Climate change and environmental concerns have not been at the forefront in this Canadian election. The incumbent Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, must be delighted by the direction of the debates as their environmental record is ripe for criticism. After the votes have been counted on Monday October 19th, the opposition parties might be left lamenting the missed opportunity.

The Harper government’s record is not merely poor, it is historically miserable. The Centre for Global Development ranked Canada last of developed nations on the Environment in its latest ranking. Some of the most egregious acts were withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011 and its increasingly aggressive actions to silence government scientists. However, it is most important to focus on the government’s dismantling of environmental policies. More specifically, I will chronicle Harper’s dismantling of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

Environmental assessments (EA), or environmental impact assessments (EIA), are the backbone of all environmental policies  worldwide. EAs are essential to environmental stewardship as they examine the potential environmental consequences of completing a proposed project. Requiring assessments forces industry to try to lessen their environmental impact for every project. The cumulative effect of every project requiring an assessment aims to move a nation toward sustainability. In 2012, the Conservative government tabled a controversial omnibus budget bill. Of the 425 page omnibus bill, over 150 pages were devoted to the repeal and replacement of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA). The CEA Agency saw its budget cut by 43 percent combined with similarly drastic cuts to the Fisheries Department an agency that also conducts and analyses EAs, which further undermined the role of the CEAA. Equally alarming was the complete restructuring of what projects required the completion of an assessment.

The new law also makes changes from a “Category Approach” to a “List Approach.” Put simply, the difference is all projects required an assessment unless it did not fall under one of the broad categories and then was cleared after a screening project. Now, only projects that fall under the new very specific “list” does a project require an assessment. The environmental law firm Blakes Law found under this new law over 90 percent of projects no longer require an assessment. The risk is not that a large project will go un assessed, all oil and gas projects like proposed pipelines still require strict EAs, but rather that the accumulation of thousands of projects no longer required to assess the least damaging environmental impact will amount to deep environmental degradation.

The Harper government claimed these changes were necessary as the old CEAA was inefficient and was brimming with “duplication and overlap.” Under close examination these claims of inefficiency do not hold up. The new law allows for the substitution of provincial assessments in place of federal assessments, but unfortunately, most provinces have much lower standards — not to mention smaller budgets — which could lead to less effective enforcement. The inefficiencies of “duplication and overlap” the government decried amounted to less than 2 percent of projects that had previously required both provincial and federal EAs. This figure comes from the CEA Agency’s own numbers.

EAs have been criticized for being long and arduous. While true, this is for good reason; a proper assessment requires great detail in its analysis and implementation of strict timelines only inhibits the assessments accuracy. The new CEAA imposes strict timelines coupled with a reduction in staff and budget leads to a sacrifice of quality. Without the empirical evidence supporting the government’s position on the need for increased efficiency, ideological reasons become the logical motivation.These ideological motivations first appeared during the Seven-Year Statutory Review of the CEAA. The statutory review was delayed for nearly 3 years and when it was finally conducted consisted of only 4 weeks of hearings. The Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) was involved in the development of the original CEA Act found that the review was “largely designed to solicit or foster anti-CEAA sentiment among certain industrial sectors whose projects trigger federal EA requirements at the present time.”

The final report’s ideological motivations are most obvious in the fact that the only views quoted in the report are from witnesses who supported the recommendations without a single opposing view. The 2012 version of the CEA Act included all 20 of the recommendations from the Standing Committee’s statutory review, without a single amendment. During the debate the government made clear it aimed to remove any barriers to economic growth.

Support for their position of economic gains over environment protection is found in Greenpeace’s publication of a letter from Energy Framework Initiative (EFI) to the government. In the letter the EFI, which represents all the major oil and gas associations, asks the government to overhaul six environmental statutes which it finds “outdated” and results in “a position of adversarial prohibition.” In under a year, five of the six statutes, including the CEAA, had been replaced or received major amendment overhauls.

A major reason for the success in dismantling has been the stealth strategies implemented by the Harper Government. While the Green Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP) have campaigned hard on these issues, they have gained little traction. Until environmental dismantling becomes politically toxic, Conservative governments will look to ease regulatory burden and other barriers to rapid economic growth, especially in the resource industries.

So until the voters hold politicians accountable, expect Canadians to slowly suffer the death by a thousand cuts.

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