The House was in session, after dark, grinding through C-38, the Lobbyists’ Bill. Drafted in secret, frog-marched on closure, its provisions hidden from voters in the last campaign, the bill reads like it was ghostwritten at the Calgary Petroleum Club. It puts Canada dead last among G8 countries in environmental protection. C-38 is so outrageous Conservative MPs were not permitted to read it beforehand in caucus.
Galleries sat empty. Collars wilted in the humidity. The speaker was Michelle Rempel, first-term Conservative MP from Calgary. It was a hot, miserable night, but Rempel found the energy to mix her metaphors. “We now have the opportunity,” she enthused, “to set the ball in motion to cement Canada’s golden age on the world stage for years to come.”
This is no cement ball; not a golden age. This is The Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s testament to the venality of lobbying. He wrote his fictional account of a sleazy Washington land deal in 1873 but the dateline could read Ottawa, 2012: “Sunset came, and still the fight went on; the gas was lit, the crowd in the galleries began to thin, but the contest continued; the crowd returned, by-and-by, with hunger and thirst appeased, and aggravated the hungry and thirsty House by looking contented and comfortable; but still the wrangle lost nothing of its bitterness. Recesses were moved plaintively by the opposition, and invariably voted down by the governing army…debate had dwindled to a mere vapouring of dull speakers, and now and then a brief quarrel over a point of order….”
This day the dullness of speakers was at least comic. One MP paraphrased Churchill, badly. “This is democracy in its finest hour,” said Winnipeg Conservative Shelly Glover, “because the government is defending democracy.”
There was dullness in the press, too.
One Postmedia account dismissed opposition protests as “a Parliamentary pajama party”; The Canadian Press attempted an examination of how filibustering MPs would make it to the bathroom; a Toronto Sun columnist explained debate had to be forced short because “the Greek elections are in a week”; the Saint John Telegraph-Journal sighed, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
C-38 is a gift for oil and gas lobbyists.
It repeals 20 years of environmental case law; it eliminates some 90 per cent of all federal environmental assessments, by one estimate; it tilts the rules for industry where studies are unavoidable; it deliberately fails to define “significant effect” of industrial projects. Might that be, say, a tailings pond in a lake? An open pit mine on a trout stream? “That omission is deliberate,” one lawyer told me. “Once you define ‘significant effect,’ you have to start saying ‘no.’ ”
The Lobbyists’ Bill decrees eco-studies on mega-projects must end in two years. Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver complains of the time it takes to license proposals, like the six years spent to approve Alberta’s Joslyn North oilsands mine—a project so massive it straddles two townships. “Egregious,” Oliver called it. Yet records show actual public hearings on Joslyn North lasted only three weeks; it took Oliver’s own government two years just to appoint a joint review panel, and the developer another 18 months to write its environmental assessment.
No one can explain what vexing environmental problem C-38 aims to solve. One federal study rated Canada as second only to Chile with the fewest environmental barriers to investment—and that was before C-38 (see Comparative Analysis of Impacts on Competitiveness of Environmental Assessment Requirements, Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, September 2000).
Nor do oil and gas companies suffer barriers to profit. They pay less tax in Canada than they do in the U.S., Germany or France—and lower rates here than they have since WWII. Imperial Oil today pays proportionately less tax than it did in 1950, though profits rose 53 per cent last year—$3.37-billion. Imperial’s corporate budget now exceeds the national accounts of 84 countries in the United Nations.
Who wrote C-38?
The authorship is anonymous, though it is worth noting Lobbyist Registry records show Cabinet members had 81 meetings with oil and gas lobbyists before the bill was introduced. The meetings were private. Joe Oliver hosted lobbyists 44 times. Asked once who complained about environmental assessments, Oliver told a reporter: “When I was in China – and I’ve been there a couple of times, once with the prime minister, we heard that there was a tremendous interest on the part of Chinese investors in Canadian projects.…However, they were concerned about the delays they have seen.”
So, Parliament repealed its own environmental practices to please Sinopec directors in Beijing.
And they did it after dark, under threat of closure, grasping for appropriate metaphors.
It’s no golden age for Canada, and perhaps not even a gilded one. It is like a cement ball—let’s go with that one.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Tom Korski
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