An investigation by The Narwhal reveals that industry and related groups, primarily from the oil and gas industry, are responsible for more than 80 per cent of Senate lobbying on Bill C-69, Canada’s proposed new environmental assessment law.

In contrast, just 13 per cent of Senate and Senate staff lobbying was conducted by environmental groups and four per cent was carried out by one First Nation.

Twenty-nine groups representing industry, business and related associations registered to lobby the government specifically about Bill C-69, which introduces new rules for reviewing major projects like mines and pipelines following the gutting of environmental assessment legislation by the former Stephen Harper government.

Of these groups, 21 went on to have 224 meetings with individual Senate members over a 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced in February 2018. (To read more about how The Narwhal conducted this analysis, read our methods at the end of the article).

The unelected Senate has become a potential show-stopper for Bill C-69, which would make updates to Canada’s environmental assessment laws promised by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the last election campaign. The bill was supported by four out of five political parties in the House of Commons.

Normally the Senate would readily approve legislation backed by a majority of MPs. But last Thursday, in a rare move that tests the limits of its power, the Senate passed Bill C-69 with 187 sweeping amendments that experts say would leave Canada with weaker environmental assessment laws than those introduced by the Harper government.

Breakdown of meetings linked to lobbying on Bill C-69 that targeted the Senate. These meetings took place between February 8, 2018 — the date Bill C-69 was introduced — and early June 2019. The Narwhal is looking at meetings arranged with lobbyists that specifically named Bill C-69 in their registrations.

Many of the Senate’s amendments mirrored requests, some word for word, from oil companies and related associations such as the industry lobby group Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

CAPP, which has issued press releases and written op-eds condemning the original Bill C-69, has lobbied 36 senators since Bill C-69 was introduced, some of them on multiple occasions, according to The Narwhal’s findings.

Only three environmental groups specifically listed Bill C-69 as a target for their government lobbying — the Quebec Centre for Environmental Law, West Coast Environmental Law and the Pembina Institute, a Canadian non-profit think tank focused on energy issues.

Those three groups had a total of 36 meetings over the 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced by federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in February 2018.

Foreign ownership of Canada’s oil industry

Kevin Taft, a former Alberta MLA and former leader of Alberta’s Liberal Party, said he’s not at all surprised that the oil industry has “massively outspent and out manoeuvred and out lobbied everybody else” on Bill C-69 — and Bill C-48, which would formalize a 30-year-old moratorium on large oil tanker traffic off B.C.’s north coast.

Taft said he’s struck by what he called an“Orwellian twist” and irony that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney faults “foreign-funded” environmental groups for influencing bills C-69 and C-48 when the oil industry has played a far larger role in lobbying. The oil industry, Taft said, is largely foreign-funded even though it’s based in Calgary.

Last Friday, when Kenney announced his “energy war room,” he repeated a now-familiar refrain from his campaign that environmental groups are behind a “campaign of lies and defamation” against the province’s energy industry.

Kenney, flanked by oil and gas industry representatives including the CEO of CAPP, Tim McMillan, told reporters that the “tar sands campaign” launched by environmental groups “helped to write two devastating federal bills — C-48, the ban on Alberta oil exports off our northern coast, and Bill C-69, what we call the No More Pipelines Law.”

Taft pointed out that Imperial Oil is owned by Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp., while Canadian Natural Resources Limited trades largely on foreign stock exchanges.

China is also heavily invested in Canada’s oil industry. Calgary’s Nexen Energy is now owned by China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) international division. And Chinese-owned Sinopec Oilsands Partnership — the biggest oil company in the world ranked by revenue — owns nine per cent of Syncrude, while CNOOC acquired seven per cent of Syncrude through its acquisition of Nexen.

Then there’s Husky Energy Inc., one of the largest oil companies operating in Alberta. The majority stake in Husky is controlled by the family of Hong Kong’s richest man, recently retired billionaire Li Ka-shing, who holds approximately 70 per cent of the company’s shares.

Oil industry spends ‘millions’ a year on lobbying and PR campaigns

Laurie Adkin, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, said to imply that the oil and gas industry is the victim of propaganda and the environmentalists have all the power is “an inversion of what we know factually.”

“The reality is that the oil and gas industry has huge resources to lobby and finance public information campaigns, advertising … departments dedicated to engaging in government relations, digital communications, preparation of submissions for inquiries and consultations of various kinds,” she told The Narwhal.

“We know that they spend millions of dollars a year on this.”

Adkin noted that environmental lawyers say the government’s original version of Bill C-69 is weak, pointing out that it doesn’t go far enough to reverse the Harper government’s deregulation and protect the health of Canadians and biodiversity, or to address the climate change effects of Canada’s extractive industries.

The oil and gas industry views Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 as “obstructions” to building pipelines and expanding the oilsands, Adkin said. “So they are investing a lot in defeating them and modifying them.”

Oil industry has a ‘grip on the throat of democracy’

“It’s not a coincidence that five members of Jason Kenney’s cabinet, including the energy minister, are from the oil industry,” said Taft, author of the book Oil’s Deep State, which examines why democratic governments have failed to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions despite compelling evidence of the growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

In addition to Sonya Savage, Alberta’s energy minister, at least four other ministers in Kenney’s cabinet list extensive oil and gas experience in their government biographies.

Taft said the oil industry has “got a grip around the throat of democracy in Canada” and that he believes that anybody who thinks the Alberta government is looking after the best interests of Albertans is mistaken.

“The Alberta government is looking after the best interests of the oil industry and that’s because the oil industry has such a tight grip on most of the democratic institutions in this province. And they are working hard and deliberately to tighten that grip nationally through the Conservative party, for example, whose senators are bringing forward legislative amendments written word for word by the industry.”

“Those should be ringing loud alarm bells for every Canadian,” Taft said. “When we have a rich, powerful, foreign-controlled industry drafting our legislation for us we have a real problem with democracy in Canada.”

Industry lobbies government 16 times more than environmentalists

At press time, the full House of Commons was poised to debate a motion to accept about one-third of the Senate’s amendments and reject about two-thirds. Once the amended bill is approved by a majority of MPs it will return to the Senate for consideration, likely next week.

The Narwhal’s investigation reveals industry and related groups had far more access to politicians than environmental groups did, even before the bill reached the Senate.

In addition to tallying lobbying of the Senate, The Narwhal also looked at the total number of lobbying meetings with all government officials reported by groups registered to lobby on Bill C-69. This includes senators, members of parliament, the prime minister’s office and all other public office holders. These reports span a 12-month period.

Because the communications reports that document meetings do not specify the content of the lobbying effort, we couldn’t verify that each of these meetings directly included Bill C-69, though each group had included the bill in their lobbyist registration.

The Narwhal’s analysis found that industry and associated groups registered to lobby on Bill C-69 had 945 meetings with government officials in a 12-month period.

Breakdown of meetings linked to lobbying on Bill C-69 that targeted all government officials, including the Senate, members of parliament and other public office holders. These meetings took place over a 12-month period. The Narwhal is looking at meetings arranged with lobbyists that specifically named Bill C-69 in their registrations.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) alone reported more than 100 meetings during this time period.

In its lobbyist registration, CAPP listed — among a myriad of other topics — what it described as a “grassroots lobbying campaign to ask Senators to make sure [Bill C-69] does not pass as it stands today” as one of its lobbying activities.

Elisabeth Besson, a spokesperson for CAPP, declined to answer specific questions but told The Narwhal by email “CAPP seeks to work collaboratively with governments to meet a common goal — protect the environment, responsibly grow oil and natural gas production and strengthen the economy. We appreciate opportunities to submit comments or participate in working groups to provide our expertise, along with other key stakeholders, on a given topic.”

Taft said “for practical purposes” oil companies have unlimited resources for lobbying.

“They count their dollars by the billions whereas environmental groups count them by the thousands,” he said. “It’s a complete and utter mismatch.”

“Organizations and corporations lobby because it’s effective,” Taft said, adding that lobbying is “only one small component” of the oil industry’s broader strategy.

“It’s a strategy that, in addition to lobbying, includes advertising, legal threats, massive political donations … [and] overt political organization,” Taft told The Narwhal.

By comparison, environmental groups registered to lobby on C-69 held 58 meetings with government officials — about six per cent of the lobbying done by industry-related groups.

Indigenous groups registered to lobby on C-69 filed a total of seven communications in the same period.

Not all industry groups oppose the bill. The Mining Association of Canada has supported Bill C-69 since it was introduced, saying it would provide more certainty and is an improvement over existing legislation. The association’s CEO, Pierre Gratton, told CBC that metal and minerals mines account for more than half of current environmental assessments.

Industry is ‘in the driver’s seat’

David Hughes, an earth scientist who has studied the energy resources of Canada and the U.S. for more than four decades, said The Narwhal’s analysis clearly show “industry is in the driver’s seat.”

“The industry’s been incredibly successful in ramping up production, which is why we have a pipeline bottleneck,” Hughes said in an interview.

“If the environmental groups are lobbying to reduce production and leave it in the ground they’re incredibly unsuccessful.”

Oilsands production increased 376 per cent from 2000 to 2018, according to Hughes, who spent 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada as a scientist and research manager.

Oil production in the rest of Canada increased 45 per cent over the same time period, he said, while conventional oil production in Alberta dropped by 34 per cent.

Canada’s net oil exports have increased by 515 per cent since 2000, Hughes pointed out, adding that “environmental groups have been very ineffective.”

As overall oil production has climbed, royalties to government have plummeted — by almost 60 per cent, or $9.5 billion, from 2000 to 2017, according to Hughes.

‘Very big disproportionality’

University of Victoria sociologist Bill Carroll, whose research focuses on the relationships between corporate power, fossil fuel capitalism and the climate crisis, said The Narwhal’s findings are consistent with patterns traced by the Corporate Mapping Project he co-directs.

“What Jason Kenney says is not only untrue in terms of the specific details of Bill C-69 but it doesn’t fit the actual reality of lobbying in a larger time frame,” Carroll said in an interview.

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the mapping project — a partnership of several universities and civil-society organizations — examined fossil fuel sector lobbying of federal agencies and public office holders from early 2011 to early 2018.

That research showed that 260 fossil fuel companies and carbon-sector industry associations, such as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, lobbied the federal government over that time period, registering more than 11,000 distinct lobbying contacts.

Those lobbying contacts were concentrated among a small number of those 260 organizations, with the top 20 organizations accounting for 88 per cent of all lobbying, Carroll said. Those included CAPP, Enbridge, Suncor and TransCanada Corp (now known as TC Energy).

By comparison, over the same seven-year period, 16 environmental groups were active in lobbying at the federal level, Carroll said. “Their total lobbying contacts amounted to one-fifth of what the fossil fuel sector was doing. So a very big disproportionality there.”

The most active environmental group was the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, with 628 lobbying contacts. Other top environmental lobbyists were Environmental Defence, Pembina, Nature Canada, Ducks Unlimited and the David Suzuki Foundation, Carroll said.

Fossil fuel companies and associations are lobbying in an effort to shape legislation and policy “in ways that maximize their profitability” as part of business strategies, he noted.

“There’s an ongoing strategic concern to shape policy, to in a sense bombard policy makers — including senior civil servants and politicians — with a lot of information in an on-going, really permanent campaign in which the voice of industry is dominant.”

‘Tactical’ lobbying

When a specific piece of legislation like Bill C-69 is introduced, a “lobbying window” opens up and lobbying takes on a more “tactical aspect,” according to Carroll.

Speaking to CBC this week, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix characterized his industry’s involvement with Bill C-69 and subsequent amendments as an “almost unprecedented effort with government.”

Rick Petersen, founder of the group Suits and Boots, penned a strategy for killing Bill C-69 in the Senate. Suits and Boots describes itself as a “grassroots organization” of 3,700 members, founded in April 2018 by a group of investment community colleagues (the ‘suits’) who support the working families of the resource sector (the ‘boots’).

Petersen wrote that only 48 Senate votes were needed to kibosh the bill.

He theorized that the 31 Conservative Senators “will all very likely oppose C-69.” So only an additional 17 votes would be needed from the remaining 64 sitting senators, Petersen wrote on the Suits and Boots website, which published a list of senators people could call to “kill Bill C-69.”

Of the sitting non-Conservative senators, 11 are Liberal, 45 are independent and eight are non-affiliated.

CAPP’s Senate lobbying on Bill C-69 reflected the strategy outlined by Petersen. Of the 37 senators lobbied by CAPP since February 2018, only approximately a fifth were Conservative senators — eight in total, including one senator who retired in August 2018.

The majority of senators CAPP targeted for lobbying — 24 in total — were independents. CAPP also targeted two Liberal senators and two non-affiliated senators.

Suits and Boots is a non-profit organization that lists neither its total funding nor its funding sources, although its website solicits donations from “individual grassroots supporters.” The website says the group received “early support” from corporations that include Canoe Financial and Petersen Capital.

As part of the group’s campaign targeting the Senate, launched last October, Suits and Boots hired an airplane to fly over Parliament Hill trailing a huge banner for all to see.

The message was clear: “Kill Bill C-69.”

*Updated 9:20 a.m. June 14, 2019, to add the word ‘net’ to this sentence: Canada’s net oil exports have increased by 515 per cent since 2000, Hughes pointed out, adding that “environmental groups have been very ineffective.”

Research methods

Wondering how exactly we conducted this analysis?

First we wanted to hone in on the lobbying of the Senate — which was crucial in gutting Bill C-69 — so we tallied the number of lobbying efforts that specifically targeted the Senate.

To do this, The Narwhal scoured the federal lobbyist registry for all registrations that specifically named “C-69,” dating back to February 8, 2018, when federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna introduced the bill.

We then tallied the number of monthly lobby communications reports — communications reports are filed whenever there’s a pre-planned face-to-face meeting, a phone call or any other verbal communication with a member of parliament, senator or other government official — associated with those registrations, including only those that involved the Senate.

We then categorized each lobbyist into one of the categories: industry and related groups, Indigenous groups and environmental groups. A couple of lobbyists, such as Alberta Barley and the Alberta Wheat Commission, were grouped into the “other” category as they appear to be primarily lobbying on agricultural, rather than industry-related, interests.

While we can’t verify the precise content of individual lobby efforts (the communication reports contain only vague subjects, such as “environment” or “energy”), we can identify which groups lobbied Senate members the most extensively in the 16 months after Bill C-69 was introduced. It’s important to note that The Narwhal only searched for lobbyist registrations that specifically named Bill C-69 — other lobbying activities on Bill C-69 may have taken place without specifically naming the bill.

Second, we wanted to get an idea about lobbying of all government officials. To do this, we used the federal lobbying registry’s 12-month tool to compile all communications reports tied to lobbying registrations that specifically named Bill C-69.

We again searched for registrations that specifically named C-69, then tallied communications reports and grouped them using the same categories.

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Alberta Premier Jason Kenney calls Bill-69 the “No More Pipelines Act” and says he’ll take the proposed environmental impact legislation to court if it becomes law.

“This bill does not need a nip and tuck,” Kenney told Canadian senators in May. “It needs major reconstructive surgery or it needs to be put out to pasture.”

True to Kenney’s wishes, the bill — which introduces new rules for reviewing major projects like mines and pipelines following the gutting of environmental assessment legislation by the former Stephen Harper government — received far more than a nip and tuck in the Senate.

Major reconstructive surgery came in the form of 187 amendments approved by the Senate on Thursday evening, following intense lobbying led by the oil and gas industry and an in-person appeal by Kenney. The new premier travelled to Ottawa only days after he was sworn in, telling members of the Senate’s energy committee that Bill C-69 was the “culmination of a full-frontal attack” on Alberta’s economic prosperity.

But the Senate’s surgery is so extreme, with many of its wide-ranging amendments mirroring requests from the oil and gas industry, some verbatim, that environmental law experts say Canada would be better off leaving the Harper-era environmental assessment legislation in place.

“Unless the vast majority of those amendments are rejected, then it’s worse than what we have right now,” University of Calgary law associate professor Martin Olszynski said.

“What’s happened now is just ridiculous,” Olszynski, who specializes in environmental law, told The Narwhal.

“The [Senate] changes are not thought out. . .They’re essentially putting so many holes in the ship that it won’t even hold water.”

Senate amendments are ‘badly drafted’

Bob Gibson, a University of Waterloo professor in the department of environmental and resource studies, examined the fine print of every one of the Senate’s 187 amendments to Bill C-69 and wrote a detailed 20-page analysis.

He recommended that virtually all the amendments be rejected.

“A lot of the amendments are badly drafted,” Gibson said in an interview. “The amendments to me look like a large portion of it is driven by political optics more than substantive consideration.”

“I think a lot of it is fairly profoundly cynical. And I think a lot of it is ill-informed.”

Bill C-69 addresses an election campaign promise made by the Liberals to make environmental assessment credible again. The Harper government virtually dismantled Canada’s environmental assessment process, drastically reducing the number of federal assessments among other major cuts.

Following a report from an expert panel that travelled across the country, hearing from stakeholders in 21 cities, federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna introduced Bill C-69 in February 2018, saying the new legislation would ensure “more timely and predictable project reviews” that would attract investment and development.

The 340-page bill replaces the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. The bill also makes changes to the Navigable Waters Act and overhauls the beleaguered National Energy Board, replacing it with a Canadian Energy Regulator.

The new impact assessment agency would review all major projects in the country, assessing not just the environmental impacts but also the social, economic and health impacts, as well as the effects on Indigenous peoples.

The bill establishes timelines for assessments and requires that impacts on Indigenous rights and culture be considered early on in the planning process.

Experts say Bill C-69 is not ‘anti-pipeline’

Both Olszynski and Gibson said Bill C-69 is neither anti-pipeline nor pro-pipeline.

“Since the current federal government bought a pipeline out of devotion to getting resources to market — and/or retaining associated votes — it’s a safe bet that they don’t intend for C-69 to be anti-pipeline,” Gibson said.

Indications are that more pipeline and oil and gas projects would be exempted from environmental review under Bill C-69 than under the existing law, Gibson said.

Olszynski pointed out that the proposed Impact Assessment Act, like all of its predecessors, is “entirely procedural in nature. It sets out a decision-making process only.”

The amendments come as members of the Red Chamber test their power to influence laws following reforms introduced by the Trudeau government that are intended to make the unelected Senate less partisan. A majority of senators now sit as independents.

The amended Bill C-69 will go to Parliament for consideration next week, but if MPs make any changes to the Senate amendments the bill will bounce back to the Senate for approval.

Typically the Senate would approve a bill at that point, but legislative deadlock is possible and Bill C-69 will die on the order paper if it has not been passed into law before the current legislative session ends (scheduled for June 21).

Many amendments are at the request of the oil and gas industry

Olszynski described the majority of the Senate committee amendments as akin to putting Bill C-69 through “some kind of incoherence-generating machine.”

“They’ve just essentially attacked various aspects, various provisions,” he said. “Much of it is at the request of the oil and gas industry, [and] some of it is from the independent senator’s group who I think failed to appreciate just how complex and interconnected all these different parts are.”

As one example, Olszynski pointed to a Senate amendment that would require the new assessment agency to respect something called a  “principle of proportionality” — involving the time and money proponents spend on studies during an assessment.

Olszynski said he is not aware of the existence of a “principle of proportionality” in environmental assessment regimes anywhere in the world.

He said it’s hard to imagine a “more uncertain” provision given that critics of Bill C-69 say they want more certainty in environmental legislation.

The idea of proportionality is bound to generate conflict, litigation and delay, Olszynski said.

“Proponents will balk at every additional study or information request, claiming disproportionality,” he wrote in an analysis of Bill C-69. “If adopted, this provision would become a major pinch point in every contentious assessment.”

Senate amendments downplay climate change considerations

The Senate amendments would also require that a project’s impacts on the environment and climate change be considered on a global level.

Before any amendments, Bill C-69 would require decision-makers to consider the extent to which a project would hinder or contribute to meeting Canada’s climate change commitments.

But projects do not have to help Canada meet those commitments. Nor would major projects be rejected if they make it more difficult for Canada to meet commitments, according to the original bill.

“When you look at even the most massive greenhouse gas emissions emitting plants they are all insignificant on a global level,” Olszynski said.

He pointed to Shell Canada’s Jackpine oilsands mine north of Fort McMurray as an example of the argument that carbon emissions from a major Canadian project should be discounted in light of global emissions. Shell argued that greenhouse gas emissions associated with the expansion — roughly the equivalent of putting 281,000 new cars on the road a year — were negligible because they only represented .5 per cent of Alberta’s total emissions.

Gibson said the “great elephant in the room” with the Senate amendments is climate change, pointing out that the science says we have to be down to net zero greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“Understandably, the oil sector, including the pipeline interests, would much rather not have climate mentioned in the assessment law, or to have it delayed and muted by a long-extended and heavily lobbied policy exercise,” Gibson said. “They may get their wish. That is the thrust of some of the Senate amendments.”

“But that won’t delay actual climate change or associated damage and outrage. Nor will it make new bitumen extraction operations and new dilbit [diluted bitumen] pipelines a better bet for investors who can see ahead to stranded assets, or to Albertans who wonder how the Alberta economy will support their children.”

Syncrude operation in Alberta’s oilsands north of Fort McMurray. Photo: Louis Bockner / Sierra Club BC

Oil and gas industry lobbied senators intensively

Shortly after the Senate voted to accept the amendments — as proposed by the Senate committee on energy, the environment and natural resources — Kenney tweeted his approval, saying he was “very pleased.”

In a subsequent statement, Kenney noted that the amendments adopted by the Senate were proposed by the Alberta government, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association.

Lobbying of senators by the oil and gas industry intensified as Senate committees considered Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, which formalizes a decades-old moratorium on large oil tanker traffic off B.C.’s north coast. The Senate approved Bill C-48 on Thursday, after the bill was rejected by the Senate transport committee following ‘exhaustive’ industry lobbying.

From February 9, 2018 — the day after McKenna introduced Bill C-69 — to June 6, 2019, CAPP lobbied senators 29 times on issues pertaining to the environment, according to the federal lobbyist registry. Some of CAPP’s lobbying efforts involved multiple senators at once.

Sixteen individual oil and pipeline companies and groups also lobbied a slew of individual senators from November 2018 to the end of April 2019, reporting a total of 122 lobbying communications with senators, including with more than one senator at a time, according to the registry.

Those companies and groups included Enbridge, Imperial Oil, TransCanada and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association.

The original Bill C-69 would improve government accountability for final decisions

The Alberta government and the oil and gas industry have also criticized Bill C-69 for allowing political discretion when it comes to making final decisions about large projects.

But Gibson pointed out that Cabinet decision-making is already “veiled from public view.” The impact assessment act is stronger than previous legislation because it sets out specific criteria for making final decisions about major projects, including consideration of the impact on Indigenous peoples, he noted.

The new legislation would compel Cabinet to provide reasons for its decisions and justify them while currently those reasons are “just a black box,” Gibson said.

“Because there’s this broad suite of things you have to look at, and because there have to be reasons set out, there is more control of the political discretion than there is in the current act and there was in the previous 1995 one.”

Harper’s environmental assessment rules ‘did not work to deliver approvals’

Yet another criticism is that Bill C-69 will slow approvals for pipeline and oil and gas projects.

But legislation introduced by the Harper government has not resulted in timely approvals for projects such as the Northern Gateway or Trans Mountain pipelines, Olszynski and Gibson both noted.

Harper’s environmental assessment legislation was broken in the sense that it gave approvals, “but they weren’t credible approvals,” Gibson noted.

“CEAA did not work to deliver approvals and shovels in the ground for major projects. The assessment process from 2012 approved Northern Gateway and approved Trans Mountain. But those approvals were not sustainable. They failed before the courts.”

“One of the objectives of the new legislation was to have more credible process that would lead to decisions that were less likely to fail in the longer haul before the courts.”

Bill C-69 sets timelines for project decisions  — a maximum of 300 days for smaller projects with fewer assessment requirements and 600 days for larger projects, down from the current 730 days.

Bill C-69 would keep Harper-era rule to scrutinize only Canada’s largest projects

Olszynski calls the unamended bill a “marginal” improvement over existing legislation. One of his main concerns is that Bill C-69 does not restore the pre-Harper era rules about which projects merit federal environmental assessment because it applies only to major projects.

Before 2012, about 3,000 environmental assessments a year were conducted at the federal level, ranging from screenings to far more intensive panel reviews.

“We’ve just had this massive deregulation on the landscape,” Olszynski said.

“You’ve essentially put a black box over 98 per cent of the activity that you used to know about. That’s what we lost. You’ve lost that understanding. . . Post 2012, the federal government only knows about the biggest projects.”

Olszynksi said while individual large projects are important “it’s the cumulative effect of all those smaller projects that are as important, if not more important, if you’re really interested in managing landscapes and managing ecosystems.”

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As President Obama heads to the Arctic to discuss climate change, just mere weeks after approving Shell Oil’s bid to drill for oil in the treacherous Chukchi Sea, a very different group is sounding the alarm over the dangers of a warming climate. That group, surprisingly, is Wall Street bankers.

Citibank has released a new report showing that taking action now against the growing threat of climate change would save an astonishing $1.8 trillion by the year 2040. Conversely, the report says that if no action is taken, the economy will lose as much as $44 trillion during that same time period.

As Think Progress points out, the Citibank report takes into account the potential lost revenue from leaving resources in the ground — including 80% of coal reserves, half of the world’s gas reserves, and a third of global oil reserves — and still concludes that the global economy would see a net gain.

This report offers a very stark contrast to the typical talking point that we hear as to why we can’t take action on climate change — that action would simply cost too much. 

But this is not the first time that financial leaders have warned about the financial dangers of climate change.

Earlier this summer, a group of current and former Wall Street executives and former U.S. Treasury Secretaries warned that a 2 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures could result in property losses in the state of Florida totaling $23 billion by the middle of this century. On top of the economic losses from property being underwater, the Southeast would also begin to see an alarming rise in yearly deaths due to extreme heat, with some estimates putting the yearly death toll as high as 35,000 people a year.  Agricultural losses could be as high as 20% of current yield.

If Wall Street understands the threat of climate change, even if only in terms of dollars, then this begs the question as to why they continue to fund climate change denying politicians.

Since 2014, Wall Street banks, real estate firms, and insurance companies — all industries that have expressed enormous concern over the financial threat of climate change — have poured an astonishing $507 million into political campaigns and lobbying activities.  62% of this money went to Republicans.

The reason that Party split is significant is because we have more climate change-denying members of the House and Senate then at any other point in time, and nearly every single one of them are members of the Republican Party.  According to an analysis by Think Progress, 53% of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives deny that climate change is real, and 70% of Republicans in the Senate refuse to admit that climate change is real.

If they want to be taken seriously, and if they want their financial concerns addressed by politicians, then Wall Street bankers need to immediately stop the flow of corporate campaign cash that is going to climate change deniers. As long as those people hold seats of power in Washington, D.C., then we will continue to see action stalled year after year.

Image source – Huffington Post UK.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

1. Bill C-13, ‘Cyberbulling’ Legislation. Introduced under the thinly disguised banner of anti-cyberbulling measures, the new bill will amend key parts of the criminal code in order to extend police power—streamlining the process of obtaining warrants to intercept private communications, enabling the tracking of individuals if a crime is suspected, and expanding wiretapping from telephone data to any digital activity. In short, bullying tragedies are being exploited to push through previously struck down legislation (such as Bill-30), that will force Internet Service Providers to surrender our personal information to government agencies with absolutely no civilian oversight.

2. Bill C-56, The Combating Counterfeit Products Act. Championed as a measure to protect intellectual property, closer scrutiny reveals that the bill is but an attempt to push the extensively discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—an agreement rejected by EU member countries for its invasiveness—in through the backdoor. Attempting to cover everything from pharmaceuticals to art, the bill would legislate new invasive border measures including seizure powers without court oversight in instances where a government official ‘reasonably’ believes there may be some risk to a dangerously flexible conceptualisation of ‘public safety.’

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When Stephen Harper was first elected Prime Minister in 2006, he promised to bring a new era of accountability to Ottawa. Harper and the Conservatives swept to power on a wave of popular indignation over the Liberal sponsorship scandal, arriving in Ottawa with talk of ending the elite impunity that had taken hold after the long rule of “Canada’s natural governing party.”

Harper announced his intentions in a 2005 speech: “We must clean up corruption and lift the veils of secrecy that allow it to flourish. We must do nothing less than replace the culture of entitlement with the culture of accountability.”

Eight years later, with a growing expenses scandal in the Senate prompting the resignation of Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright and forcing senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin out of the Conservative caucus, the culture of accountability appears to be slow in taking hold.

The specter of unelected Conservative senators using their position for personal financial gain is particularly damaging, since Senate reform has long been a key component of the Conservative plan to clean up Ottawa.

There has rarely been a better argument for reforming the Senate than Mike Duffy’s confusion about what “primary residence” means, despite his life-long career in journalism and a government job that requires him to keep a close eye on the details of proposed legislation. A consummate Ottawa insider, Duffy has also confirmed fears that official “Senate business” occasionally includes campaigning and fundraising for Conservative candidates at public expense.

In other words, the Duffy affair is a classic example of Conservatives committing the very misdeeds they promised to clean up: unelected government officials using public funds to promote both individual and partisan interests.

But as the scandal continues to unravel, there are signs that the rot goes deeper than improperly claimed expenses. In particular, how could a Prime Minister notorious for micromanagement not know about Duffy receiving a $90,000 personal bailout from Nigel Wright, a chief of staff renowned for his political savvy?

This is precisely the question that the Prime Minister should face from the Opposition during Question Period, and from the media in an open and unscripted press conference. But that’s exactly what isn’t happening.

Harper was not present during Question Period on Monday, met with his caucus on Tuesday, and is set to fly to Latin America today—in the midst of a serious scandal that calls the federal government’s integrity into question.  

When Harper did find the time to address the scandal during a televised speech to the Conservative caucus last Tuesday, he failed to provide any new details. Instead, he tried to divert attention away from his office by praising the government’s efforts in creating “one of the most accountable and transparent systems of governance in the entire world.”

If that is indeed the case, Harper chose a strange way of illustrating Canada’s enviable transparency when he declined to take questions from journalists after the speech. Preferring to exit to the sound of partisan applause rather than face media scrutiny, Harper demonstrated precisely why his government continues to suffer from a serious accountability gap.

Since taking office, Harper’s media appearances have resembled a tightly managed public relations campaign. He ensures that the government always appears on brand and on message, and too many questions from journalists tend to threaten the script. With Harper’s accountability at stake in the Senate expenses scandal, his conduct with the media—the very institution charged with holding governments accountable—should be center stage.

Rabble.ca editor Derrick O’Keefe put it best: “This government’s relationship with the media is a scandal in its own right.” But it doesn’t stop there.

When a 2012 report on freedom and access to information by the Centre for Law and Democracy put Canada at 55th place globally, the Conservative government responded by dismissing the report as inaccurate—5 months after it was released. The late response gave extra credibility to the report’s findings, which cite unjustifiable government delays in releasing documents as one of the most common strategies used to suppress access to information.

If the Conservatives are guilty of withholding information, they’ve also engaged in the opposite tactic: the use of omnibus information-overload to push through legislation that would otherwise encounter serious opposition. In 2012, the Conservatives passed two omnibus bills of over 400 pages each, packed with provisions that gutted environmental protections and made major changes to employment insurance and Old Age Security benefits.

With so many unrelated changes packed into one massive bill, it’s nearly impossible for the public to grasp the full scope of the legislation before it passes.

None of this sounds like the behavior of one of the world’s most transparent and accountable governments. Whether or not Harper faces further political fallout from the Senate expenses scandal, his government will continue to do its work as far from democratic oversight as possible.

A genuine culture of accountability means more than government officials resigning when they get caught. 

Image Credit: mikeduffy.ca

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