Government policy at the root of long-standing drinking water problems, lawyer Julie Abouchar says
‘Small and Aboriginal Communities: Solutions that fit’ is one of themes of a Canadian Water Network conference taking place in Toronto, beginning March 10. (sl_photo/Shutterstock)
Governments, not charities, need to provide long-term solutions to the problem of unsafe drinking water in First Nations, says lawyer Julie Abouchar.
Abouchar, who served as assistant commission counsel at the Walkerton Inquiry, is one of the speakers tackling the issue of unsafe water in First Nations at the Canadian Water Network’s conference beginning Tuesday in Ottawa.
Charitable donations recently helped fund running water systems for 20 homes in Pikangikum First Nation, a fly-in First Nation in northwestern Ontario. A non-profit group has approached Neskantaga First Nation, also in Ontario’s remote north, to offer water aid there.
Lawyer Julie Abouchar says government policy changes are needed to resolve problems with safe drinking water in First Nations communities. (Canadian Water Network)
“Any effort made to improve the situation is positive,” Abouchar said of the charitable work. “I worry that those solutions may not be long-term solutions.”
The first step toward those long-term solutions is a conversation between policy makers in Ottawa and individual First Nations about what would work best in their communities.
Nearly half of the 133 First Nations in Ontario currently have boil water advisories, and it has been more than ten years since ten First Nations in northwestern Ontario had safe drinking water.
In 2013, the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act provided a legislative framework to ensure drinking water on reserves met the same standards as those in the rest of Canada, but there are still no regulations under the act, Abouchar said.
“I think it’s time to take a pause and hear what First Nations want,” she said.
The desire by charitable groups to solve basic human rights issues is understandable, Abouchar said, “but without changing the underlying policies and approaches, you probably shouldn’t expect a different outcome.” SOURCE
Ontario’s transportation minister wants the federal government to step up rail safety after the third CN derailment in the province in less than a month.
Steven Del Duca said he will contact federal Transportation Minister Lisa Raitt, CN and CP this week to reiterate the Liberal government’s “serious concerns with respect to ensuring our railways are safe.”
As of Monday morning, crews were still battling the blaze from the latest derailment. Authorities say a train with 38 cars carrying crude oil from Alberta went off the tracks early Saturday near the village of Gogama, Ont., about 150 km south of Timmins.
Police said as many as five cars broke through the ice and into the Makami River, prompting health officials to advise Mattagami First Nation residents to avoid drinking the water. Nearby residents were also warned over the weekend to stay inside to avoid smoke inhalation.
Glen Thibeault: The federal government, responsible for rail safety, must do more to protect our communities and the environment
Raitt responded to Del Duca in a statement saying she’s “very concerned” with the spike in derailments.
“Should non-compliances be found, the company will face the full force of the law,” she said.
Ontario environment ministry officials are investigating the latest wreck and possible water contamination.
The crash is similar to the Feb. 14 derailment north of Gogama in which 29 cars went off the tracks and spilled crude oil.
Transportation Safety Board (TSB) investigators found the crude was being transported in Class 111A tank cars — the same tank cars that were upgraded since the derailment disaster in Lac-Megantic, Que., on July 6, 2013, that killed 47 people.
In an interim report, the TSB says the upgraded cars still fail to withstand derailments.
“The TSB has been calling for tougher standards for Class 111 tank cars for several years,” chief operating officer Jean L. Laporte said. “Here is yet another example of tank cars being breached and we once again urge Transport Canada to expedite the introduction of enhanced protection standards to reduce the risk of product loss when these cars are involved in accidents.” SOURCE
Pressure is growing. A relentless climate movement is starting to win big, unprecedented victories around the world, victories which are quickly reshaping the consensus view.
Pisonia with acidification graph 2009, Judy Watson, acrylic and chinagraph pencil on canvas, 214.5 x 191.5 cm
In the third piece in the Guardian’s major series on climate change, Bill McKibben describes how relentless climate movements have shifted the advantage towards fossil fuel resistance for the first time in 25 years. But he argues triumph is not certain – we must not rest till the industry is forced to keep the carbon in the ground.
By Bill McKibben, reposted from The Guardian, Mar 9, 2015
The official view: all eyes are on Paris, where negotiators will meet in December for a climate conference that will be described as “the most important diplomatic gathering ever” and “a last chance for humanity.” Heads of state will jet in, tense closed-door meetings will be held, newspapers will report that negotiations are near a breaking point, and at the last minute some kind of agreement will emerge, hailed as “a start for serious action”.
The actual story: what happens at Paris will be, at best, one small part of the climate story, one more skirmish in the long, hard-fought road to climate sanity. What comes before and after will count more. And to the extent Paris matters, its success will depend not on the character of our leaders but on how much a resurgent climate movement has softened up the fossil fuel industry, and how much pressure the politicians feel to deliver something.
The good news is, that pressure is growing. In fact, that relentless climate movement is starting to win big, unprecedented victories around the world, victories which are quickly reshaping the consensus view – including among investors – about how fast a clean energy future could come. It’s a movement grounded in the streets and reaching for the photovoltaic rooftops, and its thinking can be easily summarised in a mantra: Fossil freeze. Solar thaw. Keep it in the ground.
Triumph is not certain – in fact, as the steadily rising toll of floods and droughts and melting glaciers makes clear, major losses are guaranteed. But for the first time in the quarter-century since global warming became a major public issue the advantage in this struggle has begun to tilt away from the Exxons and the BPs and towards the ragtag and spread-out fossil fuel resistance, which is led by indigenous people, young people, people breathing the impossible air in front-line communities. The fight won’t wait for Paris – the fight is on every day, and on every continent.
Consider, first, the fossil freeze
On 24 February, Barack Obama vetoed Congressional attempts to force the construction of the Keystone pipeline – a proposed pipeline to transport oil from Alberta in Canada to refineries on the US gulf coast. Four years ago, a poll of DC energy insiders found that 91% thought Transcanada (the Canadian company that wants to build the pipeline) would quickly and easily acquire the permit for the pipeline; the company was so confident that they mowed the strip they were about to dig up across the centre of the country. But that easily-explained arrogance (no infrastructure project like this had ever been stopped before) ran into a indefatigable band of Native Americans, farmers, and climate scientists and activists, who in record numbers went to jail, filed public comments, and generally refused to buckle. Already their pressure has forced the cancellation of $17bn in new Canadian tar sands projects, and another big project was shelved last month. The oil industry continues to press for Keystone, offering increasingly frantic promises of good behaviour on carbon from Canada if only they’re allowed to build this one last pipe. Those last-minute bargains could still save the day for the tar sands—so far the president has merely rejected Congressional efforts to force his hand, not ruled on the permit itself. But if Obama says no later this winter, it will be a landmark moment.
Artist Judy Watson, Bloom 2009 pigment, ink, pastel and acrylic on canvas 217.5 x 148 cm
And in any event, the bigger effect has been to embolden opponents of every kind of carbon-intensive new infrastructure. Tar sands pipelines across Canada are now hopelessly snarled by First Nations activists. Valiant local organisers in upstate New York forced the powerful governor, Andrew Cuomo, to ban fracking – a ban that has now spread to Scotland and Wales, with much of England up in arms as well. You can’t frack in France, and Tasmania just added its own moratorium. In the Algerian Sahara thousands are waging a relentless battleagainst the technology, and their arguments about wasting water are resonating loudly in California as well, where governor Jerry Brown is under intense pressure as his state’s record drought deepens.
Oil and gas – but also coal. Two years ago, on the west coast of the US, developers proposed building six giant coal ports. As America began cutting its use of coal, they planned on essentially shipping Wyoming’s Powder river basin – a huge coal deposit and site of the world’s largest coal mine – to China for easy combustion. So far, though, campaigners have forced cancellation of four of the ports, and theother two are on the ropes.
In Australia, which also boasts massive coal deposits, plans for the world’s largest mine in the Galilee Valley are foundering after the ruling party suffered a massive defeat in Queensland polls, throwing government subsidies for the mine into question. The fight comes with huge international implications – its Indian owners want to ship the coal back to the subcontinent where the new government has planned to double coal consumption. But fresh data shows the subcontinent with the world’s dirtiest air, and one Indian in six dying of indoor and outdoor air pollution –internal resistance to more coal is rising fast, just as in China.
In Sompeta, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, for instance, a six-year campaign(which left two activists dead from police gunfire) has now blocked a huge thermal coal plant. The fossil fuel resistance, like the fossil fuel industry, is protean and sprawling – and each win reverberates for decades to come, because that’s how long pipelines and coal mines are built to last. Wins in 2015 shift the landscape in 2055. That’s why, if politicians want to lead, they need to stop new fossil fuel development now. A piece of paper explaining what should happen 20 years from now is easier for them to sell, but atmospheric chemistry is unimpressed. Hilary Clinton, to name one example, says the right things about the dangers of climate change, but she’s backed Keystone from the start – a pointless combination.
With the help of feckless politicians the world around the industry still wins its share of fights too – the rapid spread of fracking across the Dakotas and Texas has boosted Obama’s US past the Saudis and Russians to become the world’s largest oil and gas producer, for instance. Fighting one pipeline at a time, the industry will eventually prevail.
That’s why the climate movement has left its usual defensive crouch and started playing offense too, trying to freeze the pipeline of capital that sustains the industry. The campaign to force institutions to sell their fossil fuel stocks – which an Oxford study described as the fastest growing divestment campaign ever – has rolled up significant victories. Universities from Stanford to Sydney have started offloading their shares. At first the industry feigned unconcern – “someone else will buy the shares,” their lobbyists said with a patronising smile. Silly kids.
But the divestment movement never thought it could bankrupt BP in the short term. Instead: intellectual, moral, and political bankruptcy. Campaigners had a story to tell, one based on compelling new math first compiled by London’sCarbon Tracker Initiative. Their figures – based on SEC filings, annual reports, and other official data – showed that the fossil fuel industry had in its proven reserves four times as much carbon as scientists thought we could burn and still have a hope of keeping temperature rise below 2C. (Given that 1C of warming has melted the Arctic, 2C is a target for fools – at this point, however, that’s as reasonable a label for us as Homo sapiens.) Once you knew those numbers you could never think the same way about Shell again. The fossil fuel companies (and the countries – think Kuwait – that operate as fossil fuel companies) are rogues. If they carry out their announced business plans, they break the planet.
The first number is 2C, the amount of global warming the world’s governments have set as a limit. Beyond 2C, the world’s scientists project “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people. The 2C number began life in 1995 as a round number that was useful in political negotiations. But since then scientists have warned that even 2C of warming will bring damaging impacts.
The second number is 565 billion tonnes (GT) of carbon dioxide, which scientists estimate is the maximum amount that can be produced by future fossil fuel burning if we are to have an 80% chance of keeping global warming under 2C. If you use a lower chance, say 50% or 66%, the amount of allowable CO2 gets a bit bigger.
But whatever the amount, they are all dwarfed by the third number. This the total CO2 contained in today’s proven reserves of coal, oil and gas: 2,795 GT. That is fossil fuel identified and ready to extract.
So here’s the arithmetic. To stay under 2C, only 565 GT of CO2 can be emitted, but there is already 2795 GT - fives times more - ready to burn.
This simple analysis has global implications. If climate change is to be tamed, most existing fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground. That means continued exploration should be pointless and that assets worth trillions of dollars should become worthless. And that shows the scale of the challenge presented by climate change.
Damian Carrington
The math is so basic and easy that it’s quickly carried the day. What in 2013 was the rallying cry of a few student campaigners has by 2015 become the conventional wisdom: there’s a “carbon bubble,” composed of the trillions of dollars of coal and oil and gas that simply must be left underground. Here’s the president of World Bank speaking in Davos: “Use smart due diligence. Rethink what fiduciary responsibility means in this changing world. It’s simple self-interest. Every company, investor and bank that screens new and existing investments for climate risk is simply being pragmatic.” Those radicals at HSBC, in between sheltering taxes for the super-rich, ran the numbers: if the world actually tried to keep its 2C commitment, valuations of the fossil fuel industry would drop by half.
Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, did his best to explain the unwelcome news to the industry at a conference last October: the “vast majority” of the planet’s carbon reserves “are unburnable,” he said. When Shell’s chief executive hit back last month, calling a rapid transition off fossil fuel “simply naïve,” it was Tory veteran and chair of parliament’s energy committee Tim Yeo who told him off: “I do believe the problem of stranded assets is a real one now. Investors are starting to think by 2030 the world will be in such a panic about climate change that either by law or by price it will be very hard to burn fossil fuels on anything like the scale we are doing at the moment.”
Forget sea level rise for a moment – this is a sea change, happening in real time before our eyes, as the confidence in an old order starts to collapse. Last September the members of the Rockefeller family – the first family of fossil fuels –announced that they were divesting their philanthropies from coal, oil, and gasfor reasons “both moral and economic”. As the head of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund put it, “We are quite convinced that if John D Rockefeller were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy.” This is the rough equivalent of the Pope appearing at his Vatican window in saffron robes to tell the crowd below he’s now a Hare Krishna, or Richard Dawkins showing up at Lourdes in a bathing suit.
The fossil fuel industry – facing a serious challenge for the first time in its 300-year run – has tried to pretend it’s not happening. They’re just a year or two removed from record profits, and they keep producing internal forecasts showing that the world will stick with fossil fuels for decades to come (forecasts that caused Shell and BP, among others, to dump their tiny renewables divisions and double down on hydrocarbons). Here’s Exxon, for instance, arguing that divestment campaigners are fools because the company’s “estimates suggest that wind, solar, and geothermal will make up no more than 4% of the global energy supply by 2040.” Shell was blunter still: “We do not believe that any of our proven reserves will become stranded.”
Increasingly they’ve fallen back on public relations, with some companies funding a PR guru named Rick Berman, who once worked for the tobacco industry and who promised at a secretly videotaped industry meeting to wage “endless war” against environmentalists. But their great offensive has been a damp squib, consisting mostly of lecturing greens that we can’t “turn off fossil fuels overnight”. A highlight, produced by Berman in the lead-up to Global Divestment Day, was a minute-long cartoon about a boy whose girlfriend was a barrel of oil till his enviro friends convinced him to break up with her – at which point he could no longer use his cellphone, or eat food, or do much of anything else. (It features my floating disembodied head as a leering demon).
No one thinks, of course, that we will get off fossil fuel overnight; there’s a couple of hundred years worth of infrastructure guaranteeing it will take a while. And of course the industry argument, if true, is a good one. Even facing catastrophic global warming, we’re not going to stop using energy. In the face of that brute fact, a fossil freeze might seem like so much posturing.
Which is where the solar thaw comes in. Because the fossil fuel industry faces a closing pincers. Month by month, activists hold up its expansion and damage its reputation. And month by month engineers undercut its rationale. The price of solar panels has dropped 75% in the past six years, and now the “soft costs” of putting them on your roof is falling just as fast – Deutschebank estimates they’ll be 40% less expensive in the next two years.
Exxon thinks, in their Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040 report, that wind and sun will supply 4% of the world’s power in 2040? The Danes got 40% of their juice from wind turbines last year, and sadly for the fossil fuel industry Denmark has no monopoly on wind. There were days last summer when the Germans got 80% of their electricity from solar panels – and Germany, on average, gets as much sunshine as Alaska. The fastest gains will be made where energy is needed most, across the sun-rich tropics. I saw the first solar panel ever installed in Bangladesh, a single panel atop a village schoolhouse roof that went up sometime in the late 1990s. By now Bangladesh has 15m solar arrays, and 60,000 new homes a month come on line: the nation plans to be entirely solarised by 2020. When the Indian state of Aandhra Pradesh put out a tender offer for new power last October, the winning bid came from a big solar farm – at two cents a kilowatt hour less than the cost of importing coal.
Judy Watson, red flood (2011), pigment, pencil and acrylic on canvas, 212 x 157cm Photograph: Judy Watson
The erosion is happening at both ends of the technological scale: Indian peasants are powering their cellphones with the extra power generated by the solar panels that runs the cellphone towers themselves. And Apple is building giant data centres in California, Denmark, and Ireland that run entirely on renewables. Investors see where the growth will come: Tesla, which produced 2,500 cars a month last year, now carries half the valuation of General Motors, which produced 300 times as many. As the electric car fleet expands, the demand for oil will start to dwindle, and there will be an ever-larger number of four-wheeled batteries to rejigger the grid.
None of the problems the fossil fuel players keep predicting for renewables seem decisive. Yes, the sun goes down at night, but that tends to be when the wind kicks up. We’re learning to store peak power in all kinds of ways: a California auction for new power supply was won by a company that uses extra solar energy to freeze ice, which then melts during the day to supply power. The smart meters now coming on line around the world allow utilities to juggle demand, turning off your water heater when its not needed. Wise companies have either seen the future or learned their lesson: E.ON, Germany’s biggest utility, announced last year that it will now focus on wind and sun. “We are the first to resolutely draw the conclusion from the change of the energy world,” chief executive Johannes Teyssen told reporters in Dusseldorf. “We’re convinced that energy companies will have to focus on one of the two energy worlds if they want to be successful.”
Most utility executives aren’t so far-seeing, of course – in the US, for instance, many are coping with the threat posed by solar power by trying to make it prohibitively expensive for customers to put panels on their rooftops, a strategy embraced by the Koch Brothers. But the pushback is coming not just from enviros but from Tea Party conservatives – a “Green Tea” coalition has had success even in Deep South bastions like Georgia. As national Tea Party founding member Debbie Dooley puts it: “This is about the freedom to choose and create your own electricity.”
Polls show that even people who doubt the climate is changing instinctively understand the pleasure of controlling their own energy destiny. Even large elements of the labour movement are coming to understand the appeal of renewable energy, where jobs are growing far faster than in the economy as a whole (and where the profits don’t end up funding your bitterest enemies, like the Koch Brothers).
The best news, of course, is that the new renewables make the most sense in the developing world, where whole nations are poised to leapfrog past coal just as they went straight to mobile phones. They’ll need money to make that happen – which is why the most crucial decisions at Paris may be about providing financing for poor nations – but they’ve got the crucial ingredient: sunshine.
And so the race is fully, finally on. There are three teams. Team one, in the green: that’s the climate justice activists and the solar engineers, working together, scrappy but gaining. Team two, in the red as the price of oil drops: that’s the fossil fuel industry. It has a big lead, but a big gut too; it’s tiring fast. And the third? That’s physics, the most mysterious of the contestants, and arguably the most important. So far physics has meant that a single degree of global warming was enough to melt most Arctic ice. Last year the California heatwave lifted 63tn gallons of groundwater from the drought-stricken state, allowing its main mountain range to jump half an inch skyward. The heavy groundwater was depressing the Earth’s crust so when it evaporated in the drought, the land rebounded upwards. The world’s sea levels are now rising inexorably, turning every storm and high tide into peril. It’s happening faster and scarier than we thought a quarter-century ago when I wrote the first book for a general audience about all this.
Had we acted a quarter century ago, physics would be working on our side by now. We could have acted from a sense of justice, since global warming’s inherent unfairness – that those who contributed the least suffer the most – has been obvious from the start. Or we could have acted, you know, rationally: every economist, left, right and centre, has said for a generation that it makes no sense to let the fossil fuel companies pour their carbon out for free, and that the economic mess we’re creating far outweighs the cost of preventing it.
But this fight, as it took me too long to figure out, was never going to be settled on the grounds of justice or reason. We won the argument, but that didn’t matter: like most fights it was, and is, about power. The richest industry in human history wants to keep on their current path for a few more years, even if it means dragging the whole planet over a cliff. (Never forget for a moment that this industry, having watched the Arctic melt, immediately set out to drill the newly open waters for more oil.) Their power lies in money and the political favour it can buy; our power lies in movement-building, and the political fear it can instill. They know they’re in a tough spot so they’re spending like crazy (the Koch Brothers, party of two, just announced plans to dump $900m on the next US election, which is more than the Republicans or the Democrats will spend). We’ve therefore got to organise like crazy.
And if we do we have a chance. The Copenhagen climate summit was a fiasco, but not because the science wasn’t clear – in 2009, too, the world had just come off a record hot year. Copenhagen was a fiasco because environmentalists were hopeful that our leaders would do the right thing. Not this time – we’ll push as hard as we possibly can, and if we do then good things will happen before Paris, after Paris, and for years to come. Our task is brutally hard and painfully simple: keep the carbon in the ground. SOURCE
Judy Watson
Judy Watson is an indigenous Australian artist whose work takes inspiration from the land and traditions of the Waanyi culture. Describing herself as a ‘cultural traveller,’ Judy Watson has completed projects in New Zealand, India, Canada, France and the United States and exhibited widely over the last 20 years. She co-represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale.
National Energy Board queries why Enbridge asked municipalities along route to sign non-disclosure agreements before receiving copies of full emergency plans.
Construction of the Line 9 gas pipeline along Finch hydro corridor in North York. The National Energy Board is looking into Enbridge’s request for non-disclosure agreements from some Quebec municipalities that lie on the pipeline’s route LUCAS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO.
Federal pipeline regulators are pushing back after Enbridge asked some municipalities along its Line 9 route, which cuts across the GTA, to sign non-disclosure agreements prior to receiving complete copies of emergency plans.
In a February 2015 letter to the pipeline company, National Energy Board chair and CEO Peter Watson wrote that officials representing Quebec municipalities had informed him of the company’s request for confidentiality agreements.
“Both officials expressed concerns about signing the (non-disclosure agreement), and questioned how they could justify doing so to their citizens, who are expecting transparency,” wrote Watson.
“I am concerned that Enbridge’s practice of requesting NDAs is not consistent with the principle of regulatory transparency that guides the board’s approach.”
Enbridge spokesperson Graham White said it’s standard procedure for municipalities to sign confidentiality agreements when receiving documents that contain “sensitive information.”
This information could include locations of endangered species’ habitats and drinking water intakes, personal information about first responders, and third-party proprietary information.
“They are in fact necessary for safety, environmental and security reasons,” said White.
Public scrutiny of the pipeline industry and its regulator has mounted in recent years, as a host of major pipeline projects coupled with several high-profile spills have stoked safety fears.
Last March, the NEB, which regulates interprovincial pipelines across the country, approved Enbridge plans to reverse flow and expand capacity on its 40-year-old Line 9. The pipeline, which flows from Sarnia to Montreal, is set to begin operating in June.
The green light came after months of public hearings that heard from a parade of concerned citizens, municipalities and environmental groups. Toronto and other GTA-area municipalities raised myriad concerns about emergency planning and a lack of information from the company.
The NEB’s approval was contingent on Enbridge meeting 30 conditions prior to opening, including a requirement to file an emergency response plan with the regulator.
Emergency plans for Line 9 have been posted on the board’s website, though swaths of pages in some sections are heavily censored.
It’s the information under those blacked-out sections that must be covered in confidentiality agreements before non-censored copies are provided to municipalities, though the company does share the full information with some parties without non-disclosure agreements.
Federal pipeline regulations require companies “to inform all persons who may associated with an emergency response” of procedures. But who constitutes “persons who may be associated” isn’t entirely clear.
Enbridge presents information about emergency plans to all municipalities, only requiring confidentiality agreements when local officials want their own written copies. Enbridge provides the plans to regional first responders and “all persons who may be associated with an emergency response activity” without requiring a confidentiality agreement, White said.
When asked to clarify whether that would include people living in the area, business owners or other members of the public, White said, “It would if they had a role in the response or had to know for safety reasons.”
But he said every incident is different and so could not speculate on who would fall into that category.
Residents living near pipelines receive information about lines’ locations, the products they carry, emergency contacts and leak recognition and response; in the event of an emergency, municipal officials that have full access to emergency plans would direct the public on what to do, said White.
NEB spokesperson Darin Barter told the Star that, in the board’s view, those who should be informed includes “people who live and work in a predetermined vicinity of the pipeline who may be directly impacted should an incident occur.”
“There is a public will for the information and we agree that citizens who may be impacted as a result of a pipeline incident should have the information,” said Barter.
NEB Chair Watson wrote in his letter that if the company believes “there is significant confidential and proprietary information that in your view must not be released … then Enbridge can seek a review of the information by the (NEB) and we will decide what should be released.”
Toronto spokesperson Wynna Brown said the city has signed non-disclosure agreements in order to obtain copies of tactical plans for water crossings. The plans contained “detailed access information that could create a security threat if publicly available as it could be used to frustrate emergency response steps,” said Brown.
“City staff are satisfied that the process has provided a reasonable opportunity for input and liaison in the event of an emergency,” she said.
Representatives from Mississauga, Pickering and Whitby said their municipalities have received emergency plans without being asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.
“The public has an absolute right to know everything about what the risks are,” said Adam Scott, the climate and energy program manager with Environmental Defence. “I’m glad to see that the NEB’s poking but I’m not convinced that they’re going to bring it to the resolution that we’d want to see … We haven’t seen the NEB force transparency yet.”
Krystyn Tully, co-founder and vice president of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, said the environmental organization supports an “open by default” approach.
“We are happy to see that the NEB agrees with that perspective in its letter to Enbridge,” said Tully.
The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association said it acknowledges the importance of making emergency response plans available to the public.
But those plans, according to an emailed statement attributed to CEPA’s vice president of external relations Philippe Reicher, also contain information that “could infringe upon individual privacy, national security, third party confidentiality and environmentally sensitive information.”
The organization, which was copied on the NEB letter to Enbridge, said it is looking into the matter.
Enbridge said the issues with concerned municipalities have been resolved. The company is expected to respond to the NEB early this month. SOURCE
The Tories’ new anti-terror legislation radically authorizes sharing of information not related to terrorism. It ought to be carefully debated in Parliament
If the ill provoking Bill C-51 is terrorism, then the part of it that relaxes rules on information sharing should be about terrorism. But that is not what the proposed law is about, write Craig Forcese and Kent Roach. DREAMSTIME
ByCraig Forcese and Kent Roach, reposted from the Toronto Star, Feb 17, 2014
The new information sharing law in Bill C-51 will relax constraints on the flow of information between government agencies about “activities that undermine the security of Canada.” This change has not received as much attention as have other features of the bill. This is unfortunate because, as with other features of Bill C-51, this proposed law is not balanced.
“Big data” technology enables incredibly detailed and potentially intrusive monitoring and scrutiny of people’s behaviour. Law stands as the bulwark against the end of privacy, and this bill makes the law weaker.
Recent events raise real concerns about terrorism, and there may be a case for increased information sharing. The Air India Commission even recommended mandatory sharing by CSIS to prevent another such attack. So information sharing is required. But it must be reasonable in its scope and be countered with effective review to ensure that the information shared is reliable and respects privacy.
If the ill provoking this change is terrorism, then a law that relaxes rules on information sharing should be about terrorism. That is not what Bill C-51 is about.
The law creates a radical new concept of activities that “undermine the security of Canada.” It sweeps in anything “undermining” (whatever that means) the lives and security of Canadian people and the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of Canada. The only exception is “lawful” protest, dissent or artistic expression. Note the reference to “lawful.” If your protest fails to comply with municipal permitting regulations, it is fairly characterized as “unlawful.”
The law names examples. They include activities aimed at changing or “unduly influencing” any Canadian government by force — or merely “unlawful means.” Students protesting tuition beware.
It names activities in Canada that undermine the security of another state. Any state. Diaspora groups denouncing repressive regimes should be attentive.
It names activities that interfere with “critical infrastructure.” Any interference. Environmental or Aboriginal protest groups pay heed.
Also included: threats to Canada’s territorial integrity. Sovereigntist and First Nations groups take note.
Bill C-51 speaks of information sharing aimed at “detection, identification, analysis, prevention, investigation or disruption” of these “threats.” And so the government may be empowered to distribute information pre-emptively, in anticipation of this sort of conduct that may be unlawful.
In sum, it is hard not to read this bill as aimed at “total information awareness” of real threats, and also more banal forms of dissent.
But even if it were more reasonable in its scope, this bill fails to include proper safeguards.
Information can injure. Improperly shared information may result in rumours and innuendo being reconceived as fact, and used to justify action.
Information sharing lay at the core of the Arar commission of inquiry. There, the RCMP shared inaccurate information with the U.S. that associated Arar with Al Qaeda. Information sharing played a role in Arar’s rendition to Syria as well as the torture of three other Canadians, Adbullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin.
The Arar commission recognized (wisely) that integrated information sharing must be matched and balanced with integrated independent and self-initiated review to ensure reliability, relevance, and compliance with Charter and privacy rights. The government has failed to act on its recommendations and continues to do so in this bill.
The government promises its conduct will be subject to review by the Privacy Commissioner. In 2014, the Privacy Commissioner issued a report that recognized that the Privacy Act had not been substantially amended since the 1980s and that the Commissioner required more powers to ensure integrated review of secret information. Those amendments are not included in Bill C-51.
Nor should we expect judicial oversight. As Justice Dennis O’Connor recognized in the Arar Commission report, standard judicial review cannot effectively review information sharing because so few cases end in prosecutions. People may not even know that secret information about them has been shared.
We may need good, modernized information sharing laws. We may even need mandatory information sharing in some cases. Bill C-51 is not this legislation. It is not balanced and it radically authorizes sharing of information unrelated to terrorism. It deserves the most careful debate in Parliament. SOURCE
Craig Forcese and Kent Roach teach national security at the Universities of Ottawa and Toronto respectively and Roach worked with both the Arar and Air India commissions. They have posted detailed legal analyses of Bill C-51 at www.antiterrorlaw.ca.
Five refrigerants that won’t harm stratospheric ozone and have lower global warming potentials than many similar products got a green light from the Environmental Protection Agency last week.
R-441A is a blend of four alkanes.
The five products—one hydrofluorocarbon (HFC), three short alkanes, and a blend of hydrocarbons—are already used in Asia and Europe, the agency says.
EPA approved the products via a part of the Clean Air Act designed to ensure that new refrigerants are less environmentally damaging than those they replace. The agency approved ethane for low-temperature refrigeration units; isobutane for retail refrigeration units and vending machines; propane for home refrigerators and freezers and vending machines; difluoromethane, also known as HFC-32, for room air-conditioning units; and the hydrocarbon blend R-441A for retail refrigeration, vending, and room air-conditioning units.
According to EPA, the newly approved refrigerants have global warming potentials that range from 3 to 675. The five refrigerants can replace older products that have much higher global warming potentials ranging from 1,400 to 4,000, the agency says. For reference, CO2 has a GWP of 1.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called the agency’s action “an example of how we can turn the challenge of climate change into an opportunity to innovate our way to a better future.”
In the new rule, the agency exempts the four hydrocarbon products from the Clean Air Act’s prohibition against discharging refrigerants to the atmosphere. “Current evidence suggests that their venting, release, or disposal does not pose a threat to the environment,” the agency explains. Other refrigerants, including HFC-32, must be captured during maintenance or the disposal of cooling equipment.
Stephen Van Maren, a director with the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy, an association of chemical makers and refrigeration and cooling companies that rely on HFCs and ozone-depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbons, says he expects to see a variety of repercussions from the new regulation. “The ability of companies to adapt to the provisions of the rule varies quite a bit by sector and company,” Van Maren tells C&EN.
