among the people is an affront to democracy,” said Nicolas Mainville, a spokesperson for Greenpeace in Quebec. “Quebecers and Canadians have a right to oppose and question these pipeline projects that threaten the public good, their health and that of the planet.”
David Sawyer, an environmental economist who specializes in climate change policy, has estimated that the exploration and development subsidies are costing taxpayers $1.3 billion per year, while encouraging more pollution and emissions that cause global warming.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has defended the incentives, citing a study co-authored by a board member of Imperial Oil, which concluded that the sector was not getting special treatment.