Most Canadian cities and towns, including those of Ontario, seem to be liberated from wildfire smoke – for now. But the fire season is just beginning. We would all be foolish to become complacent.
Politics being a memory-challenged activity, political debate in Canada’s most populous province has quickly shifted away from the climate crisis.
The Ontario legislature wrapped up for the season last week. NDP and official opposition leader Marit Stiles attempted to use the occasion to nail the Doug Ford government on some of its big failures, including numerous hostile actions on the environment.
The premier was in high-spirited, fighting form. He pushed back with vigour, boasting about his government’s economic, job-creating successes.
The NDP’s Stiles put it to the premier that his “government has really delivered, if you’re a wealthy developer with insider connections. We saw this government prioritize carving up protected greenbelt lands for the benefit of deep-pocketed friends of the Premier and his party, lands that help Ontario mitigate the effects of climate change, lands of ecological significance and crucial farmland.”
READ MORE: Doug Ford denies connection of global warming to unprecedented wildfires
In his response, Ford utterly ignored the question.
He chose to talk instead about Ontario’s record low unemployment and about the massive subsidies his and the Trudeau federal government are paying out to entice Volkswagen to build a massive new electric car battery plant in Ontario.
Ford said it would be “the largest manufacturing plant in the history of Canada”.
The premier also touted his government’s plans to build more hospitals, hire more nurses, and train more doctors.
Taking her cue from her interlocuter, Stiles picked up on the healthcare theme. She pressed the premier on the government’s record on that front since it took office in 2018.
That record includes a severe shortage of primary care facilities and personnel, and a mass exodus of nurses.
Ford’s response was to pivot again, this time back to his own comfort zone: the economy and jobs.
“When the NDP and Liberals were running this province,” Ford said, “They chased 300,000 jobs out of the province. Let’s move forward five years: There’s 670,000 more people working today than there was five years ago.”
A long list of environmentally-hostile measures
Some Ford supporters find all of this bluster and blarney attractive. When the premier had earlier evoked Smokey the Bear to rebuff talk of climate change as a contributing factor to unprecedented forest fires, many of those fans cheered.
“What’s wrong with telling people not to make campfires?” They asked, adding that, of course, Ford, like just about everybody, accepts the deleterious impact of global warming on the forest environment in Ontario and throughout Canada.
Somehow Ford’s record on the environment did not figure much in last year’s election. Media coverage of that campaign, including that of the CBC, didn’t help when it focused almost exclusively on the horserace defined by opinion polls.
For those still beguiled by the Ontario premier’s affable, self-created image of your friendly neighbour who just wants to remind you not to make campfires in the woods, here are some highlights.
- The Ford government ended the former Liberal government’s financial incentives to purchase electric cars,
- The Ontario Conservatives had electric vehicle charging stations removed throughout the province, repealed the previous government’s green energy act.
- They ditched plans to plant tens of millions of trees which would soak up noxious carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
- One of Doug Ford’s environmentally hostile actions forced the government to pay out over $230 million in compensation for broken agreements.
- That was when the Conservative government cancelled over 750 contracts with private-sector renewable power providers. One of those cancellations, with the German wind and solar power company WPD ag, caused a diplomatic row with a valued Canadian ally and world leader in environmental technology.
Ford did not limit his attacks on the environment to measures associated with climate change. Posing as the best-friend-forever of all notional “job-creators,” Ford eliminated environmental assessments for many projects; for those that remained, he severely reduced the opportunities for public participation.
The champion of urban sprawl and paving over the Greenbelt
Ford’s government, from the outset, pressured municipalities to eliminate or soften regulations that prevent urban sprawl. It also targeted the Ontario Endangered Species Act, weakening protections for owls, wolves, turtles and other threatened wildlife. Ford even took on environmental protection systems that had the support of prominent Conservative governments.
In 2020, former Toronto mayor David Crombie resigned as chair of the Ontario government’s Greenbelt Council.
Crombie, who had also served in Brian Mulroney’s federal Progressive Conservative government, was livid at Ford’s repeated end-runs around the local conservation authorities.
Conservation authorities had been set up decades earlier as non-political stewards of wetlands, waterways and other natural habitats in densely populated and highly industrialized southern Ontario.
Following his election victory in 2022 Ford went even further in his efforts to pave and build over precious wetlands and other fragile environments.
His government introduced legislation last November to remove over 7,000 acres of protected land in 15 different areas from Greenbelt protection, and virtually oblige landowners to proceed quickly with the construction of 50,000 new homes on that land.
The Greenbelt is the vulnerable and irreplaceable wooded and wetland area that surrounds Ontario’s most populous, most polluted, and most industrialized zone – a zone which includes the greater Toronto area.
While during its first mandate the Ford government routinely undermined the province’s conservation authorities (some of which are directly responsible to protect the Greenbelt), at the outset of its second term, the Ford team doubled down hard.
It proposed legislation to strip those authorities of most of their powers to regulate and limit development.
Hostility toward action to limit global warming
As for the larger climate change picture – in November 2021, Ontario auditor general (AG) Bonnie Lysyk reported that the Doug Ford government would not even achieve one fifth of the emission reductions it promised to achieve by 2030 if it stays the course.
In 2018, when the Doug Ford government bowed out of the federal carbon tax, it pledged a “made-in-Ontario” emissions-reduction plan. Revealingly, Ford’s folks chose to accentuate the negative by calling their new plan the Cap-and-Trade Cancellation Act.
The Act promised to reduce Ontario’s emissions by 17.6 megatonnes. But the auditor general’s office tells us the province is on track to achieve only a 3.4 megatonne reduction – a gargantuan miss.
The Ontario AG office based its analysis on information provided by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.
In 2019, the AG recommended a series of actions the provincial government would have to take to achieve its emission-reductions goal – recommendations the Ford government accepted.
But, the report concluded that Ford’s folks have only “fully implemented 27 per cent” of the recommendations. They are “working on” a further 18 per cent.
As for the rest, the AG reports that “little progress has been made on 50 per cent of the recommended actions.”
The Ontario environment ministry does not even have an “expected timeframe for presenting an updated climate change plan to cabinet for approval.”
Enough said.
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