Have the public and government abandoned the environment file?

• Author: MacKinnon, Donald

Donald MacKinnon represents Winsloe-West Royalty in the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island. He was appointed Minister of Development in August of 1998. This paper was presented to the 37th Canadian Regional Conference of the CPA held in Toronto from July 18-24, 1998.

This article looks at various environmental issues in Prince Edward Island and the rest of Canada and comes to the conclusion that legislators and parliamentarians must not permit continued abandonment of the environmental file.

Have the Public and Government abandoned the environmental file? For the most part, I think the answer to this question is YES; particularly if we define "abandonment" as including: the withdrawal of financial, technical and moral support from the commitments of previous governments, and governments in waiting; and the relaxed sense of urgency on some environmental issues, often in the face of a preponderence of scientific evidence. One example of an environmental issue meeting this definition is that of climate change, more commonly known as global warming.

In 1988, Canada hosted and sponsored the first international Conference on Climate Change that concluded, "Humanity is conducting a vast unintended, uncontrolled globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences are second only to global nuclear war!"

In 1993, the federal government in waiting, made a series of "green promises" one of which was a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2005. At the Kyoto Conference last year, our government agreed to undertake a reduction in emissions to a mere 6% below 1990 levels by the year 2010. Today, unfortunately, identifying climate change as a problem and doing something about it, are two very different propositions.

To my mind, this delay of action and even reversal of previous commitments constitutes abandonment of the Climate Change File. Until very recently, environmental indifference and lack of political will was also the standard as successive Prince Edward Island governments undertook a number of studies related to land use and environmental issues, only to have them sit on the shelf while the province developed in an ad hoc fashion, seriously limiting future options and placing the health and economic well-being of Islanders at risk.

As a result, public interest in the Environmental File increased dramatically for a number of specific reasons:

* the rapid expansion of the potato industry

* increased soil erosion

* accelerated land clearing and clearcutting of forests, and

* increased pesticide use and the resultant conflicts between agricultural producers and their non-farming neighbours.

In 1996, former PEI Premier Catherine Callbeck's Speech...