I just got back from a trip to Ontario. The leadership over there has some pretty wild ideas. Our province and our regional municipality could learn somethingfrom Ontario.
Very few visitors to Ontario bother with the northern half—225,000 square kilometres of boreal forests, or four Nova Scotias. Ontario’s supreme leader, Dalton “no lips” McGuinty, recently evoked the wild idea of protecting this vast swath of carbon sinks (those trees absorb almost 13 million tonnes of CO2 every year).
But McGuinty didn’t stop there, the wild man. He committed his government to consulting with the 24,000 residents of the area, most of them living in First Nations communities, every step of the way. This includes changes to the Ontario Mining Act requiring early consultation and accommodation with those communities.
Nova Scotia’s been no slouch when it comes to protecting wild lands lately, but our goal of protecting 12 percent of land mass suddenly looks pretty pathetic by comparison. Equally pathetic is our performance as consumers in supporting green energy. Ontario happens to co-host one of the country’s leading private green energy providers, Bullfrog Power, with Alberta (that other environmentaljuggernaut).
Bullfrog uses a demand-side management approach, which means they sell wind- and water-generated power to Ontario’s power grid at exactly the rate their customers use energy in their homes and offices. The customer pays her power bill (at a dollar a day premium) to Bullfrog, which uses the revenue to invest in all that green energy. Budda bing—less demand for coal and other polluting non-renewables. And the consumer gets nothing back but a clean, green conscience.
Bullfrog’s clients include 4,000 homeowners, businesses and government offices. Big banks, municipalities and major publishers have joined the ranks of high-profilecustomers.
Back at home, Nova Scotia Power offered its own green power marketing program in 2002, but we weren’t buying and the program was dropped. The company has since made some worthy investments in renewable energy. But Nova Scotia has meanwhile prevented consumers from buying directly from renewable generators. Looking at how one recent start-up has used social marketing to reshape an industry and give a province a better chance at a low carbon future, you can’t help but wonder what could have been. Anybody out there in our ocean playground seeking a new market niche?
The sad thing is that, in some respects, even Canada’s universal centre, the big sprawling city we love to hate, is handing our ass to us when it comes to certain environmental initiatives. As our province’s capital municipality widens roads, cracks down on four-legged friends, cracks the heads of tree-lovers and invests nothing in active transportation, Toronto is preparing to release a dazzlingly ambitious transit plan. And get this: The plan includes money!
Backing their brainchild with bucks, Toronto’s transit plan will come with its own companion investment strategy. Investments will include expanded commuter rail lines, incentives to pedestrians and cyclists, and ever-controversial road tolls. Wild ideas indeed; mayor David Miller must be anticipating an early retirement. But hats off to him. While our mayor launders his diarrhea-proof Speedo, their guy is risking his political future to do right by the environment.
Another controversy is dividing Toronto on one environmental issue that may give us bragging rights: Waste management. Our leaders have reason to be proud of our waste diversion record (but not too proud as long as much of our waste is “diverted” to poor rural communities and China). Our hipster friends in Hogtown ship almost half a million tonnes of garbage to Michigan each year, and super-sized composting and recycling programs haven’t ended that practice.
Enter the pay-per-size garbage bin, another wild idea. The city rents bins in four convenient sizes. The more garbage you make, the bigger bin you need, the more you pay for it. The revenue pays for more investments in waste diversion.
The simple plan has been criticized for its potential to drive up rents and punish people living in areas of urban density, its unfair punishment of large families, even its impingement on the “right to litter.” All but the latter are reasonable concerns and the bugs still need to be worked out. But at least the city councillors in the Big Smoke are willing to consider creating pollution taxes that give people personal reasons to reduce their ecological footprint.
It’s good to be home, though. Despite Ontario’s wild ideas, this feels like a wilder place, more open and spacious and green. I just hope our leadership doesn’t succumb to the other kinds of wild ideas, like mining for uranium again, because boy did that solve our poverty problems last time, and twinning highways because what the hell else can you do with a hundred million bucks? These are the ideas being whispered in our leaders’ ears by dingbats with dollar signs for eyeballs.
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2008.
Haven’t had enough coffee yet, but it appears you may be supporting Ontario’s measures regarding protection of the boreal forest. Please take careful note that McGuinty said “protect” regarding this area and in the same breath said “develop”.Essentially, this is all to insure that the prospective protected area will be developed regardless of the use of the term “sustainable.” There is no consideration for the desire to just leave the area the hell alone. This is accompanied by other words like “consultation” when speaking of Native land rights issues. As we have found out, whether you are Native or a private land owner, you will not be included in consultation unless you agree to development. You have no right to say “no” to development, sustainable or otherwise.Case in point: Ontario’s review of the Ontario Mining Act, a 145 year old provincial legislation that provides mining interests the right to free access to private and crown land for staking and exploration. This piece of antiquity trumps property rights (owners have only surface rights unless you hold the original deed to the property with the patent rights included, as granted by the Emperess Of Ireland herself, Queen Victoria) and native land rights.Neither the miners, natives, nor private land owners are pleased with this bit of rushed play acting in the guise of review. When some interest wishes to “develop” native land, or private land, the province now wants to have meaningful consultation initiated, but no one is sure WHO has to do the consulting: the province? The miners? The exploration companies?. No mention of Crown land. (Crown land, don’t forget, belongs to the people, not the province or the Feds.) The province says that consultation is up to the miners and the miners say it’s up to the province and the province responds that native and certain issues, such as uranium, are in the Fed’s court and the Fed’s are too busy posturing for an election and bumping up their stock portfolios.The reason that the miners don’t want to consult is that they fear claim jumping. Currently an exploration interest is must give property owners scant hours notice before they can come in and remove 1000 tons of material in order to assess whether it’s worth continuing to trash your property. There is no obligation to repair the damage done. Notification can consist of dropping a letter in the mail hours ahead of commencement of exploration activities. They could be on your land doing the do long before the letter arrives notifying you of their intent.In our personal case, uranium is the sticky issue. To date, 23 Ontario municipalities have solicited the Ontario Provincial Government for a moratorium on uranium exploration in Eastern Ontario and the province has refused to respond. We don’t want to have our two drinking aquifers punctured with exploration holes (as they have bee for forty years) without obligation to fill them, let alone redirect trout streams and reclassify lakes to amass piles of tailings on the surface in concentrated forms where it has no business existing. NO ONE IN THIS COUNTRY HAS REPRESENTATION IN ANY GOVERNMENT ORGAN. NO ONE BUT CORPORATIONS WITH MONEY.Your dingbats are no better of worse than ours. It’s all for money and it’s at the expense of all species, let alone human.I say we install 6 sets of stocks outside every provincial and territorial legislature as well as on Parliament Hill. A few hours in the stocks and a bit of berating from the public would go nicely with these sociopathic megalomaniacs. And while we’re at it, let’s institute a policy of spanking for these reprehensible greed mongers.Terry TuftsRobertsville, ON