Calls begin for a national inquiry into Harper damage
Never mind mandate letters — what Canada urgently needs now is a national inquiry to repair key pieces of federal environmental legislation such as the Fisheries Act and environmental assessments act, David McRobert, a former senior lawyer with the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, said in an interview with National Observer.
The “unravelling” of the federal legislation under the Stephen Harper government has been “devastating," McRobert added. “Without legislative change, reversing what the Harper government did on the fisheries act habitat provisions, it’s hard to be optimistic that we’re actually going to see increased protection.”
West Coast Environmental Law detailed the changes to environmental legislation the Harper government made in a document released last year and titled Canada’s Track Record on Environmental Laws 2011-2015.
The changes included replacing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act with weaker legislation, scrapping over 3,000 environmental reviews in the process; gutting the Fisheries Act by weakening fish habitat protection, removing protection for most non-commercial fish species and broadening the government’s powers to allow harm to fish and fish habitat.
Other key changes included handing environmental oversight of major energy and pipeline projects to the National Energy Board; and lifting legal protection to over 99 per cent of Canada’s lakes and rivers by changing the Navigable Waters Protection Act to, tellingly, the "Navigation Protection Act"— shifting the focus of the law away from protecting water to protecting transport.
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