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Federal budget – taking aim at the environment

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In Environment
Mar 30th, 2012
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Moving from regulatory review to regulatory approval
By Kate Harries AWARE Simcoe March 30 2012
Canada’s environment is under attack as never before. It’s not just that we happen to have a land that’s rich in natural resources of every kind. It’s that 21st century technology can extract and destroy at a scale previously unimagined. And the eyes of the world’s markets are on us: they want what we have.
In the budget announced yesterday, Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told the world: Come and get it.

 “This is a colonial vision of the economy as a quarry for foreign interests,” says Marc Lee of the Progressive Economics Forum.
It’s also a vision that exports the value-added employment that comes with refining, processing and manufacturing our raw materials. What Canadians will be left with for the long term are the cleanup costs – or, more likely, the costs of failing to clean up.
The full implications of the Conservative plan won’t be revealed until the Budget Implementation Act is introduced. That’s when we’ll find out just what is to be changed in legislation like the Fisheries Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and a raft of other legal safeguards built up over a century.
But Flaherty has set the stage with new timelines for environmental reviews. For standard environmental assessments the cap will be set at a year, for more complicated panel reviews, at two years. This is the wrong move in a growing and increasingly complex society, where the impacts of our actions become ever more powerful. When the destruction wreaked by a project can last for generations, or forever, it behooves us to think more deeply and act more mindfully. Setting arbitrary limits is also anti-democratic: all Canadians who wish to participate in these hearings should be able to do so, and not be excluded by deadlines.
“We’re moving from a regulatory review system to what is just a regulatory approval system,” Ed Whittingham of the Pembina Institute told the Calgary Herald.
The so-called crackdown on charities is a distraction, aimed at putting environmental groups on the defensive. Those that have charitable status will have to produce a lot more accounting and submit to time-wasting and intrusive audits. 

Budget reaction
PEF A budget that screws the planet for short-term profits 
COC Federal budget bad for people and bad for planet  
CELA Federal Budget Signals Attack on Canada’s Environmental Laws  
Rabble Federal government hides behind budget with changes to environmental assessment  
Suzuki Reckless budget threatens health of the environment and us

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