Canada guts environmental legislation

I mailed this letter to Mr. Harper on June 7 with copies to Ministers Ashfield and Kent. June 7, 2012 The Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6 Dear Mr. Harper: RE: BILL C-38 Have you any idea how badly the changes to the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the other changes to environmental legislation, will affect my business? My company and the hundreds of other environmental consulting firms in Canada will have hardly any work if these changes proceed. Developers will have no need to hire biologists to see that their projects are designed to mitigate environmental impacts. Of course, I would gladly suffer lost clients and business if the environment would still be protected, but it will not. You are well aware of the inter-linkages of environmental legislation: • The Fisheries Act is a “trigger” the invokes the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act • When invoked, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act ensures consideration of all components of the environment, including archaeological sites and other cultural heritage values. • Protecting fish also protects water- and riparian-associated wildlife and endangered species. I started working in this business in 1972, before there was even an environmental impact assessment policy, let alone an Act. I spent most of my career with Environment Canada and have two awards from that Department for meritorious service and a letter of congratulations upon my retirement signed by one of your Prime Minister predecessors. No one thinks these Acts can’t use a little tweaking to improve fairness and efficiency; but this is too much. Please stop it. Sincerely, Lee E. Harding, PhD, RPBio President, owner and Chief Scientist cc: The Hon. Keith Ashfield, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans The Hon. Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment

Ottawa to keep records on Canadians' border crossings for the American government

Published in the Globe and Mail, December 2011:
Re: "How Ottawa will track who’s coming, who’s going and where” December 8, 2011, p. A10:

So, Ottawa will keep a record of every time I drive to Oregon to visit my Mom or my plane stops in Texas on the way to a business meeting in South America, but cancelled the long-form census and doesn’t want to know if I own a rifle?


Background: the Conservative government cancelled the mandatory long-form census in 2011, and the long-gun (i.e., rifles and shotguns) registry, a key part of Canada's gun law,in February 2012.

Coquitlam endorses pesticide bay bylaw

Published in the Coquitlam Now, February 24, 2012

Councillor O’Neill grossly distorts the precautionary principle and disingenuously ignores the huge body of scientific knowledge of cosmetic pesticides. The precautionary principle guides us to avoid chemicals that are known to be dangerous without waiting for overwhelming proof that they sicken people and pets in our own city, or in our yards. The toxicity of these chemicals is known in minute detail; as a former Environment Canada toxicologist, I have produced some of the literature myself. While modern pesticides are not as toxic or persistent as older, banned ones, they are still toxic or they would not work. Used as directed, they still kill beneficial, non-target organisms, such as earthworms. The Health Canada approvals only apply when used as prescribed, but many people use too much, or too often, or to kill plants or animals not prescribed on the labels. Pesticides can drift into a neighbour’s yard, or be tracked into the house by pets and people. Some people and pets are more sensitive than average, and can become sick even when a pesticide is used as directed. There are cheap and easy alternatives, such as a weed puller for dandelions and non-pesticide treatments for fungus on the roses or weevils on the rhododendrons. We should keep cosmetic chemicals out of our city because we don’t need them for healthy yards and gardens and because however benign they are, they still kill.

Sandhills, Bison, Pronghorns and Pipelines

In expressing angst about attacks on the proposed Keystone pipeline (Pipeline Shutdown, Nathan Vanderlippe and Carrie Tait, Globe and Mail, November 11, 2011, p. B1), could you not at least mention the environmental values that it threatens? Maybe even run a photo of it, instead of protesters in Washington? The Nebraska Sandhills are an iconic landscape “where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play”, and a unique ecozone. In 2010, I had a chance to visit the Sandhills for the first time. My brother and I parked the car many times and just walked out across the prairie. We watched hawks hunt prairie dogs under a sky that went on forever, saw pronghorn antelope gather at a waterhole, and were unnerved by a glowering bison bull moving between his herd and us. There is nowhere else on Earth where one can see this wildlife community in an undisturbed, natural environment. It is worth protecting.

Doing business with undemocratic regimes

Geoffrey York wrote in The high cost of doing business with undemocratic regimes (Folio, Globe and Mail, March 21, 2011) what a great many Canadians have been saying privately for a long time. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where Human Rights Watch estimated in 2009 that 200,000 women and girls had been raped since 1998, as Mr. York stated, is Canada’s top African investment portfolio at $3.34 billion. Putting retirement savings into ethical business funds as my wife and I do is only part of the solution. Canada should introduce regulations to make sure that our companies do not engage in practices abroad that would be illegal here, and compel them to disclose tax and revenue paid to foreign governments , as the USA has done in the recently-passed Dodd-Frank bill.

The spiralling food security crisis

“The spiralling food security crisis” (Celebrities raise awareness of world agricultural crisis” Jessica Leeder, Globe and Mail, March 16, 2011) may be puzzling policy-makers and governments, but not researchers. Sixteen years have passed since Lester Brown, an agricultural economist, published “Who will feed China?” In it, he showed that agricultural production could not rise in the future nearly as much as it had in the previous 50 years because the easy gains from irrigation and mass production of fertilizer had already been realized, there is no more good agricultural land, and no more water. He showed that fish production in the world’s oceans had peaked at about 100 millions tonnes. And he predicted that, with global food production nearly stagnating and population continuing to rise exponentially, the per capita food production would surely decline.

These predictions have come true. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of cropland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha. Fish and shellfish farms have partially offset some of the losses in wild ocean fish production, but at tremendous cost to coastal fisheries and agriculture. Corn and soy crops have increased in Brazil, but at tremendous cost to tropical forest ecosystems and biodiversity. Moreover, much of the increased production is going to feed cars (via ethanol) instead of hungry people. Meanwhile, in 2007 people in 22 countries from Bangladesh to Yemen rioted in the streets because of food price increases. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businesses in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. The government of Madagascar fell in 2009 because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies. The 2011 riots that started “Arab Spring” were but a continuation of this crisis, the roots of which are (a) global population increases, and (b) the failure of developed countries including Canada to focus international policies where it matters: in the stomachs of poor people.

Mammoths live until 3700 years ago

This doesn’t take anything away from “Lost Giants” (Charles Q. Choi, Scientific American, Feburary 2010, p. 21) but megafauna persisted well after 13,700 years ago. In Europe, the dramatic contraction in mammoth range occurred about 12,000 years ago. A mastodon at the Manis Site in Washington was dated to 12,000-11,000 years, and drarf mammoths have been dated to about 3,700 years ago on Wrangel Island, Siberia, and to 7,900 years ago on St. Paul Island, Alaska. The Manis mastodon had a stone point embedded in a rib.