The Council of Canadians has numerous concerns with the Harper government’s Budget 2010 in the areas of trade, water and energy. While a fuller analysis will follow, a few of the worst aspects of it for us include:
TRADE
In Budget 2010, the Harper government commits itself to “resist trade protectionism” and support “open markets”. It says it will promote “free trade” through “unilateral action to eliminate tariffs and support for the completion of the Doha Round, and through an aggressive bilateral free trade strategy that currently includes efforts to complete a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union, exploratory talks with India, and the implementation of recently concluded agreements with Colombia, Panama and Jordan”.
Budget 2010 eliminates almost “all remaining tariffs on manufacturing inputs and machinery and equipment” immediately and the remainder by 2015. The government says, “this will make all of Canada a tariff-free zone for industrial manufacturers” and adds that “this approach is superior to efforts by other countries that focus on location-specific free trade zones”.
As such, the Harper government remains fixated on a so-called free trade agenda that limits real job creation, further opens our economy to foreign ownership, continues to put our water, energy and public services at risk, and gives undue power to corporations to sue governments through Chapter 11 like provisions when their profits may be affected by public interest and environmental legislation.
WATER
While the government acknowledges that “millions of Canadians depend on the Great Lakes for their drinking water” and says that “cleaning up the Great Lakes is a key objective of our Government’s Action Plan for Clean Water”, the government allocates a mere $8 million a year to Environment Canada to “implement its action plan to protect the Great Lakes”.
In contrast, at the end of last year, the US Congress authorized $475 million to be spent on cleaning up the Great Lakes. In February, US President Barack Obama proposed another $300 million into this program. And just this past October the Harper government lobbied the US Environmental Protection Agency to weaken and delay their tough new measures against ship-diesel exhaust on the Great Lakes aimed at reducing the health toll from air pollution. The federal government is simply not serious about protecting the Great Lakes.
With respect to water in First Nations communities, the government says it “will undertake a comprehensive review of its current approach to financing First Nations infrastructure” in order to “support access by First Nations to alternative sources of financing, and approaches to improve the life-cycle management of capital assets”. This raises the spectre of private-public partnerships and all-out privatization, rather than the public provision of water and the recognition of the human right to water.
And while taking no real action to protect or conserve water, the budget allocates $18.4 million over two years to the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators initiative, which the government says “produces a coherent set of indicators on water quality, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions over time.”
ENERGY
The Harper government states that “Canada has established itself as an energy superpower” and notes the “unprecedented opportunities” to export “energy products within an integrated North American energy market and to the rest of the world”. It promotes Canada as an “increasingly attractive destination for global investment” to “tap our abundant energy potential”.
It wants to support this by accelerating “regulatory reviews of major energy projects”, like the environmentally-destructive projects in the tar sands. It says “responsibility for conducting environmental assessments for energy projects will be delegated from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency to the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for projects falling under their respective areas of expertise.”
The government also says “the resource potential in Canada’s North is world-class” but that “potential investors in northern resource projects face complex and overlapping regulatory processes”. To remove these “unpredictable, costly and time-consuming” protections, they will spend $11 million over two years “to support the acceleration of the review of resource projects in the North”. This undoubtedly is driven by the US Geological Survey reporting in July 2008 that the Arctic Circle has 90 billion barrels of ‘technically recoverable’ oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
The Harper government also continues to support “the development of advanced clean energy solutions, such as carbon capture and storage technologies” that are environmentally problematic and have been promoted, despite evidence to the contrary, as a way to green the tar sands. Even an Alberta-Canada EcoEnergy Task Force report released in January 2008 says that only a small percentage of CO2 emitted from the tar sands is currently amenable to the technology because of the size and concentrations of the emission streams.
CBC.ca reports that, “The Council of Canadians said the Conservative government has let down people concerned with the state of the environment. Andrea Harden-Donahue, the council’s national environmental campaigner, said there was barely a mention about the environment or creating green jobs. ‘Really, it’s surprising because this is the way the world is moving. Now, we need to review the budget and see what numbers are going where, but certainly from the speech itself, there’s no indication that this is a priority for the government,’ Harden-Donahue said.” This article is at http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2010/03/04/ns-federal-budget-reaction.html.
There are many other problems with this budget – including the opening of the telecommunications sector to foreign ownership and the further cutting of already minimal corporate taxes (down to 15 percent by 2012) – that all indicate the Harper government is taking Canada in the wrong direction.
For CUPE analysis – ‘Budget 2010: Water’ and ‘Budget 2010: Climate Change and the Environment’ – please go to http://cupe.ca/budget/budget-2010-water and follow the web-links.
To read our chapter on ‘Water’ in the Alternative Federal Budget (pages 113-118) and to note the AFB’s other recommendations, please see http://canadians.org/campaignblog/?p=2998.
