By David Crane
NEW YORK - While Canada likes to see itself as an environmental leader, it is in fact an environmental hypocrite, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development finds in its latest report on Canada.
Canada has mismanaged the Atlantic fishery, toxic materials and water resources, says the report released yesterday, and is fumbling its response to climate change.
Moreover, Canada gives some of the most generous tax incentives in the world to resource industries, favouring these over the new knowledge-based economy, and relies too heavily on voluntary and poorly monitored accords with industry for pollution reduction.
And Canada's handling of the environment has been made even worse by severe federal and provincial spending cuts that have undermined the ability of governments to monitor the environment and enforce existing laws.
To achieve better environmental performance, the Paris-based economic research and policy group says federal, provincial and municipal governments will have to consider implementing a wide range of painful measures. These include metered charges for water, higher gasoline taxes, charges for toxic emissions, elimination of tax preferences for oil and mining companies, and stronger enforcement of environmental laws.
The report singled out Canada's handling of climate change as particularly hypocritical.
Although Canada "has been a leading proponent of international action on climate change," the report says the country still lacks a concrete plan to meet its commitments under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol targets.
The federal and provincial governments are divided over what to do, but have to reach some kind of agreement before the end of the year. But with such a delay, says the report, Canada will have difficulty meeting its climate change pledge.
To reach its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 6 per cent below the 1990 level - they currently exceed that level by 13 per cent - by 2008-12, Canada will have to reduce fossil fuel consumption much more aggressively. Since Canada boasts the second- lowest gasoline and diesel taxes in the industrial world, one approach would be to charge higher levies on gasoline.
The OECD is especially critical of how Canada manages its water resources.
Canada, it says, is unwilling to allow bulk exports of water because it considers water too precious. But at the same time, it wastes enormous amounts of water because it fails to price it as a precious resource.
"To bring about more efficient water use, provincial and territorial governments should therefore implement the principle of 'economic pricing' without delay," says the report.
This would require "substantially increased use of water metering, which is still far from universal, and the elimination of quantity discounts."
However, environmentalists who would agree with many of the OECD's criticisms of Canada's environmental practices may not agree with its recommendation that Canada design a licensing system for bulk exports of water that would allow it "to reap some benefits from its abundant aggregate water resources."
And while lip service is paid to the polluter-pays principle in Canada, it "is not systematically applied, and reliance on voluntary agreements has not been sufficient to achieve environmental objectives - for example, in the case of management of toxic substances."
The OECD stresses that "no-cost opportunities for curbing pollution are rare, and a strategy based on voluntary agreements alone cannot be expected to correct completely for the external costs of pollution."
The OECD says Canada must increase the use of taxes and other economic environmental instruments, such as charges on toxic emissions and waste, and disposal fees for products containing toxic substances.
Federal and provincial governments have also been too generous with tax benefits for resource companies, the OECD says, which has meant such companies have been favoured over knowledge-based companies. In the case of the Atlantic fishery, overfishing has been so severe the federal government had to halt fishing altogether in the early 1990s. Yet policies to reduce the number of people tied to the fishery have fallen short.
"Resource-based production is energy-intensive and may in the end cause serious pollution problems, notwithstanding the Canadian environment's substantial assimilative capacity compared with other OECD countries," the OECD report argues.
The 1990s were a bad decade for the environment in Canada, the OECD says, as a result of spending cuts to eliminate budget deficits. The provinces also "substantially reduced their environmental budgets" - by about 60 per cent in Ontario between 1994-95 and 1998- 99.
OECD report
The Toronto Star article was distributed by the David Suzuki Foundation, climate-action@davidsuzuki.org.
The Toronto Star home page is at: http://www.thestar.com/
The Toronto Star
September 6, 2000
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