Globe and Mail Update March 6, 2008

OTTAWA — Successive Canadian governments have paid lip service to keeping international environment agreements and greening their own operations but little progress is actually being made, Canada’s Environment Commissioner said in a scathing report released Thursday.

The 2008 Status Report of Commissioner Ron Thompson revisits 14 key environmental concerns that were the subjects of previous studies and finds that corrective action has been unsatisfactory in nine of those areas.

“The government did not follow through on its own commitments to strengthen the protection of the environment,” said Mr. Thompson.

“I believe that the federal government should lead by example, both in terms of how environmental issues are managed and in terms of greening its own operations.” But he said, his findings “paint a disappointing picture.”

A major concern highlighted by Mr. Thompson is the lack of commitment to protect Canada’s most threatened ecosystems and species at risk.

For instance, after agreeing more than 20 years ago that 17 environmentally degraded areas around the Great Lakes had to be cleaned, only two locations have been removed from that list – and it is unclear who is responsible for carrying out the remedial action on the remainder, who will pay for it, and what time frames are anticipated.

But it is the inability of federal departments to follow through on the government’s own directives that are perhaps most indicative of the inattentive attitude on the part of government that the Commissioner repeatedly alludes to in his report.

While the federal cabinet decreed 17 years ago that all new policies and programs must be assessed to determine their impact on the environment, the Commissioner found that only three of 12 departments were fully complying.

In 1995, the government decided that, as one of Canada’s largest employers, purchasers and landowners, it could become an environmental leader by purchasing energy efficient, non-toxic and recycled products. The Commissioner’s report says targets for achieving that goal remain non-specific and optional.

And while Canada has signed more than 100 international environmental agreements over the years, the Kyoto Protocol among them, there is little information available on what the government has been expected to achieve – and what progress is actually being made.

On a positive note, says the report, Environment Canada and Health Canada have completed assessments of all but three of 69 priority chemicals identified a decade ago as being potentially toxic to humans – 42 of those were declared toxic and control measures have been put in place.

The government has also done an adequate job of managing pesticides and cleaning up contaminated sites within its jurisdiction. The military is making progress in identifying chemical and biological weapons as well as unexploded ordnance in ocean dumpsites.

And, as a follow-up to a 2005 recommendation of the Environmental Commissioner, the Natural Resources department is taking steps to ensure that there is adequate insurance to compensate people adversely affected by an incident at a nuclear plant.

But there are far more recommendations emanating from previous reports that seem to have been ignored or tackled only half-heartedly – that despite the fact that the departments in almost every case have agreed with the criticisms and made commitments to rectify identified problems.

In looking at Canada’s success in meeting international environmental agreements, for instance, the Commissioner examined 20 agreements in four departments to determine whether there was enough information available for parliamentarians and other interested Canadians to judge whether the commitments were being met. The Commissioner found that “the availability and fairness of the information remain uneven” and there is no government-wide plan for ensuring progress in the future.

And, with regard to the directive that environmental assessments must accompany new programs and policies, the report says there is no mechanism to hold departments accountable when the directive is ignored, “nor did we find evidence that the Privy Council Office challenged departments or agencies on their application of the directive when they have submitted proposals to Cabinet.”

This article was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 and is filed under Canadian Issues and Politics, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.