Eliminating environmental commissioner is short-sighted

In 1993, Ontario adopted the Environmental Bill of Rights and established an environmental commissioner to ensure compliance with the bill and report on Ontario’s progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving energy conservation and efficiency.

The commissioner’s office has authority to review and report on environmental issues. With this mandate, it has kept Ontarians informed and played an important role in issues, including invasive species, boreal forest protection, landfill management, biodiversity, water protection, pesticide management and climate change. Now, the government has decided to scrap the commissioner’s office.

Ontarians care about the environment. Polling shows a vast majority support the right to a healthy environment, including clean air and water, and think Ontario’s environmental laws need strengthening.

Over the past 25 years, the environmental commissioner has earned the trust of residents and NDP, Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments as a non-partisan watchdog for the environment.

During a recent review of the Environmental Bill of Rights, more than 18,000 people participated in consultations and supported measures to strengthen it. This latest move is out of sync with public expectations for accountability, human rights and a healthy environment.

Current Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxe has been critical of the Ontario government on a number of fronts. Her department recently released a report outlining “decades of government inaction” on water pollution.

In September, the commissioner criticized the government for dismantling the province’s cap-and-trade system without replacing it with another climate program.

“Most of the cap-and-trade money was funding energy efficiency programs in Ontario communities — in schools, public housing, transit and hospitals, for example — that would have reduced (greenhouse gases) and saved millions of dollars in energy costs,” Saxe said, adding, “Dismantling a climate change law that was working is bad for our environment, bad for our health and bad for business.”

On Thursday, the government announced it is shutting the commissioner’s office, along with the child advocate and French language services commissioner, justifying the closures as costcutting measures. The government plans to transfer the environment commissioner’s duties to the environment minister and auditor general, but the commissioner’s specific focus on the environment and forward-looking expertise will be lost, and its reporting mandate will be curtailed.

When Canada and the world face severe environmental crises from water pollution to climate change, our country’s most populous province should be stepping up efforts to ensure the health and well-being of its people. With Ontarians already experiencing climate change’s effects in areas such as increasing severe weather, it’s critical for the province to maintain the leadership position it has held since passing the Environmental Bill of Rights.

If this were truly about saving money, the government would consider the ever-rising costs of pollution and climate change and the many opportunities to save money and create jobs and economic opportunities by maintaining a commissioner who has offered advice on cost savings through energy conservation and efficiency and emissions reductions. It would recognize the tremendous opportunities in the growing clean energy economy.

The government claims it is committed to ensuring that Ontarians have clean air, water and land. The environmental commissioner was essential to ensuring accountability to those commitments.

As a non-partisan, independent watchdog, the commissioner can hold government to account and ensure Ontarians know what it is doing, good and bad, to protect the land, air and water on which Ontarians depend for health and wellbeing. The commissioner can help ensure that Ontario is doing all it can to prevent the worst impacts of climate change and that the province is prepared for the consequences of global warming that can’t be prevented.

Many environmental impacts, from polluted water to contaminated air to climate change, disproportionately affect society’s most vulnerable. Eliminating the commissioner’s office, as well as the child advocate’s office, shows a lack of concern not just for the vulnerable, but for all Ontarians and, indeed, all Canadians.

Ontario’s government should reverse this decision, and ensure the commissioner’s office continues to exist as a stand-alone, independent office with all its powers, duties and responsibilities intact under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights. Justifying these measures in the name of cost-cutting makes little sense. There’s far more to be gained by maintaining them.