Religious leaders across a number of faiths are calling on the government of British Columbia to halt its plans to expand coal exports.

“We state emphatically that making money at the expense of the health and prosperity of the planet is wrong,” write clergy and faith leaders from Sikh, Jewish, Unitarian, Quaker, Roman Catholic, Anglican, United Church of Canada, Presbyterian, and Evangelical Lutheran communities along the southern coast, including Texada Island, the Sunshine Coast, Delta, New Westminster and Surrey in an open letter addressed to the Premier Christy Clark and three of her ministers.

The letter was a response to the B.C. government’s quiet approval of an expansion of coal exports from Texada Island in March. The move will increase shipments to between 10 and 20 times the current level, although residents of the island are already complaining that the beaches near the terminal are contaminated with arsenic laden coal.

Citing moral grounds, the leaders are asking the premier “to reconsider the recently approved permit for the augmentation of the Texada Island port facility that would enable the increased coal export, and to phase out all U.S. thermal coal exports from B.C. ports.”

Coal is at the root of “horrific air pollution problems” linked to rising CO2 emissions in China, the group states in their letter, adding we are morally responsible for any human suffering its export causes. “Contributing to the increase in coal-related disability among the Chinese weighs heavily on our conscience,” they write.  

B.C.’s relatively small share of the coal supply does not mitigate the province's responsibility to act, they note.

“In our weekly sermons we encourage our congregations to adopt a sustainable lifestyle,” they say. “Now our congregations are asking us to act as emissaries of their message to you, to embrace a shift in the way to do business. Therefore we will not stand idly by when we see local actions that will contribute to climate destabilization.”

This call comes after Archbishop Desmond Tutu urged Canadians to examine the morality of profiting from oilsands at the expense of environmental health. In an editorial published in the Ottawa Citizen on May 9, the Nobel Peace Laureate called opposition to pipeline expansion a moral imperative.

“I stand in solidarity with communities across Canada and the United States that are opposing the proposed oilsands pipelines,” he wrote. “The struggle of citizens against the pipelines puts them on the front lines of one of the most important struggles in North America today: stopping the reckless expansion of the oilsands.”

Allowing the continued expansion of oilsands, he believes, makes us morally culpable for putting humanity at risk.

“Canada is now faced with a profoundly moral choice: Will the country embrace the oil industry’s plans for radical expansion of the oilsands and the pipelines that come with it, or will it slow down the frenzied rush and focus its efforts on another path that leads us as a global community in a more hopeful direction?”

He will be speaking at a two-day conference in Fort McMurray on May 31.

The Vatican also recently hosted a five-day conclave on sustainability and ethics. The event ended with a short meeting between Pope Francis and San Diego climate change researcher Ram Ramanathan. Afterward, the professor of atmospheric and climate science at Scripps Institution of Oceanography felt hopeful Pope Francis would help advance the goals of climate scientists.

Image Credit: Jordan Oram via Flickr

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Food is at the heart of our cultural lives. It’s not just sustenance—it’s part of how we celebrate, how we mourn and how we come together. But what happens when the food that defines us begins to disappear?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report released in March, climate change is already having an affect on food security. Extreme weather in “key producing regions” has already led to drastic jumps in food pricing. In cities we are padded from these effects by long supply chains, but not so in places like Hartley Bay on the northern coast of British Columbia.

“We depend on the sea so much for our food,” says Gitga’at Chief Ernie Hill, the principal of Hartley Bay Elementary/Junior High/Secondary School who has spearheaded efforts there to document and teach traditional indigenous harvesting practices.

Spring is harvest season around Hartley Bay, he says. Starting in April, when the clear weather coincides with low tides in the morning, families from the Gitga’at Nation travel to nearby islands where they collect seaweed and lay them to dry for the day in the warm sun. While the grown-ups harvest, the little ones scrape sea prunes, large shelled mollusks also known as chitons.

Now at the age of 73, Hill is no longer able to perch on the slippery rocks to harvest the seaweed, but he’s still committed to passing that tradition on to younger generations. He learned to harvest and prepare traditional foods such as seaweed, halibut and clams when he was a child, and over the years, he has passed that knowledge on to both his children and grandchildren.

Now, with the help of his students, members of the community, and “world class” videographers, he’s been steadily building a library of short documentaries that record traditional food gathering practices so they can be shared long after his generation is gone.

Through the ministrations of community elders like Hill and Helen Clifton, who just received a BC Community Achievement Award, the practices have endured as a way to bring families together much as they did before colonization disrupted lives. They also provide a respite from the rising price of importing food to the remote community, and the nutrient rich traditional diet helps to combat rising levels of diabetes caused by sugar-rich processed foods.

The trouble is that, because of climate change, nature is no longer cooperating the way it once did. According to Clifton, who co-authored a paper on the subject of environmental change with University of Victoria researcher Nancy Turner, weather in the region has been progressively less reliable over the last two decades. Unseasonable spring rains have obstructed the seaweed drying process. Frost and snow have damaged the plants.

And it’s not just seaweed—the rains have impeded the curing of halibut, disrupted pollination cycles and caused berries to grow so over ripe as to be inedible. For the last year the community has also been warned against harvesting clams because levels of toxins leading to paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) were more than twice normal. Hill says tests pinned the problem on a rise in pH level, which could be due to climate change—because the water is getting warmer, it can no longer hold as much oxygen.

Seeing that gradual decline in harvest, the Gitga’at Nation decided to contract sustainability experts from EcoPlan International to aid in the testing and planning process. Analyst Colleen Hamilton presented the work they had been doing at the most recent Livable Cities Forum in Vancouver.

Their goal, she said, was to corroborate local observations with science that would help further conversations already happening within the community. “The first thing we did when we started this project was go into the community and talk to people about all the weird things they were seeing.”

What the group found was that although the challenges were huge, the community was already making some moves to adapt by constructing buildings for drying halibut indoors and setting up freezers at the seaweed harvest sites to preserve it through the rain.

Another idea that came up was to shift focus onto other traditional foods that might better season the changes in temperature. There may be no clams this year, but there were mussels and cockles. Although the Gitga’at Nation is staunchly opposed to fisheries, which Hill says do more harm than good, the group has been experimenting with growing oysters and scallops that may deal better with the new conditions.

The resilience of the Gitga’at Nation, built up over a thousand years of observing and adapting to our planet’s shifts, may offer a road map to other communities dealing with climate change. According to a 2012 report for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Indigenous peoples have long and multi-generational histories of interaction with their environments that include coping with environmental uncertainty, variability and change. They have demonstrated their resourcefulness and response capacity in the face of global climate change.”

Still, it’s a slow, sometimes disheartening process, one that has been interrupted by the fight against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal which poses a much more immediate threat to traditional waters.

Another unexpected challenge to the process has been massive funding cuts in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). Since 2013, maintaining fish habitats is no longer part of the purview of the DFO. In the region around Hartley Bay, that has meant a suspension of water testing which was providing valuable clues about future avenues for adaptation.

“It’s such a strange thing for Harper taking the habitat out of the DFO,” Hill says. “It would have been interesting if the testing had continued over time. Then we would have known exactly what is happening.”

Image Credits: miguelb via Flickr | **604*250** via Flickr

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There is simply not enough reliable information to be confident about the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing, according to a new report released by the Council of Canadian Academies.

The report, commissioned by Environment Canada, takes a broad view of the implications of “fracking,” from possible contamination of land and water to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to human health and social impacts. It identified several key areas of concern, particularly that pathways created by leakage of natural gas from “improperly formed, damaged or deteriorated cement seals” may contaminate ground water and increase GHG emissions.

Other issues of concern included:

• land damage due to the extensive infrastructure required by multiple wells, such as roads, well pads, compressor stations, pipeline rights-of-way and staging areas.
• health and safety issues related to the rapid growth of an extraction industry in rural areas.
• air pollution due to the heavy-industrial process of fracking for the extraction of natural gas.
• seismic events due to wastewater injection.
• the contravention of the rights of Aboriginal peoples in extraction areas.  

The report also notes the fracking process varies wildly depending upon the geography and population of the region under development. British Columbia, for example, with its mountainous landscape and vast unpopulated wildernesses, will face different challenges and require different study than Quebec, which is relatively low-lying and densely populated.

But overall, the report’s key criticism was the utter lack of reliable data on the contentious topic. “In most instances, shale gas extraction has proceeded without sufficient environmental baseline data being collected,” it concludes.

In an interview with CBC during the afternoon call-in show BC Almanac, John Cherry, the University of Guelph adjunct professor who headed up the study, pointed out that when issues do come up, industry has tended to sweep complaints under the rug.

As journalist Andrew Nikiforuk recently reported on The Tyee, a high-profile water contamination case in Alberta against natural gas giant Encana has been met with significant pushback from government. Claimant Jessica Ernst, a former environmental consultant for industry, is suing Encana and the provincial regulator for negligence and a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, respectively, in the contamination of her groundwater near the hamlet of Rosebud, Alberta.

Recently Alberta Environment sought to have the word 'contamination' struck from the lawsuit, as well as any other mention of polluted water wells in the region.

Nikiforuk also reports in many cases landowners who have suffered ill-effects from the fracking process have been made to sign non-disclosure agreements, making it impossible to draw reasonable conclusions about the frequency of problems or study the incidents to make future regulatory improvements.

Responding to statements by British Columbia energy minister Rich Coleman about the safety of fracking, Cherry was unequivocal: “Your minister is wrong,” he said. “There is no reason for government to be confident.”

His colleague, University of Pennsylvania professor Bernard Goldstein echoed that warning. “We’re racing ahead without seriously thinking through how best to do this,” he told the Globe and Mail.

The report argues that if natural gas extraction through fracking is to become a regular feature of the Canadian economy, there will need to be an extraordinary leap in scientific study. But that kind of research is “unlikely to occur without a concerted effort among industry, government, academia, and the public in each of the provinces with significant shale gas potential.”

Any realistic understanding of the issue will require a “crash course program of monitoring and research,” Cherry told the CBC.

Similar reports decrying the shortage of data and calling for enhanced monitoring appeared recently in the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.

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In May 2000 in the town of Walkerton, Ontario, heavy rains swept water containing the O157:H7 strain of E. coli bacteria from a nearby farm into a well of drinking water. For almost two weeks, the two city workers in charge of water quality claimed that there was no danger. Meanwhile, 2300 people fell inexplicably ill and seven died.

City managers Stan and Frank Koebel both faced criminal charges for their part in the slow response to the outbreak. In his report, Justice Dennis O'Connor lambasted the provincial cuts to the Environment Ministry, which lead to the incompetence on the ground level. It was a disaster that could have been prevented had the public officials in charge acknowledged the problem and acted earlier.

At the ICLEI Livable Cities Forum in early April, Public Health Agency of Canada researcher Manon Fluery invoked the specter of Walkerton as a way to illustrate the growing public health risks associated with climate change. Rising water levels, she said, could lead to a growth in gastrointestinal illnesses related to water borne diseases. Extreme weather events that batter aging infrastructure could lead to cross contamination between sewage and drinking water.

And waterborne illnesses aren’t the only public health risk associated with climate change. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a complex and sweeping picture of the near future. It noted several public health risks that have already begun in exposed coastal regions. While not all of those dire predictions have yet made it to Canada, if climate change is allowed to continue at present alarming rates, there is little doubt they will.

According to Nancy Edwards, the scientific director of the Institute of Population and Public Health at the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the public health effects of climate change will be numerous and wide ranging. She points to housing and mold issues caused of increased flooding like last year’s in Southern Alberta and Toronto. The loss of housing and livelihood, she says, can also lead to widespread mental health issues.

Meanwhile, seniors, children and low-income people without access to air-conditioning in their homes are particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures in cities where heat is less likely to dissipate. In the North, melting permafrost restricts access to food supply and traditional food sources.

Disease-carrying insects have already begun to force their way into new territories. Both lyme disease carried by ticks and West Nile virus carried by mosquitoes has been on the rise. “There’s an indirect consequence that happens,” Edwards says. “It changes the breeding ground for the insects. Then you have changes in bird populations that might be eating the insects. As they are affected, there’s a whole domino effect through the biosphere.”

It can feel like a bleak picture, but there are solutions. Many cities have begun to plan for the coming risks. Toronto has already begun to adapt to this reality by introducing “cooling centres” during the height of summer heat.

“But it’s not really dealing with the underlying issue,” says Edwards. She believes buildings and infrastructure must be retrofitted to withstand the new climate realities. And public health campaigns must continue to raise awareness of both insect-borne and heat related illnesses.

Some of this work has already been done at the municipal and provincial level, but is it enough? Is adaptation really all we have left?

Research has shown that a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions leading to reduced temperature changes can slow the process in many palpable ways. A 2011 study through McGill University found a link between climate change and the geographical distribution of the mosquito culex pipens, the species that carries the deadly West Nile virus, which has grown steadily in its effects since first appearing in the Western Hemisphere around 1999.

Using climate estimates from the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, researchers found that if emissions were curtailed and there were a quick transition to cleaner, more energy efficient technologies, the spread of this kind of disease-bearing mosquito is significantly reduced. If not, the rise in suitable habitat for the species will increase from 211 per cent to 518 per cent by the 2080s.

That would cover 100 per cent of the Maritime Provinces (excluding Labrador), much of Southern Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and great swaths of Alberta and British Columbia.

Fluery is not the only researcher to connect the public health risks of climate change to the Walkerton tragedy. Thomas J. Duck, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Dalhousie University, sees the recent cuts to environment Canada’s budget as a reflection of the same kind of neglect and shortsightedness on a much larger scale.

“Since the cuts began in earnest in 2011, scientists have been sounding the alarm,” he wrote in the Toronto Star last month. “Their warnings have fallen on deaf ears. And, as was the case in Ontario, it appears that the federal government has not assessed the risks.”

“Protecting the health and safety of Canadians is a key responsibility of the federal government. Investment in environmental protection — Environment Canada’s job — is only prudent.”

Image Credit: Ramón Portellano via Flickr

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In the aftermath of last year’s flood in Southern Alberta, insurance companies had a public relations nightmare on their hands. Residents were facing massive rebuilding costs and banks were suddenly holding mortgages for useless properties. Yet much of the damage was uninsurable because it was caused by “overland flooding,” a hazard that insurance companies in Canada have never covered. Calculations for applying existing insurance on sewer back-up damages led to erratic settlements, leaving residents of communities like High River frustrated and angry.

Speaking at the Livable Cities Forum last week in Vancouver, Barbara Turley-McIntyre, head of sustainability and citizenship for The Co-operators insurance company, painted a picture of lives ground to a halt by a disaster that some forethought might have prevented.

She believes that it’s time for collaboration on analysis and mitigation of risks associated with climate change. “We need to be able to understand what the risks are so we can do a cost-benefit analysis and as a society put our dollars where they’re going to protect your homes and communities,” she said.

That means developing up-to-date flood maps for rural and urban areas and weather hardening infrastructure and homes against coming disasters, but it also means finding ways to prevent the growing dangers associated with climate change.

Since their advent in 17th century Europe, insurance agencies have worked by taking the cost of destruction from a few and dispersing it amongst the many. They remain solvent by analyzing risks and pricing their products in a way that will cover eventualities without being so high as to scare away customers.

Although insurers have traditionally been wary of stating unequivocally that climate change arises from human activity, the industry has had a long history of observing and warning of its effects. The German reinsurance giant Munich Re, one of a few companies that provide insurance to smaller insurers, started warning of a rise in climate change related flood incidences all the way back in 1973. The company now curates the world’s most extensive database of natural disasters.

To agencies such as the Co-operators, the evidence of growing risk is irrefutable. Turley-McIntyre points out that up until 2009, the yearly cost of insurable disasters in Canada was $400 million. From 2009 to 2012, that number jumped to $1 billion. In 2013, with catastrophic flood damage in Southern Alberta and Toronto, as well as huge storms on the east coast, that number skyrocketed to $3.2 billion.

In June of 2013 more than 1500 Canadian soldiers were deployed to southern Alberta to help with flood relief. Photo: MCpl Patrick Blanchard for the Canadian Army via Flickr.

The Alberta flood caused the third most costly insured catastrophic losses in 2013. Recent disasters have already begun pushing up premiums, and without immediate action, that trend will continue.

Members of the Canadian Army set up modular tents as part of operation LENTUS, a response to the Alberta floods. Photo: MCpl Patrick Blanchard for the Canadian Army via Flickr.

In order to move forward, The Co-operators commissioned a study through the University of Waterloo to assess the viability of providing overland flood insurance, a product that has never been available in this country despite flooding being the “most frequent type of natural hazard in Canada.”

Researchers Jason Thistlethwaite and Blair Feltmate found that all Canadian insurance agencies were harbouring the same fears about climate change. “Without effective mitigation, flood risk was predicted to increase with climate change, which will add burden on taxpayers and potentially lead to reputational and regulatory risk for insurers,” they wrote. “This increase in flooding could reduce the availability of existing property insurance coverage in some areas.”

Unchecked increases in flooding will lead to increased vulnerability, which will in turn transfer more of the financial burden of clean-up to the government. Turley-McIntyre doesn’t believe that it’s enough to predict these coming disasters; we must also plan ahead to mitigate their effects by building communities that are resilient to climate change.

Mark Way, senior vice president of sustainability in the Americas for European reinsurance agency Swiss Re, agrees. “Higher levels of resilience means lower levels of loss,” he said, speaking at the same event as Turley-McIntyre. “Climate change is best tackled with a portfolio of adaptation measures.”

But insurance agencies can’t do it alone. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns, “Risk financing mechanisms in the public and private sector, such as insurance and risk pools, can contribute to increasing resilience, but without attention to major design challenges, they can also provide disincentives, cause market failure, and decrease equity. Governments often play key roles as regulators, providers, or insurers of last resort.”

Turley-McIntyre hopes that the floods in Alberta may have been a catalyst for the necessary cooperation between the provincial, municipal and federal government, because it happened in the Prime Minister’s “back yard” and because “it caused the government to come close to not meeting its budget targets for last year.”

Flooded city streets in Calgary, Alberta. Photo: Wayne Stadler via Flickr.

Ian Bruce from the David Suzuki Foundation has seen positive work from municipal and provincial governments, but sees efforts sorely lacking at the federal level. He believes that changes within the insurance industry will make it ever harder for the federal government to ignore the pressing issue of climate change.

In order to prevent worsening disasters, governments must prioritize clean energy, invest in green infrastructure and modernize and expand public transportation systems to get more cars off the road.           

“I can see a trickle-down effect happening where the changes within the insurance sector changes investor and banking decisions, which then influences government policy,” he says. “Certainly without the immediate support from the federal government this transition will be more chaotic and a bit slower, but I see it happening. It’s only a matter of time.”

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A group of engineers has released papers warning us not to trust the numbers provided by Enbridge when it comes to tanker traffic associated with the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.

Concerned Professional Engineers (CPE) is a group of four engineers living in British Columbia with specializations in areas such as probabilistic methods in engineering, naval architecture, small and large materials handling, and cold climate design. Between them they claim more than 100 years experience in design related to industrial projects.

The group’s spokesperson Brian Gunn first became involved in conservation issues when he retired from his long career in civil engineering and bought a dude ranch in the wild interior of BC. Delving into the world of wilderness tourism, he became aware of the tense relationship between developers seeking to take advantage of the region's abundant natural resources and those residents who wished to preserve it.

“I became conscious in that business to all the opposing forces of nature-based tourism and those forces that were the industrial forces that were also exploiting the land,” he says. “We all exploit the land in one way or another, but some leave a bigger footprint than others.”

It was quite an awakening after a long career of working with industry. “In my day, there was no real environmental opposition,” he says. “Nobody really questioned sticking a coal port on the eelgrass bed of Robert’s bank [in the southwest corner of the Greater Vancouver Regional District]. With these industries, we grew up feeling that we were doing a great job for society. Now the situation has changed.”

He and his colleagues decided to speak out in on Northern Gateway in 2012 when they first learned of the Enbridge plan to bring tankers as far inland as Kitimat. “As engineers involved with navigation and tankers and freighters, we thought, why would they want to go through 160 nautical miles, over 300 kilometres, and face all the risks in those channels when they could go somewhere else?”

But the group didn’t want to speak out before they were able to make an unbiased assessment of the situation. “Because we’re engineers, we felt we couldn’t just come out and comment right away. We had to do a proper job.”

Gunn says that professional engineers often feel pressure to speak for companies they are associated with. He believes that being retired frees him and his colleagues to examine the evidence objectively and speak candidly about their findings.

The papers point out three major issues with the findings of the Joint Review Panel: flawed risk analysis, who will shoulder the burden of spill cost, whether a spill can be cleaned up at all.

“When we read the JRP reports in December, we were very disappointed and felt very strongly that they misled all of us who put our efforts in to consider the evidence.”

Among the many oversights, Gunn says that the database used in analyzing risk contained errors and omitted two major incidents that would have significantly skewed the numbers: the MV Braer off the coast of Scotland and the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska.

He also questions Enbridge’s lack of transparency in their process, given the extraordinarily high cost for accessing the proprietary database they used to make their estimates. “It’s like somebody producing a major scientific paper and saying, these are the conclusions we’ve come to, but you can’t see the reasons why we came to these conclusions,” he says.

The CPE reports call the Joint Review Panel’s estimates around spill probability and the intricacies of cleanup “optimistic.” They also question the panel’s assessment of the behaviour of diluted bitumen in water. “Given the complicated currents and geometry of the Douglas Channel area, is it reasonable to assume that the spilled diluted bitumen can be recovered before it weathers and sinks?"

In the end, the group is careful to point out that they are not anti-business. They just believe the Northern Gateway proposal to be a poorly conceived project. “We still support development and the economy, but we’re trying to say, let’s do it in a way that’s responsible,” says Gunn. “The Northern Gateway tanker proposal is not a responsible development. It’s too risky and the evidence used to support it is not accurate.”

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The Canadian Library Association (CLA) has requested the federal government engage in talks concerning the recent closures of and cuts to government libraries, according to a statement released Tuesday. 

In the three-page statement, the organization, which represents 1410 library workers, libraries, and library supporters, called for more transparency on the part of the federal government about the process of consolidation and digitization of Canada’s historical records and scientific data. The CLA claims it is "troubled" by the government's handling of budget cuts, which have led to library closures and the disposal of collections.

"There has been much public debate and discussion about these reductions and very little information forthcoming from the government. CLA wishes to participate in informed dialogue regarding government library consolidation and closure," the statement reads.

“CLA agrees that collection management practices, such as withdrawal, are necessary in library management and that library consolidation is often an effective way to reduce costs while still maintaining service for clients; however, when implemented within the context of national public collections, such processes should be transparent and open.”

This statement addresses widespread fears over the loss of archival material, beginning with cut of $9.3 million over three years to the budget of Library and Archives Canada in 2012, which lead to a reduction in service hours and a 20 per cent reduction in staff.

It also speaks to the closure of seven of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ 11 libraries as well as further cuts impacting government libraries in departments as wide-reaching as Health Canada and Statistics Canada. "CLA has received reports that valuable materials are being lost due to the haste of these library closures."

The organization is "concerned about the lack of communication and consultation in the decision-making process around the consolidation and closure of these libraries. Given the absence of such dialog, CLA is concerned that there will be a substantial reduction in access to the materials in these collections, resulting in an irrevocable loss of unique information.” It is also concerned cuts to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) will prevent the federal body from accomplishing its legislated task.

Excerpt from the Canadian Library Association statement on the role of Library and Archives Canada.

Throughout the process, the federal government has said its goal is to digitize information and make it accessible through online portals, but CLA calls these plans “unclear.”

“CLA appreciates that digitization can provide enhanced access to materials for employees, researchers, and the broader public. However, digitization is a long-term, labour intensive process.”

They point out that the role of library and information professionals is “critical” given the volume of material slated for digitization. “It is essential that government use this expertise to manage and curate this material.”

On December 19, 2013 the federal government released a document of “Frequently Asked Questions” regarding the library closures. The CLA called this move a “good first step,” but say “the government’s plans for the preservation of and access to the valuable material remain unclear.”

In a January interview with the Tyee’s Andrew Nikiforuk, CLA president Marie DeYoung echoed these misgivings about the process, pointing out the lack of clarity about the intended outcomes was evidence that librarians were not involved in the planning of these closures. “That's what information professionals do well,” she said. “It is not apparent information professionals have been involved in the process."

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Julie Gelfand, Canada’s new environment commissioner, has ties to both environmental advocacy and industry.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Gelfand was a staunch advocate for environmental legislation. As executive director of the Canadian Nature Association and a founding member of Mining Watch Canada, she spoke out on issues of biodiversity, the future of national parks and endangered species legislation. While chairing of the Green Budget Coalition in 2006, Gelfand was unequivocal in her calls for ending tax subsidies to the oil and gas sector, nuclear power and mining exploration.

Then in November 2008, Gelfand was appointed as vice president of sustainable development for the Mining Association of Canada, a group that advocates for the mining sector. Its members are companies that engage in mineral exploration, mining smelting, refining and semi-fabrication.

"I am pleased to report that over 75 percent of companies and facilities have crisis management plans developed and reviewed under TSM" she noted in the 2010 Toward Sustainability Mining Progress Report. "Between 60 and 70 percent of Canadian facilities have now reached or exceeded good performance in dealing with their communities of interest."

She was then appointed as vice president of social responsibility and environment for Rio Tinto Alcan where, according to a video on the website, her job was to find “that spot where those three areas, the social, the economic and the environmental meet, that’s when you can say that we’re working toward sustainable development.”

In an interview with Postmedia, Gelfand said she sees her experience with industry as a boon to the position. “I really hope to add value to the auditor general’s office in whatever way I can because I’m not an auditor, per se, and I think I can bring in new perspectives, and as much balance as possible.”

Whatever her experience, the new commissioner will have a difficult road ahead, according to former commissioner Scott Vaughan.

Vaughan left the position in April 2013 after five years of calling out the federal government on its inability to meet environmental targets.

Though he never expressed frustration or anger, Green Party leader Elizabeth May said Vaughan experienced an extraordinary level of criticism while appearing before parliamentary committees. “I apologized to him once,” May told Postmedia. “I just thought it was so awful that I apologized on behalf of MPs.”

In November, interim minister Neil Maxwell continued offering a scathing report on biodiversity.

Under the auspices of the Office of the Auditor General, the job of the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development is to provide “parliamentarians with objective, independent analysis and recommendations on the federal government’s efforts to protect the environment and foster sustainable development.”

The office collects data from a variety of governmental and non-governmental organizations and then compares that information to other countries to gauge the effectiveness of federal environmental policy.

Given the complexity of the data involved, simply creating metrics for success is often a challenge. During his tenure, Vaughan made a point of paying attention to environmental NGOs, which he saw as having a much quieter voice than industry within federal politics. 

Vaughan, who has always asserted complete political neutrality, believes the environment commissioner has become an even more crucial position of reason since the government’s recent attitude toward NGOs.

“It’s a really important role, particularly now given how this government has basically walked away from many longstanding relationships with environmental groups,” he says. “Not only walked away, but there’s been an openly hostile approach to many of them. It’s been quite unfortunate and it’s also been noticed around the world.”

“If the government has done a great job, then great job, but if the government is dropping the ball, for example on the 2020 climate targets — there’s no way they’re going to meet them — there’s somebody who has the objectivity and the perspective and access to all that information to be able to make those calls.”

Image Credit: Leila Mead via the International Institute for Sustainable Development

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It has been a difficult few years for the curators of knowledge in Canada. While the scientific community is still reeling from the loss of seven of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' eleven libraries, news has broken that scientists with Health Canada were left scrambling for resources after the outsourcing and then closure of their main library.

In January CBC news uncovered a report from a consultant hired by the federal government cataloguing mistakes in the government’s handling of the closure. "Staff requests have dropped 90 per cent over in-house service levels prior to the outsource. This statistic has been heralded as a cost savings by senior HC [Health Canada] management," the report said.

"However, HC scientists have repeatedly said during the interview process that the decrease is because the information has become inaccessible — either it cannot arrive in due time, or it is unaffordable due to the fee structure in place."

Government spokespeople dismissed the report, saying it was “returned to its author for corrections, which were never undertaken.”

The consultancy company fired back through a letter from its lawyer. “Representations that our client provided a factually inaccurate report and then neglected to respond to requests for changes are untrue," it read.

However, Health Canada and the DFO are not the only government bodies to lose access to vital archival material in the past two years. Postmedia reports more than twelve departments losing libraries due to the Harper government’s budget cuts, including the Canada Revenue Agency, Citizenship and Immigration, Employment and Social Development Canada, Environment Canada, Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Natural Resources Canada, Parks Canada, the Public Service Commission, Public Works and Government Services, and Transport Canada. 

Many of these departments lost multiple libraries, with historical records and books disappearing from shelves, scattered across private collections or tossed in dumpsters. In 2013 even the country's main home for historic documents, Library and Archives Canada, faced major cuts to service, including hours, interlibrary loans and staffing.

This unprecedented process has triggered concerns about the loss of physical documents and imperfections in the digitization process. A recent report from the Canadian Libaries Association (CLA) expresses these fears in no uncertain terms.

“Currently in Canada the vast majority of research data is at risk of being lost because it is not being systematically managed and preserved. While certain disciplines and research projects have institutional, national, or international support for data management, this support is available for a minority of researchers only. A coordinated and national approach to managing research data in Canada is required in order to derive greater and longer term benefits, both socially and economically, from the extensive public investments that are made in research.”

But equally as worrisome is the loss of the librarians themselves, some of whom have spent decades familiarizing themselves with the extremely specialized materials in their collections.

Anyone who has written an undergraduate research paper knows how maddening it can be to dig through online databases for a single piece of information. The same is true for high level researchers, according to Jeff Mason, past president of the Canadian Health Libraries Association (CHLA/ABSC).

Mason is a librarian at a hospital in Saskatchewan with firsthand experience of working with health professionals. “Much as you would think a doctor would be an expert at treatment and diagnoses, when it comes to information in the health field, librarians are key resources,” he told DeSmog Canada by phone a day after learning of the Health Canada main library’s closure.

“I was shocked to hear that the Health Canada library had been closed because we thought it was safe as an organization,” says Mason.

In a field as specialized as medical research, having a librarian who is familiar with the material is integral to success.

“Unless you really know what you’re doing and spend all day everyday searching for information, these databases, or the internet, can be impossible,” Mason says. “Unless you spend all your times with your hands in it, you can’t really ever be sure that you’ve found everything that’s out there.”

A librarian’s relationship to a collection makes them able to help researchers and physicians alike find necessary information with speed and efficiency. They can aid researchers in formulating questions and narrowing fields of inquiry, streamlining the process of both digital and hard copy searches. "We tell our clients in our hospital if they spent more than 10 minutes looking for something, then they should have come to us," he says.

With budget cuts and library closures, collections are being shunted to academic libraries that are simply not capable of maintaining the level of service of the original institutions.

“They’re short-staffed and they don’t have enough funds to do what they’re supposed to do,” says Mason. “Now they’re being contacted by government researchers and not-for-profits that used to get their information through the government of Canada.”

Head of collections David Sharp and gift specialist Colin Harness from Carleton University have released a stunning graphic detailing their institution’s efforts to “rescue” collections. 

In 2012 and 2013 Carleton University engaged with 21 different government libraries. They were able to help fourteen libraries, finding homes for 500 rare items from Fisheries and Oceans Canada only, either by taking in their collections or connecting them with resources. Eight of those collections were either dispersed elsewhere or have an unknown status. One collection, from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, was declined because of “staff and space resource concerns.”

But even if the materials find a safe home either on a physical shelf or in a database, librarians, Mason believes, are still “integral to sound science and sound policy.” 

Their loss is “really devastating to the state of science and knowledge in our country.”

The January report by the CLA corroborates Mason’s opinion. “Research libraries are essential institutions in developing and managing data repositories,” it reads. “Libraries and librarians have the expertise in resource description, storage, and access.”

Image Credit: Wikimedia Image Credit: Colin Harness and David Sharp via dysartjones.com

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Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic sci-fi book "A Canticle for Leibowitz" tells the story of a post-apocalyptic future in which a small group of monks strive to preserve the remnants of humanity's scientific knowledge. After the destruction of civilization, in the absence of physical records of its history, humanity repeats the worst of its mistakes.

There have been many tales over the years of the destruction of books. Sometimes, as with the sacking of the library of Alexandria, it was out of sheer thoughtlessness. Other times, it was with the clear intent of the reigning regime to banish knowledge that didn’t fit its worldview. However it happened, it was only in hindsight that we understood to what extent the loss set humanity back.

It’s hard not to think of these things when reading stories of the closure of seven of the eleven Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries across Canada. Local media outlets have reported dumpsters full of books. The Winnipeg-based North/South Consultants brought a flatbed truck to the closure of the library at the University of Manitoba’s Freshwater Institute and packed it full with the history of Canadian water.

“There's a treasure trove of stuff there,” Don MacDonell, a spokesperson for North/South, which does field research and environmental impact assessments for government and corporate clients, told the Winnipeg Free Press. “In our field, aquatics, the library was quite valuable. It serviced the whole central and Arctic region.”

When word first broke that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was closing the libraries, government officials promised that there would be no loss of vital historical material. Today many are skeptical of those claims.

In an interview with the CBC, former fisheries minister Tom Siddon called the move “Orwellian, because some might suspect that it's driven by a notion to exterminate all unpopular scientific findings that interfere with the government's economic objectives.”

Several scientists spoke anonymously to the Tyee’s Andrew Nikiforuk. "I was sickened," said a research scientist who had worked for the federal government for 30 years. "All that intellectual capital is now gone. It's like a book burning. It's the destruction of our cultural heritage. It just makes us poorer as a nation."

Green Party leader Elizabeth May, whose constituency of Saanich-Gulf Islands is home to one of the four remaining libraries, also condemned the move. “Consistent with their policy of muzzling scientists, the Conservatives have now moved on to trashing libraries,” she said. “This administration seems to be deliberately undermining our ability to make good policy decisions by limiting access to scientific evidence.”

On December 7, in response to the landslide of criticism, Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea sent out a press release ensuring that it is “absolutely false to insinuate that any books were burnt.”

“The decision to consolidate our network of libraries was based on value for taxpayers,” she said in the release. “The primary users of DFO libraries, over 86%, are employees of the Department. An average of only five to 12 people who work outside of DFO visited our eleven libraries each year. It is not fair to taxpayers to make them pay for libraries that so few people actually used.”

The scientific community did not find the argument convincing, including Jeffrey Hutchings, Canada Research Chair in Marine Conservation & Biodiversity at Dalhousie University.

“A logical extension of this argument proffered by DFO spokespersons is that it would not be fair to make taxpayers pay for the libraries and associated resources of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Bank of Canada, or even the Library of Parliament because ‘so few people actually used’ the libraries in question,” he told the Tyee.

Many of the research libraries facing closure are meant to act as resources for the federal government rather than the public, such as the library at the Maurice Lamontagne Institute. On the Institute's website, the research facilities are described as providing "the federal government with a scientific basis for the conservation of living marine resources, the protection of the marine environment, and safe maritime navigation, as well as to ensure the application of legislation designed for the integrated management of the marine environment and the protection of fish habitat."

Contents from the Maurice Lamontagne Institute library fill a dumpster in July 2013. File from www.cpcml.ca.

A memo uncovered by Postmedia’s Mike De Souza said that the closures would only save the taxpayers about $443,000 per year, after millions of dollars had recently been spent renovating the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick.

It referred to the removal process not as digitizing, but as “culling” materials to make room in the remaining four libraries.

Shea did not address widespread concerns regarding the technical aspects of the digitization process.

In response to a request for more information regarding the culling process, DFO media spokesperson referred to the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Library Collection Development and Management Guideline released February 2013.

“The Department withdrew obvious duplicates from its collections and approached universities, academics, museums, community and non-government organizations, and other libraries and offered materials in the collection that were outside of the department’s mandate,” the department told DeSmog via e-mail.  

At the time, scientists expressed skepticism regarding the logic behind the withdrawal of materials and feared that important historical documents may be lost.

“It is information destruction unworthy of a democracy,” said Peter Wells, an ocean pollution expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, told the Vancouver Sun. He called the potential loss of materials a “national tragedy.”

Biologist and researcher Pamela Zevit worked on an early effort to digitize government research in the mid-1990s when she served the British Columbia’s Ministry of Environment. She remembers the excitement around providing searchable, easily accessible databases quickly falling away to the enormity of the task.

The biggest issues, she says, are quality control and maintenance. How do you assure the sensitive historical documents are properly scanned and who will maintain these archives over time and changes in technology?

It would be a mistake, Zevit believes, to think of digitized archives as infallible guardians of data. A recent article by University of British Columbia researcher Timothy Vines found that as much as eighty percent of data is lost over a period of two decades because changes in technology make storage formats obsolete.

“What happens if you lose information digitally and you have no hard copy resource or archive to go back to?” Zevit says. “All trace of it is eliminated from the planet unless somebody’s actually downloaded something at some point in time.”

As a researcher, Zevit doubts the federal government’s ability to follow through on its promises to maintain quality of service at the remaining libraries. “When I worked for government, I worked under the premise that disclosure and transparency were very important responsibilities,” Zevit says. “There’s no point in investing tens of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in curating information if it’s never accessible to anyone.”

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The city of South Portland, Maine banned the export of oilsands crude from local port facilities this week. 

Portland, the suburban community of 25,000 is the Atlantic terminal of the Portland Montreal Pipe Line, which currently carries millions of barrels of oil from the coast to refineries in Montreal. The city council is currently seeking to draft a law that would ban Portland Pipe Line Corp. from using Portland facilities to move western crude to the eastern seaboard. 

“We applaud the City Council for their strong leadership in standing up to the oil industry,” said Roberta Zuckerman of Protect South Portland, a citizens group, told the Financial Post. “But now the City Council must turn the temporary ban on shipping tar sands out of our city into permanent legal protections.”

The ban expires on May 6. By then the community hopes to have new regulations in place that permanently ban the transport of diluted bitumen along the pipeline from Montreal.

When South Portland’s city council began workshops on the ban, the American Petroleum Institute sent a fiery five-page letter claiming that it would violate state and federal law, as well as the US constitution.

South Portland isn’t the only city council willing to stand up to oil companies that put profits before environmental stewardship.

In Vancouver, British Columbia earlier this month, Mayor Gregor Robertson tabled a motion for city council to intervene in coming National Energy Board meetings about the proposed expansion of the Kinder Morgan Transmountain Pipeline.

The mayor decided to speak out after a federal report found that Canada’s spill response system was not adequate to the current level of tanker traffic. According to the Kinder Morgan proposal, tanker traffic would soar from the current rate of five tankers per month to 34.

“Today we received further evidence from staff that the threat of a major oil spill in or near Vancouver’s waters poses unacceptable risks to our local economy and environment,” he said.

“The City of Vancouver’s intervention in the National Energy Board’s hearings will outline Vancouver’s significant concerns about a seven-fold increase in oil tanker traffic, and help ensure that our harbour, our local economy, and Vancouver treasures like Stanley Park are safe from the untold risks of a catastrophic oil spill.”

Image Credit: 350.org via Flickr

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