-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 2
/
Copy pathindex-footnotes.html
2101 lines (1939 loc) · 322 KB
/
index-footnotes.html
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914
915
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945
946
947
948
949
950
951
952
953
954
955
956
957
958
959
960
961
962
963
964
965
966
967
968
969
970
971
972
973
974
975
976
977
978
979
980
981
982
983
984
985
986
987
988
989
990
991
992
993
994
995
996
997
998
999
1000
<!DOCTYPE html>
<!--[if lt IE 7]> <html class="no-js lt-ie9 lt-ie8 lt-ie7"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]> <html class="no-js lt-ie9 lt-ie8"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]> <html class="no-js lt-ie9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 8]><!--> <html class="no-js"> <!--<![endif]-->
<head>
<title>Bottom Lines | A quarter-century report on Canada's natural security.</title>
<!-- Meta -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
<!-- General properties -->
<meta name="description" content="A quarter-century report on Canada's natural security." />
<meta name="author" content="Tyee Solutions Society">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="1 day" />
<meta name="copyright" content="© The Tyee 2014" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" />
<!-- OpenGraph properties -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Bottom Lines" />
<meta property="og:description" content="A quarter-century report on Canada's natural security." />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://project-name.thetyee.ca" />
<meta property="og:image" content="" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="" />
<!-- Dublin Core properties -->
<link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" />
<link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" />
<meta name="DC.title" lang="English" content="Bottom Lines" />
<meta name="DC.creator" content="Tyee Solutions Society" />
<meta name="DC.description" lang="English" content="A quarter-century report on Canada's natural security." />
<meta name="DC.publisher" content="Tyee Solutions Society" />
<meta name="DC.format" content="text/html" />
<meta name="DC.language" scheme="DCTERMS.URI" content="English" />
<!-- /Meta -->
<!-- Place favicon.ico and apple-touch-icon.png in the root directory -->
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="ui/img/favicon.ico">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://project-name.thetyee.ca/">
<!-- CSS -->
<!-- jekyll-assets pipeline -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/bootstrap.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/assets.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/fluidbox.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/bigfoot-number.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/styles.css">
<!-- /jekyll-assets pipeline -->
<!-- /CSS -->
<!-- JS Head -->
<script src="//use.typekit.net/wvv8ogg.js"></script>
<script>try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script>
<!-- /JS Head -->
</head>
<body class="default" id="">
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<p class="chromeframe">You are using an <strong>outdated</strong> browser. Please <a href="http://browsehappy.com/">upgrade your browser</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/chromeframe/?redirect=true">activate Google Chrome Frame</a> to improve your experience.</p>
<![endif]-->
<noscript id="js-warning">
This page requires Javascript. Your browser either doesn't support JavaScript or you have it turned off. Please enable JavaScript before you proceed.
</noscript>
<header class="site-header">
<div class="container">
<nav class="navbar navbar-default navbar-fixed-top navbar-inverse" role="navigation">
<div class="container">
<!-- Brand and toggle get grouped for better mobile display -->
<div class="navbar-header">
<button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbar-collapse">
<span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span>
<span class="icon-bar"></span>
<span class="icon-bar"></span>
<span class="icon-bar"></span>
</button>
</div>
<!-- Collect the nav links, forms, and other content for toggling -->
<div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="navbar-collapse">
<ul class="nav navbar-nav">
<li class="nav-label">Chapters:</li>
<li><a href="/#chapter/last-in-class">1. Last Place</a></li>
<li><a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">2. Air & Water</a></li>
<li><a href="/#chapter/species">3. Species</a></li>
<li><a href="/#chapter/climate">4. Climate</a></li>
<li><a href="/#chapter/environment">5. Environment</a></li>
<li><a href="/#chapter/about">About This Project</a></li>
</ul>
</div><!-- /.navbar-collapse -->
</div><!-- /.container-fluid -->
</nav>
</div>
</header>
<div id="content">
<article id="intro">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="row hidden-xs">
<div class="col-xs-3">
<img src="/assets/TSS-logo-outlines-white-rgb.svg" class="img-responsive tss-logo" alt="TSS logo">
</div>
<div class="col-xs-1">
</div>
<div class="col-xs-8">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-xs-3">
<img src="/assets/Partner-logo-dummy-white-rgb.svg" class="img-responsive logo" alt="">
</div>
<div class="col-xs-3">
<img src="/assets/Partner-logo-dummy-white-rgb.svg" class="img-responsive logo" alt="">
</div>
<div class="col-xs-3">
<img src="/assets/Partner-logo-dummy-white-rgb.svg" class="img-responsive logo" alt="">
</div>
<div class="col-xs-3">
<img src="/assets/Partner-logo-dummy-white-rgb.svg" class="img-responsive logo" alt="">
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-xs-12">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="row visible-xs">
<div class="col-xs-4">
<img src="/assets/TSS-logo-outlines-white-rgb.svg" class="img-responsive tss-logo" alt="TSS logo">
</div>
<div class="col-xs-8">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<h1>Bottom <br />
Lines</h1>
<h2>A quarter-century report on Canada's natural security.</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#intro-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="intro-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3></h3>
<h4> </h4>
<p>In this era of stressed ecologies and climate instability, Canadians should be able to count on the world’s second-largest landscape for resilient natural security: a healthy environment to support both our well-being and our prosperity long into the future. But can we? </p>
<p>We reviewed the facts over a quarter century of federal environmental stewardship. Here, you can explore the record several different ways. The following pages tell the story of what Canadians have said they value most, and what worries them most, in our natural environment, as well as how our various governments have responded over the 25 year since 1989 and how effective those responses have been according to a wide variety of independent assessments. Throughout, you’ll find info-graphics and interactive text features that drill down deeper into particular subjects, from climate change to threatened species to economic impacts. Here, [Link to refs window] and at the end of the text, you’ll also find the entire record of Canada’s environmental history over the period we reviewed—the key events, the important legislation and the report-cards scoring our standing in the world, along with much more—contained in six critical chronologies. </p>
<p>And the bottom line? Our review has revealed bi-partisan failures to meet Canada’s legal and international commitments, and a continuing decline of the healthy biodiversity that ensures our natural security. What’s also become clear is that the economic arguments used to rationalize our negligent stewardship are out of step with the growing awareness of just how much thriving ecosystems contribute to our national wealth and individual health, as well as deeply valued landscapes and Canadian wild life.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
<article id="last-in-class" data-chapter-number="1">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h1>Last in class</h1>
<h2>Some catchy dek for the slide here...</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#last-in-class-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="last-in-class-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3>Falling Grades</h3>
<h4>Twenty-five years of active lawmaking has not halted the decline of Canada’s ecosystems or environmental standing. </h4>
<p>Nothing says ‘Canada’ quite like a scenic vista—be it Gros Morne, the Saskatchewan sky, or a whale breeching in the Salish Sea. Canadians are justly proud of the vast variety of our landscapes. Our pride and concern for our natural environment has been rock-steady over a quarter of a century. Only Swiss and Norwegian citizens are more likely than Canadians to identify ^355 the environment as their No. 1 political issue.</p>
<p>Our leaders have appeared to be in step. Regardless of party, they have regularly assured us that Canada’s natural security is well protected. Legislation has been enacted ^112 ^118 ^183 ^194 across an impressive range of fronts, from protecting species to penalizing polluters and preventing foreseeable harm.</p>
<p>Yet independent assessments [35,40,46,48,56],and a candid account of our history tell quite a different story. Much of this country’s original wealth was created by logging forests for timber, breaking native prairie for grain fields, and blasting minerals from hard rock. The idea that environmental loss is a regrettable but necessary price for prosperity has been deeply engrained. Last year, the Prime Minister argued against additional measures to preserve a stable climate by saying, “No country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country.”</p>
<p>That this conventional wisdom is wrong is one of the clearest signals to emerge from the past quarter-century. To the contrary, a growing body of evidence [83,101,102,103,104,109] reveals the very large economic benefits that flow from healthy ecosystems, and the correspondingly high cost of their loss or disruption [86,93,99,105,108]. </p>
<p>Significantly, as the value of the security these natural systems provide has come more sharply into focus since the turn of the century, Canada’s standing on environmental stewardship has slipped from near the top of the class among developed countries, to near or even at the very bottom [14,48,198]. </p>
<p>We examined the actions that Canada’s governments—of differing political stripes—have taken to protect and secure the environment since 1989, as well as the global context of those actions. Over the 25-year period to 2014, we found that state-of-the-art legislation to protect biodiversity, the safety of air and water, and critical natural systems, has never been fully implemented or effectively enforced. Numerous mandated goals remain unmet. [213,217,218]</p>
<p>The consequences of bi-partisan neglect are now becoming apparent. Many supposedly ‘protected’ species are at greater risk [214] today than they were in 1989. New and more elusive chemical threats have replaced older biological ones in Canada’s water—although some of the latter are also back with a vengeance.</p>
<p>Ambitious goals articulated a quarter-century ago [228] to reduce Canada’s climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions have slipped by unmet. [281] Our contributions to climate change [283] have reversed a brief decline and are now again trending upward, even as its manifestations take a growing toll [99] on livelihoods and structures.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, international investors and key agencies like the World Bank [104] and International Monetary Fund [110] now question the conventional Canadian wisdom that expanding the economy is worth any price to the environment. Bodies that report on how well different countries’ maintain their natural security have made the same link.</p>
<h3 id="from-as-to-fs">From ‘A’s to ‘F’s</h3>
<p>Such rankings are only as old as the new century. One of the earliest was completed in 2000 as a pilot project for the World Economic Forum. Combining 64 indicators, the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University Center for International Earth Science ranked Canada 7th [12] among 56 developed and developing countries. In a more polished version the following year, Canada scored even better: third in a field of 122. [14]</p>
<p>But more critical assessments surfaced almost at once. In the same year that Yale and Columbia placed Canada third in the world, researchers at the University of Victoria called Canada’s environmental record, “one of the poorest of the industrialized countries.” [16] In follow-up comparisons, the same team ranked Canada 28th among 30 wealthy countries in 2005, [25] and 24th of 25 in 2010. [35]</p>
<p>Other assessments have reached the same unflattering conclusion: against its developed peers, Canada trails. The United Nations Environment Program put us as low as 43rd in the world in environmental “vulnerability” in 2005. [26] The business-oriented Conference Board of Canada scored us 15th among 17 countries in 2013. [46]</p>
<p>That same year the Centre for Global Development put us last in class for environmental care: 27th in a field of 27 rich, educated nations. [48] And last year the Climate Action Network and a research partner again placed Canada at the very bottom of 58 countries whose climate protection policies they evaluated. [357]</p>
<h5 id="not-how-we-see-ourselves">Not how we see ourselves</h5>
<p>Our national decline in global stewardship rankings is at odds with Canadians’ priorities over the same years as captured in opinion polls, although these also reveal that we’ve long been skeptical that our governments were up to the job.</p>
<p>Back in 1989, more than four-fifths of Canadians polled [360]by Environics Research agreed at least somewhat (and fully half felt so “strongly”) that pollution “threatens the very survival of the human race.” More than nine in ten of us were at least somewhat concerned about specific issues like acid rain, toxic chemicals, and air and water quality. Concern for wildlife followed closely. Climate change was on the minds of eight Canadians in ten even then.</p>
<p>At the same time, Canadians were roughly split on whether the federal government was doing a “fair” job protecting the environment, or a “poor” one. Four in ten nonetheless optimistically believed the environment would improve over the following decade.
A dozen years later, further research by the same company revealed that public concern about threats like toxic chemicals, water quality and wildlife, had hardly changed. [361] Confidence in the federal government was up modestly: by 2001 more than half of Canadians felt it was doing a “fair” job; only 29% rated it “poor.”</p>
<p>The financial crisis that struck in 2008 dramatically changed Canadians’ priorities. The year before, polls had placed the environment in a statistical tie with health care as the country’s most important problem in citizens’ eyes. [358] By the following year, it had dropped to a distant third, buried by worry over the economy. [359]</p>
<p>There has been a corresponding drop-off in pollsters’ interest in Canadians’ environmental views since then, but a handful of studies confirm that our concern hasn’t lessened.</p>
<p>Environics found in 2013 that more Canadians identified the economy than the environment as the country’s #1 issue just then. [362] But when they considered the future, they saw the loss of our natural security as the greatest threat. Other research found that while Canadians’ have become more certain that human activity is causing climate change, their confidence in government to be the “lead actor” in response, has dropped.</p>
<p>In short: Canadians’ concern for the environment has changed little over 25 years. Governments claim to have taken effective action. Yet our grades are dropping. Below, we explore this paradox in detail.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
<article id="air-and-water" data-chapter-number="2">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h1>Return of the Dead Zones</h1>
<h2>Few Advances on Canadians’ Top Three Concerns: Air, Water, and Toxic Chemicals</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#air-and-water-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="air-and-water-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3></h3>
<h4> </h4>
<p>When Canadians were asked back in 1989 to name their biggest environmental concerns, the top three answers they gave were, in descending order: toxic chemicals, water quality, and air quality. ^360 Four in ten were hopeful that things would improve within a decade.</p>
<p>Two and a half decades later, toxic chemicals, water and air quality are still among Canadians’ top concerns. ^362 But whether those 1989-era hopes have been realized depends on where you look. Some former threats have receded, but others have taken their place. And a few banes that once appeared to be conquered are now back and more dangerous than ever.</p>
<p>An example is blue-green algae—a type of primitive phyto-plankton. These can be dangerous as well as unsightly: when blue-green algae die and break down they release potent neuro and hepato-toxins, ^363 destructive to nerve and liver systems respectively. Contact can produce headaches, fever, abdominal pain, nausea and death. </p>
<p>The primary cause of their summertime ‘blooms’ in lakes, oceans and rivers is an over-abundance of dissolved phosphorus and nitrogen—ingredients in farm and garden fertilizers that have the same powerful effect in the wild, ‘fertilizing’ the rapid growth of aquatic algae. The organisms flourish particularly well in water bodies depleted and warmed by a changing climate. </p>
<p>And such toxic blooms are spreading. [364, 365] Once banished from Lake Erie, blooms have returned to the shallowest Great Lake. Last summer, residents of the U.S. city of Toledo and Canada’s Pelee Island were warned that drinking tap-water piped from Lake Erie could endanger their lives. [369, 370] ‘Dead zones’ created by algae die-offs in Lake Winnipeg have at times covered half the lake’s surface, rivaling those in the Gulf of Mexico for expanse. [367] Toxic blooms have even been spotted in the St. Lawrence River and the Salish Sea. [366]</p>
<h5 id="gender-bending-new-pollutants">Gender-bending new pollutants</h5>
<p>After intestinal ailments killed seven people in Walkerton, ON, in 2000, and sickened half the population of North Battleford, SK, ten months later, many provinces tightened up regulations to protect Canadians’ drinking water. [368] Traditional water-borne threats such as cholera and typhoid are largely vanquished, although hundreds of smaller and remote communities continue to experience water safety warnings, some of many years standing. [368, 371]</p>
<p>Meanwhile exotic new contaminants have emerged to pose elusive but alarming threats to Canadians’ reproductive health. [372] So-called ‘endocrine-disrupting chemicals’ (EDCs) are found in thousands of commercial products, from face creams to industrial cleaners. All mimic or disrupt natural hormone signals that normally control the body’s physical processes from growth to appetite. Low-level exposure at critical moments in life—notably conception and puberty—are being linked to a spate of strange effects on sex characteristics in both human and wild life.</p>
<p>Doctors observe an ongoing decline in the number of Canadian boys being born in comparison to girls—equivalent to about 800 statistically ‘missing’ boys a year by 2010. [373, 368] Meanwhile hypospadias, a correctable birth defect in which the urethra opens at the base of the penis instead of the tip, is becoming more common. [374] Reproductive system cancers—especially of the breast and testes—are also on the rise. [372] Fish exposed to EDCs in wild settings display trans-gender physiology, fewer males, and in controlled experiments, eventually population collapse. [375] Surveys have found scores of such EDCs in virtually every Canadian river, wetland and drinking-water reservoir tested from coast to coast. [376,377,378]</p>
<p>Of an estimated 23,000 such ‘chemicals of concern, Health Canada and Environment Canada have targeted 4,300 for re-evaluation, but do not expect to complete the task until 2020 at the earliest. [368] Toxicity information for nearly nine in ten chemicals in current use (87%) is missing, the Council of Canadian Academies warned in 2012. [379]</p>
<h5 id="airborne-wins-and-losses">Airborne wins and losses</h5>
<p>Air quality presents the same mixed picture over the past two-and-a-half decades. While some pollutants, such as the nitrogen and sulfur oxides that created acid rain, have receded, others such as air-borne ammonia are on the rise. [380] Toxic mercury, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, and EDCs have been found to be accumulating on surfaces downwind from Alberta’s oil sands regions. [368, 381, 382]</p>
<p>Global winds are blamed for carrying other pollutants from as far away as Asia to the Canadian arctic, where levels of exotic chemicals in the breast milk of nursing mothers in the North are on the rise. [368, 383] At the same time, smoke from massive fires in Canada’s boreal forest in 2013 and 2014 was tracked as far away as Europe. [384, 385] </p>
<p>Canada has no equivalent of the Clean Water Act [386] or Clean Air Act that set mandatory standards for water and air quality in the United States, nor of the Water Framework Directive, which does the same thing for Europe’s water. [368, 28] Instead, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), put into effect in 1989, allows the federal government to relinquish enforcement of water and air-quality goals to the provinces. [112, 134, 309]</p>
<p>This policy has failed repeated assessments over 25 years. In 1990, the federal Auditor General found “a serious deterioration in compliance” in every sector where Ottawa had delegated its monitoring and enforcement authority to the provinces. [113] The most recent such federal-provincial agreement established national limits for some pollutants in municipal sewage effluent. However it postponed implementing those limits until 2020, for urgent cases, and as late as 2040 for all waste systems. [162] </p>
<p>By 2011, the Environment Commissioner found that Environment Canada had been enforcing fewer than half (19 of 45) of its own CEPA regulations. [155] The department did not know whether it had been collecting reports that are legally required from six of nine “priority” polluting industries. And although it had added 68 enforcement positions since 2007, the number of inspections it actually conducted had dropped.</p>
<p>The tragic poster town for the undiminished risk Canadians face from toxic chemicals in their environment may be the small Anishinabek community of Aamjiwnaang, near Sarnia on the shore of the St. Clair River. [388] The settlement of 850 is surrounded by Canada’s highest concentration of petro-chemical plants; their emissions suffuse its homes, school and playgrounds. By the first decade of the new millennium, the ‘normal’ human birth ratio of about 105 males to 100 females was so far out of balance in Aamjiwnaang that newborn girls outnumbered boys by two to one. Coaches filled three girls’ softball teams, but could only scrape together enough boys for one. </p>
<p>It was an unsettling indicator that Canadians are well justified in continuing to worry about what may be in the air and water.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
<article id="species" data-chapter-number="3">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h1>More Endangered than Ever</h1>
<h2>Most Species “Protected” Under Canadian Law Are Losing Ground</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#species-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="species-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3></h3>
<h4> </h4>
<p>In a Canada Day poll a couple of years ago, 83 per cent of us identified our untamed landscape as a “good” or “great” reflection of Canadian identity. [389] And surely the iconic moose and orca, the loon that adorns the dollar and its twoonie counterpart the polar bear, the old national symbol of the beaver—all speak to Canadians’ affinity for the wildlife beyond our urban limits. </p>
<p>Our actual care for those iconic species and landscapes, let alone for lesser-known ones, reveals a quarter-century of unfulfilled good intentions however, and lengthening odds against the survival of many of our most emblematic fauna. [219, 224, 390]</p>
<p>Six major and several minor federal laws have been enacted to protect Canada’s ecosystems. In 1989, two were already nearly as old as the country: the Fisheries Act protected all fish and their habitat [391]; the Navigable Waters Protection Act protected all of Canada’s rivers and lakes. [392] Since 1930, the National Parks Act had allowed Ottawa to protect entire ecosystems. [393]</p>
<p>Three more laws of importance were added over the last quarter century. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, passed in 1988, came into effect in 1989; it consolidated federal powers to control air, water or ocean pollution. [112] An Environmental Assessment Act, added in 1992, was intended to anticipate and prevent harm to ecosystems from human development. [118, 183, 187] And in 2002 a Species at Risk Act promised to restore struggling wildlife populations. [194] Other legislation provided for Marine Conservation Areas, the protection of migratory birds, controls on the use of pesticides, and penalties for offenses under all of these laws.</p>
<p>The collective scope of this legislation is impressive. But multiple assessments have concluded that it is failing across the board. [35, 46, 48] Many of Canada’s most significant landscapes and species are more endangered now than at the start of the period we reviewed. [214]</p>
<p>There is some good news: seals and whales once hunted to near extinction are recovering in all of the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans reported in 2010. [205] </p>
<p>But a larger number of trends are negative. </p>
<p>According to the same assessment by federal scientists, all three oceans are becoming more acid, threatening the future of shellfish, and experiencing more exotic chemical contamination. Stifling ‘dead zones’ are appearing off our Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Toxic mercury is accumulating in the Arctic Ocean. On both the east and west coasts, commercial fish stocks have collapsed and the average size of the remaining fish has declined. Marine ‘trophic’ indices—which reflect the complexity of life present—have declined, indicating that simpler forms like worms and jelly fish are replacing higher ones like fin fish and marine mammals.</p>
<p>Numerous factors contribute to those changes. However Canada lags far behind other countries with long coastlines in the portion that is protected. More than 30 per cent of U.S. and Australian coastlines have protected status, and more than 11 per cent of Russia’s; less than two per cent of Canada’s coastline is similarly secure. [395]</p>
<p>In 2013, Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment advised Parliament that the federal government had not met its obligations under the Species At Risk Act. [343] Of 97 recovery plans the law required, only seven were in place. Of those, three failed to identify habitat crucial to the species’ survival, while others provided no budget or failed to say what agency would take actions required to reverse the species’ decline. [344]</p>
<p>Federal reliance on the provinces to achieve national biodiversity goals has produced disappointing results. Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have done the most to protect endangered species, but even in those provinces more than a quarter remain without statutory protection. [396] In other provinces, as few as five percent of at-risk species are protected.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, many supposedly protected populations are dwindling. Migratory waterfowl (ducks and geese valued by hunters) have been well protected, but other shore, grassland and forest birds “are in major decline,” the Environment Commissioner reported. [216] Disappearing fastest are “aerial insectivores that depend on flying insects for food.” British Columbia’s orcas, woodland and tundra caribou, and the Arctic bear that adorns Canada’s two-dollar piece are all among iconic megafauna that continue to face an uncertain future.</p>
<h5 id="vanishing-canada">Vanishing Canada</h5>
<p>Entire landscapes are also disappearing, albeit mostly beyond urban notice. In the south-west Arctic, spruce forests are collapsing as the permafrost beneath them melts. [398] A warmer, less stable climate is igniting more forest fires—that burn greater expanses of mature forest. [397] Above the advancing northern treeline, satellites have observed lakes both forming and disappearing by the hundreds. [399]</p>
<p>Researchers speculate that British Columbia’s interior pine forests, devastated by a plague of bark beetles unleashed by warmer winters, will not return; rather, they will be replaced by prairie-like vegetation. [401] Once-continuous boreal forest in Alberta and Saskatchewan is now so sliced by cut-lines cleared for seismic surveying that the balance of forces between caribou and their top predator, wolves, has shifted decisively in the wolves’ favour. [207, 402] Further east and south, rising temperatures are literally sucking the Great Lakes up into the air, increasing summer humidity and altering shorelines. [106]</p>
<p>How fast these changes are occurring, especially to species on the losing end of habitat loss, is difficult to know. Ottawa abandoned an initiative to provide Canadians with regular reports on the State of the Environment in 1993, amid government-wide budget cuts. </p>
<p>In the economic downdraft following the 2008 financial crisis, federal personnel engaged in environmental science were cut further. [402] Several research facilities highly prized by researchers were scheduled for closure, although two—the Experimental Lakes Area in northwest Ontario and the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) on Ellesmere Island, Canada’s northernmost point—received reprieves, one by transfer to a non-government operator, [335,349] the latter with a five-year funding extension. [333,339]
Ottawa also shifted the focus of federal support for science from government-sector research (typically focused on basic and natural-resource science) to technology development in the private and public-private university sectors. [403]
There have been some new science investments. Ground was broken in August for a new $142 million lab facility at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, about 1,300 km south of the PEARL site; it’s expected to begin operating in 2017. [354, 404] And in August Ottawa announced $2.5 million (roughly one-tenth of what it budgets for prime ministerial security) for new climate research. [293]
Nonetheless numerous investigations by think-tanks, scientific bodies, individual authors and the federal Commissioner of the Environment—including several predating the present government—have drawn attention to the failure to collect reliable, consistent and long-term observations of such key indicators of natural security as water flows, air contamination, or wildlife populations. [405-416]</p>
<p>Environment Canada itself has acknowledged, in communications cited by the Environment Commissioner, that it has no idea whether nearly a third of Canada’s bird populations are safe from extinction. [342] Its ability to ensure the health of entire ecosystems is no better: in 2013 the Commissioner reported that it had “made little progress in monitoring activities, conditions, and threats for the protected areas it manages.” [343]</p>
<p>These are not new lapses. In 2002 several groups lodged a complaint with the semi-judicial North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation that Canada, then under Liberal government, was not enforcing its laws protecting migratory birds. [417] In 2007, the Commission upheld the complaint. [197,418] The government, now under Conservative management, announced it was developing a new protection program but cancelled that initiative in 2010.</p>
<h5 id="limiting-protection">Limiting Protection</h5>
<p>The third modern legal leg of federal wildlife protection is the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, created by a Progressive Conservative government in 1992. [187] Subsequent court decisions confirmed its country-wide force, and required its assessments to consider long-term as well as immediate impacts from development. [301,310,311,315]</p>
<p>That Act was retired in 2012. A new Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (2012) requires far fewer reviews than the law it replaced—by one count, 3,000 fewer a year. [337] Changes the same year to the 144-year-old Fisheries Act and the similarly venerable Navigable Waters Protection Act—renamed the Navigation Protection Act— sharply reduced their coverage from all fish species and most waterways in Canada, to a listed handful. [336,159]</p>
<p>In 2013, a global comparison of stewardship practices, led by Harvard economist Michael Porter, ranked Canada in 51st place among 132 countries in protecting its natural security—suggesting we care less for our iconic wildlife and landscapes than do either Bolivia or the Central African Republic. [45]</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
<article id="climate" data-chapter-number="4">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h1>A Different Country</h1>
<h2>As Canada delays, rising temperatures alter the landscape and test the economy.</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#climate-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="climate-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3></h3>
<h4> </h4>
<p>Nothing has changed more widely or dramatically over the past 25 years than the global climate. And on no other subject has Canada’s natural security policy reversed more sharply. In 1989, Canada was a leader in the international response to climate change. [227,228] In many assessments it is now deemed a laggard. [48,285,357]</p>
<p>Over the same period, the evidence that human emissions of greenhouse gasses are the biggest factor in rising global temperatures has solidified. [229,233,242,256,280] The human and economic costs of disrupting familiar climate patterns has become sharply clearer. [111,288,291,298]</p>
<p>The subject was well on Canadians’ radar a quarter century ago. Polled in 1989, almost 80 per cent responded that they were at least somewhat concerned about climate change.[360] In subsequent surveys, the share of Canadians expressing concern for the climate has never dropped below 80 percent, and reached 88 per cent in 2013. [358,359,361]</p>
<p>That said, both Canadians’ acceptance of the scientific consensus that human activity is a leading factor in altering the climate, and their sense of how urgent it is to respond, have drifted downward in the past decade. Surveyed in 2007, 64.6 per cent of us agreed on a human role in climate change; 53.9 per cent thought it advisable to act sooner rather than later to contain its most dangerous implications. [358] By 2013, agreement on a human contribution to climate change had slipped eight points to 56.4 per cent; support for early action had fallen below 45 per cent. [419]</p>
<h5 id="out-front-back-in-the-day">Out front back in the day</h5>
<p>Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was among the leaders of the world’s seven largest economies who called from their 1989 summit meeting in Paris for “common efforts to limit emissions of carbon dioxide.” [227 The previous year, Canada had hosted an international meeting that proposed a global goal of reducing human CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2005. Soon after the Paris summit, Canada joined 59 other countries in endorsing that objective. [228]</p>
<p>Canada was also an active participant in the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, where the ground was laid for the Kyoto accord on reducing greenhouse emissions, concluded five years later in 1997. [231] Canada, by then under a Liberal government, promised to reduce its 676 million tons (MT) of greenhouse emissions that year to 555 MT by 2012. [236]</p>
<p>A global science assessment reported in 2001 that “demonstrable” change in global temperatures risked triggering “large-scale, high-impact, non-linear, and potentially abrupt changes” to Earth’s physical and biological systems. [242] Heat stress, invasive pathogens, disrupted food supplies, storms and floods, were becoming more common. </p>
<p>Canada did not act to implement its Kyoto commitments until 2005 however. Eighteen days after the protocol came into international force that February, Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government committed $1 billion to purchase credits testifying to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions anywhere in the world. [248] It promised additional money for research and demonstration projects aimed at reducing industrial emissions. The measures were passed into law later that year, shortly before a general election ended the Liberal mandate.</p>
<p>Within months, the newly elected Conservative minority government announced that Canada would not meet its Kyoto emission targets. [251] Nevertheless, it continued to assert that “this Government takes its responsibilities under the Kyoto Protocol very seriously.” And in early 2007 released a plan to reduce the “intensity” of industrial emissions (greenhouse gas releases per unit of output) by 18 per cent by 2010. The plan further envisaged a carbon price for industry of $65 a ton to take effect the same year, as well as an emissions trading system. [254]</p>
<p>In March of 2008, Natural Resources Canada reported that our climate was already changing, in ways that “will exacerbate many current climate risks, and present new risks,” as well as some opportunities. [258] In particular, Canada is losing its winter ice—both in the Arctic and over the Great Lakes. Extreme weather threatens southern infrastructure, while “resource-dependent and Aboriginal communities are particularly vulnerable.” (A follow-up report in 2014 confirmed that all those trends continue. [288]) </p>
<p>Two months later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper asserted that Canada would, “in a relatively short period of time restrain and reverse the growth of GHG emissions.” [260] Moreover, he said, “after 2012, oil sands operations will only be permitted if they can massively reduce their emissions.” </p>
<p>In the event, however, the government implemented none of the policies it had initially proposed. Instead, the government mandated specific emission reductions for various sectors of the economy. [264] Matching a US initiative, in 2012 it required automakers to cut new car and light truck emissions in half by 2025. [278] It ordered new and refurbished coal-burning power plants to reduce emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. [275] But speaking to Parliament as 2014 ended, the Prime Minister characterized as “crazy” calls for the implementation, assured six years earlier, of similar rules to limit Canada’s fastest-growing emissions source, the oil and gas industry.</p>
<p>Half of the ten southern provinces have in fact made headway in cutting their greenhouse emissions, but that accomplishment is more than offset by soaring emissions from Alberta and Saskatchewan (up 47 and 72 percent respectively between 1990 and 2012). [421] Meanwhile Canada’s government has turned against two counter-measures it once endorsed: either a carbon tax like one pioneered in British Columbia, or an emissions cap with permit trading, as Quebec launched this year with California. [422,423,253,424]</p>
<p>Canada formally renounced its Kyoto commitments in 2011. [273] Before doing so however it agreed (in Copenhagen in 2009) to a new target to be met by 2020: emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels, roughly 611 MT. [265]</p>
<p>Now that target too is beyond reach. Since dipping after the 2008 economic downturn, national emissions have hovered around 700 MT a year since 2010—roughly 14 per cent above our revised goal. [421] In 2014 Canada reported to the United Nations that by 2020 our emissions are likely to breach 735 MT—20 per cent over its promise in by 2030. [283]</p>
<p>Canada’s serial failures to meet its climate commitments have attracted international censure. They have been identified as a factor in our plummeting standing on environmental care. [48,53] In a 2014 assessment by Europe’s Climate Action Network of national responses to climate change, Morocco and Turkey warranted “good” grades; Canada, with Australia, Russia and Saudi Arabia, were graded as “very poor.” [357]</p>
<p>The issue has created an intangible impediment to other national objectives, such as market access to Europe for Canadian crude oil and the proposed XL pipeline across America. [425,426]</p>
<p>The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned again late last year that humanity must achieve “stringent” reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, or face “irreversible and dangerous impacts.” [280] World leaders will meet in Paris again this year, to consider new national reduction commitments.</p>
<h5 id="costs-becoming-clearer">Costs becoming clearer</h5>
<p>Meanwhile, the cost of climate instability has come into sharper focus over 25 years. A report released with little fanfare by Natural Resources Canada early in 2014 warned that some livelihoods will no longer be “feasible and/or cost-effective” in the near future. [288] Indeed, it appeared to endorse a fatalistic approach for some: selling “last chance tourism,” to witness wildlife and landscapes before they disappear.</p>
<p>Property damage from increasingly volatile weather has soared since 1989. 2013’s record-setting summer floods in Calgary and Toronto and year-end ice-storms typify the violent extremes being energized by additional heat in the global oceans and atmosphere. [99] Hotter summers nurture more frequent poisonous algae blooms—raising health risks and water treatment costs. [365] The B.C. and federal governments have spent over $1.2 billion so far to help communities adjust to the loss of forests devastated by insects no longer controlled by winter cold. [427] Toronto’s Mowat Centre warns that the loss of water from the Great Lakes will cost its region $9.6 billion (and waterfront property owners directly $794 million) by 2030. [106]</p>
<p>Other studies have refined estimates of the risk that climate change presents to the global economy, as well as the benefits of limiting its advance. The World Bank calculated last year that tackling climate change would boost world gross economic product by $2.6 trillion (about three percent of its 2011 value) within 16 years. [104] Shortly after, the International Monetary Fund reported that a national carbon tax modeled on British Columbia’s would boost growth in Canada by close to 0.8 per cent of GDP—about as much as the economy expanded in the first three months of 2014. [297]</p>
<p>After a quarter century of unmet commitments and climate policy neglect however, Canada finds itself ill-positioned to take advantage of such returns on initiative.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
<article id="environment" data-chapter-number="5">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h1>Billions of Reasons to Change</h1>
<h2>Impaired natural security leaves Canada at a global disadvantage.</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#environment-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="environment-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3></h3>
<h4> </h4>
<p>It’s an old economic truism, a corollary of the law of supply and demand, that scarcity creates value. In an era when natural capital is disappearing, it is also increasingly highly valued. Canada’s ineffective stewardship of its ecological assets puts at risk hundreds of billions, potentially trillions, of dollars worth of wealth, in addition to intrinsic and cultural values.</p>
<p>Economists have estimated that the ecological services provided by the Mackenzie River watershed in northern Canada are worth some $571 billion a year—thirteen and a half times the region’s official GDP of $42 billion. [83] In 2014 an unknown portion of that wealth went up in smoke, when fires consumed vast swaths of boreal forest. Soot from the fires in the Northwest Territories drifted downwind to darken Greenland’s ice sheets, hastening their melt. [384]</p>
<p>The anecdote illustrates how perceptions of environmental stewardship and risk have tightened over a quarter-century. Canadians feared for their natural security as long ago as 1989, when eight in ten of us agreed at least somewhat in surveys (and half of us, “strongly”), that pollution “threatens the survival of the human race.” [360]</p>
<p>The nature and extent of that threat, and how much we stand to lose, are now much clearer. </p>
<p>The eco-systems that provide Canadians with their natural security, that sustain health and prosperity, are weakening and degrading. While some old hazards are in check, others have resurfaced and new ones are appearing in our air and water. [372] Wildlife and landscapes deeply woven into Canadians’ identity are at more risk now than 25 years ago. [366,394] And a quarter-century after Canada’s government endorsed cutting our annual greenhouse gas emissions to 472 MT within sixteen years, they are nearly one and a half times that, and will rise more by 2020 and beyond. [283]</p>
<p>If Canada has realized few of the good intentions embodied in its array of environmental legislation, research and experience have heightened our awareness of what’s at stake. Setting aside—though not discounting—the intangible cultural and spiritual values received from natural landscapes, the release of tension found in an urban park or remote campsite, and the moral “existence value” imputed to non-human creatures, close analysis has revealed with growing precision the measurable benefits that natural infrastructure provides to our dollar-denominated economy.</p>
<p>An early study, for example, estimated in 1996 that British Columbia received $2.75 billion a year (adjusted for inflation to 2014) in non-lumber value from its pre-pine-beetled forests, mainly from outdoor recreation, but also from wildlife viewing and recreational fishing and hunting. [59]</p>
<p>Investigators have since revealed the economic value of services that Ontarians derive from Toronto’s greenbelt: farmland, recreational areas, water collection and air quality benefits ring in at $2.7 billion a year. [77] Toronto’s trees were revealed in a different study to be worth more than $80 million annually, in services that run from energy-saving shade to scrubbing pollutants from the air; that amount was more than the city spent in 2014 on economic development and recreation. The asset value of the urban forest was assessed at $7 billion. [103]</p>
<p>The value of climate-threatening carbon stored in Manitoba’s 50 million hectares of boreal forest was assessed in 2014 at $117 billion—10 times the province’s full budget—not counting recreation, hunting, and other economic contributions. [101]
Our peers and trading partners are moving beyond the outdated perspective that economic and natural security present a zero-sum dilemma, in which preserving the environment can only reduce prosperity. Policies increasingly recognize that the two are additive: that resilient, productive ecosystems also expand national and corporate bottom lines.</p>
<p>Some of these suggest practical steps for Canadians to consider, in order to reverse the erosion of our environmental advantage.</p>
<h5 id="standards-and-accountability">Standards and accountability</h5>
<ul>
<li>
<p>It may be axiomatic that it’s impossible to manage what you don’t measure. Yet a recurrent complaint among experts is that Canada lacks the consistent and timely reporting of critical ecological variables, from snow depth to species populations, needed to support sound decisions. In the words of a joint federal-provincial study in 2010: “Information critical to the assessment of ecosystem health is missing.” [405-416]</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Nearly 50 European governments have countered their own impulse to overlook environmental decay by joining the Aarhus Convention. It commits them to gather and publish enough information about their national environment to establish its status. Anyone who believes a government is failing to do so, may request an arms-length investigation and ask national courts to compel compliance with any judgment that results. [10]</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Near-term electoral rewards may tempt any democratic government to overlook long-term environmental losses in its decisions. Britain, India, Australia and the United States all broadly share Canada’s legal tradition, but have found at least a partial answer in a legal doctrine known as the “Public Trust.” [428]
Derived from Roman antecedents, it holds that governments have an inescapable duty to current and future citizens to protect certain natural features, especially related to water—and that citizens may ask the courts to force governments to meet that responsibility. Written into constitutions and simple legislation, the doctrine has obliged governments at all levels to improve their stewardship. </p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Canadians remain as concerned for the security of their air and water today as they were in 1989. Justifiably: new biological and synthetic toxic threats have emerged, and Canada continues to lack mandatory national air or water pollution limits.
The United States has had mandatory standards for air and water quality for over 40 years. Contained in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, they are enforced on a county-by-county basis. [386,387] Rules adopted in the European Union in 2007 require importers and manufacturers to replace the most toxic industrial compounds with more benign alternatives; the changes are expected to save the EU $4 billion a year in health costs. [28]</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Other countries and some provinces have pioneered other effective approaches to better environmental stewardship: regulated water ‘markets’ (Australia and Alberta); watershed-based stewardship (France and, for more than seven decades, Ontario); taxes on carbon emissions (Britain, British Columbia) [429]; special courts that can order companies to compensate communities for lost eco-services (Mexico) [430]; and legal rights to a clean environment (Mexico and more than 110 other countries). [431]</p>
<p>There has been another transformative advance in the quarter century since 1989: plummeting technology costs now make it affordable for environmental managers to stay on top of complex and variable natural conditions in real-time. Examples can be found in southwestern Alberta and British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley where mounting water scarcity has prompted the development of highly sophisticated tracking systems that could prove models for the rest of the country. [432]</p>
<p>Only the Norse and the Swiss are more likely than Canadians to rank the environment as their country’s most important issue. [355] The same world study that revealed that curious factoid however, also scored Canadians’ actual behavior as “green” consumers in 16th place among the 17 countries it examined—marginally above dead last.</p>
<p>The shortfall between the environmental aspirations we express as Canadians, and Canada’s achievements over the past quarter-century, is irrefutable. But it’s not inevitable. Effective models for action surround us. And the same 25-year perspective reveals that we have a fast-rising economic, as well as ecological, stake in the outcome.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
<article id="about" data-chapter-number="6">
<header class="fullscreen">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<section class="slide intro">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h1>A Simple Question</h1>
<h2>How and why this report came to be: Disclosure, methods and sources</h2>
<div class="center-block" align="center"><a class="smooth" href="#about-longform"><i class="next glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-down"></i></a></div>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<section id="about-longform" class="longform">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<div class="social-block">
<span class='share-button share-twitter-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-facebook-large'></span>
<span class='share-button share-email-large'></span>
</div>
<h3>About the project</h3>
<h4> </h4>
<p>he Tyee Solutions Society is a Canadian non-profit association supported by philanthropic funding that uses traditional investigative techniques and innovative technological approaches to provide citizens with the information they need to create positive change. Its previous work has included new approaches to aboriginal education and practical ideas for ‘greening’ Canada’s oil sands. </p>
<p>This series was produced by the Tyee Solutions Society (TSS) in collaboration with Tides Canada Initiatives, with funding from the Gencon Foundation. Tides Canada Initiatives and the Gencon Foundation neither influence nor endorse the particular content of TSS’ reporting and guarantee its full editorial autonomy. If you wish to re-publish this story or any other TSS-produced article, please contact Chris Wood.</p>
<p>This TSS assignment asked a deceptively simple question: Cutting through all partisan rhetoric, how well has Canada cared for its environment, really? </p>
<p>The result is a ‘just the facts ma’am’ record of the best answers we could find. To make our report the most objective one possible without conducting prohibitively expensive original science, we spent 10 months combing the most reliable publically available sources: government documents, scientific papers, reports from independent international bodies, leading research and think-tank organizations. To help overcome a potential bias toward only the most recent activities, we examined a full quarter-century of Canada’s environmental record—a period during which five Prime Ministers from three parties occupied 24 Sussex Drive. </p>
<p>This method had some weaknesses. Some older and formerly public government reports have become difficult to obtain as a result of changes to archiving policy. Continuous records of key environmental variables are in any case few (as many of the reports we reviewed also observed). Some information simply did not exist in 1989. Evidence-based ranking of countries’ environmental stewardship dates only to 2000. In other cases time liberated information that might once have been locked behind proprietary walls—such as detailed polling results.</p>
<p>The search produced hundreds of individual records, across six environmental dimensions, covering the entire period chronologically. These records, with links to their sources, can be found here; we hope other researchers find them of use. We have made every effort to confirm the accuracy of each of these, but do not guarantee it all cases. For some earlier events, dates are best approximations. We will be grateful to have errors brought to our attention. </p>
<p>We are also grateful to the Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria for its assistance in identifying and providing analysis of key legislative and judicial developments since 1989, and to Evidence for Democracy for data relating to government support for science.</p>
<p>Chris Wood was the primary researcher on this project and wrote the main text. David Beers supervised the research and edited the text. Phillip Smith created the underlying website technology. Alex Grunenfelder styled the many infographics. Carra Simpson administered the project. </p>
<p>This report is novel not only in its examination of a full quarter-century of federal stewardship of the world’s second-largest land mass, but in being tailored from inception to reach Canadians in every way that they seek out knowledge in the 21st century. We hope it becomes a place where Canadians using any device can go to answer for themselves how well their country has cared for any aspect of the environment that concerns them. </p>
<p>We ourselves draw no broader conclusion than this to the general question we were asked: “How well has Canada cared for its environment, really?” Sadly, not very well. </p>
<p>…</p>
<p>To re-publish this story or any other TSS-produced article, please contact [email protected]. </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="slide-text col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2 col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2">
<nav class="chapter chapter-previous">
</nav>
<nav class="chapter chapter-next">
<a href="/#chapter/air-and-water">Next: Air & Water »</a>
</nav>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
</article>
</div>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:1">
<p>Widely applauded as one of the most successful international treaties ever, and the only one to be ratified by all 197 world nations and the European Union, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, under the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, provided for the phase-out of hydroflourocarbons and other chemicals identified as damaging the earth's ozone layer, which protects terrestrial life from excessive ultraviolet radiation.<a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:3">
<p>The 301-m. long oil tanker Exxon Valdez runs aground on a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling between 257,000 and 750,000 barrels of crude oil into the coastal environment. The spill devastates wildlife and local indigenous communities.<a href="#fnref:3" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:4">
<p>European nations sign the Maastricht Treaty, beginning the process to European Union and continent-wide environmental standards.<a href="#fnref:4" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:5">
<p>The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, addresses for the first time the temptation for poor countries to become dumping grounds for cast-off First World toxic chemicals. It bans the export of toxic waste -- with the exception of radioactive waste -- from developed nations to developing ones. Efforts have since been made to extend the ban to ships which may contain asbestos and other toxic substances sent to poor nations to be broken up for scrap. Canada has opposed that extension. <a href="#fnref:5" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:6">
<p>The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development brings 176 governments and thousands of NGO representatives together over two weeks in Rio de Janeiro to hammer out goals and an agenda for sustainable development. Delegates sign the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change that will lead to the Kyoto Protocol.
<a href="#fnref:6" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:7">
<p>The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), better known as the Biodiversity Convention, comes into force with Canada as a party. It sets three goals for protecting biological diversity, sustainable use of living resources, and fair and equitable sharing of the economic benefits of diverse biogenetics. The agreement covers all ecosystems as well as individual species, and embeds the Precautionary Principle, urging governments not to postpone remedial action to avert threats of significant loss of biodiversity even absent full scientific certainty.<a href="#fnref:7" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:8">
<p>In a side-agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada, the United States and Mexico sign the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation. It creates a Commission on Environmental Cooperation, housed in Montreal, to study environmental issues in the trade bloc and provide information to the public and decision-makers. The Commission is empowered to investigate public complaints that any NAFTA member state is failing to enforce its own environmental laws. The Commission has no enforcement power however, and NAFTA state representatives must approve--and may prevent--its investigations. <a href="#fnref:8" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:9">
<p>Canada is among the signatories to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, as it takes effect on Boxing Day, 1996. The only international convention to spring directly from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the Convention on Desertification aims to marshall international and national action to combat drought and the loss of productive farmland to desert. Drought is occurring more often, and lasting longer, under the emerging climate. By 2013, as much as 30 per cent of Earth’s land surface had become too dry to farm—twice as much as before 1980.
<a href="#fnref:9" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:10">
<p>The "Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters,"--better known as the Aarhus Convention--is adopted in Europe. It commits member-state governments to gather enough information about their country's environment to establish its health status, and make that data available on request to any petitioner, whether a citizen of the country or not. Aarhus also empowers any citizen or organization with a complaint that a signatory country is not adequately reporting on its natural security, to trigger an investigation by an international panel of legal experts. The panel's verdict and recommendations are not binding, but petitioners may ask national courts to compel compliance. By 2014, 46 mainly European countries are parties to the Convention. Canada is not.<a href="#fnref:10" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:11">
<p>The United Nations Population Fund estimates that world population has reached six billion people. Dr. Nafis Sadik, the Fund’s executive director, notes that the date arrives later than once forecast. "However, world population is still increasing by 78 million people a year. Ninety-seven per cent of that increase is in developing countries, where access to family planning and reproductive health services is limited and where pregnancy and childbirth are still a risk to the lives and health of women." <a href="#fnref:11" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:12">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks seventh among 56 countries. In a first effort to develop a comparative index for the World Economic Forum by which to compare different countries' economic sustainability, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network, combine 64 indicators of national environmental care and performance.<a href="#fnref:12" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:13">
<p>Enacted after a decade of development, the European Union’s ‘Water Framework Directive’ sets out unprecedented goals for its surface and subsurface water, as well as for water in estuaries and marine water within 1 nautical mile of the coast. The Directive sets a target of 2015 for all of Europe’s surface water to be restored to “good” condition. Its definition of “good” is also novel: water must meet both “chemical” and “ecological” standards. The former are based on maximum concentrations of named pollutants; the latter on indices of biological health such as biodiversity. (Variation is permitted for unusual natural conditions such as mineral hot springs.)<a href="#fnref:13" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:14">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship is the third best in the world. Developed by analysts at Yale and Columbia universities for the World Economic Forum, the first Environmental Sustainability Index merges multiple indicators reflecting the state of a country's ecosystems, the degree of human pressure on the environment, human risk from natural hazards, the country's social and institutional capacity, and its stewardship of the global environment. Canada ranks third among 122 countries. <a href="#fnref:14" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:15">
<p>U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Whitman, speaking for the newly inaugurated President George W. Bush, announces that the United States will not proceed with its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gasses. The commitments had been made by former President Bill Clinton. “We have no interest implementing that treaty,” Whitman says. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declares Kyoto “dead.”<a href="#fnref:15" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:16">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks 28th among 29 countries. A detailed examination by researchers at the University of Victoria of Canada's performance on 25 indicators in ten environmental categories, from air pollution to waste management, concludes that, "Canada has one of the poorest environmental records of the industrialized countries."<a href="#fnref:16" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:17">
<p>The Aarhus Convention comes into force, committing its mainly European member states to monitor their national environments and make the results public. The Convention also empowers citizens or groups to trigger independent investigations if they believe a country is not living up to its commitments.<a href="#fnref:17" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:18">
<p>The Yale/Columbia Environmental Sustainability Index, developed for the World Economic Forum, merged 76 data sets tracking natural capital, pollution, ecological stewardship, and a country’s human and financial ability to improve its standard of care, into a single index score. Canada's eco-stewardship ranks fourth among the 142 countries studied. <a href="#fnref:18" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:19">
<p>Twenty-one years after signing the landmark Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1983, Canada ratifies the centerpiece of international ocean law. The convention recognizes signatories’ marine territorial and exclusive economic zones (within 12 and 200 nautical miles from their coastlines, respectively), and their jurisdiction over certain fish and all non-living resources to the edge of the continental shelf. Signatories commit to cooperate in conserving transient fish stocks and fisheries on the high seas. The convention gives states authority over vessels carrying their flag anywhere on the globe, including the high seas, but also makes them responsible for controlling the activities of those vessels wherever they operate.<a href="#fnref:19" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:20">
<p>The Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, comes into force with Canada as a member. The convention is intended to prevent toxic compounds from being misidentified for international sale, or otherwise entering a country that wishes to exclude them. It calls on exporting nations to require accurate chemical labelling, with directions for a product’s safe handling and disclosure of any known restrictions or bans on a product’s use. Party nations may ban the import of chemicals listed in the convention without triggering trade retaliation, and exporting party nations are obligated to respect those bans.
<a href="#fnref:20" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:21">
<p>The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants comes into force. The convention commits member states, including Canada, to take action to reduce and eliminate the intentional or accidental production of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) -- toxic chemicals that bio-accumulate and move up the food chain, posing dangers to human and wildlife. The operations of the heavy oil industry generate substantial volumes of POPs.<a href="#fnref:21" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:22">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks 6th among 146 countries. The Yale/Columbia Environmental Sustainability Index for the World Economic Forum, ranks the world's countries' stewardship based on 76 data sets tracking natural capital, pollution, ecological stewardship, and a country’s human and financial ability to improve its standard of care.<a href="#fnref:22" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:23">
<p>The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions reduction comes into force after Russia ratifies it. Canada commits to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by six per cent below their levels in 1990--to roughly 555 megatons--by 2020. In 2012, the most recent year for which Canada has reported its emissions, national emissions stood at 699 MT.<a href="#fnref:23" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:24">
<p>More than 1,000 leading international life and earth scientists assess the condition of 24 terrestrial and marine ecosystem that supply essential services to mankind, from fresh air to food and water. Their ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’ reports that 15 of those (60 per cent) are in serious decline. Five more are stable but threatened. Only four have improved over the last half-century. Humans have transformed natural ecosystems faster and more comprehensively than ever before in human history in order to secure food, fresh water, fiber and fuel—with a wide and largely irreversible loss of other species.<a href="#fnref:24" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:25">
<p>Canada ranks 28th among 30 countries in eco-stewardship. Comparing Canada to other leading industrial-country members of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), on 29 indicators ranging from conservation of nature to sustainable building, researchers based at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., rank Canada in the bottom three of wealthy nations on environmental care.<a href="#fnref:25" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:26">
<p>Canada comes 43rd, among 234 countries and autonomous zones, in protecting its environmental resilience. Developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC), the Environmental Vulnerability Index captured 50 indicators of a country’s vulnerability to environmental shock. A higher score indicates greater resilience; a lower one, greater vulnerability.<a href="#fnref:26" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:27">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks eighth among 133 countries. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission joins the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network to inaugurate the Environmental Performance Index for the World Economic Forum. The index compares different countries' environmental performance across multiple weighted indicators.<a href="#fnref:27" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:28">
<p>The European Union’s “Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals” (REACH) regulation takes effect. It obliges any company that imports or manufactures more than a metric tonne of a material to register it with a central database in Helsinki, along with information about its effects on human health and the environment. If the material is determined to pose serious and irreversible risk, it cannot be used without official authorization. Before receiving authorization, companies must look for a suitable, less-toxic substitute. Over time, manufacturers must replace extremely toxic compounds with more benign alternatives. A review by the World Bank forecasts that the system will take fifteen years to institute and cost governments and businesses as much as $6.5 billion—but will also save Europe’s health care system $60 billion over the same period.<a href="#fnref:28" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:29">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks 14th among 17 countries. Poor scores on climate change, waste generation, and the overuse of water, pull down Canada's better marks for air quality and forest cover, giving us a 'D' overall in the Conference Board of Canada's comparison of environmental performance among 17 leading industrial nations.<a href="#fnref:29" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:30">
<p>Canada falls to 12th place in the World Economic Forum's Environmental Performance Index. Developed by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the index compares the environmental performance of 149 countries across 25 indicators.<a href="#fnref:30" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:31">
<p>Canada drops one place to 15th among 17 OECD countries ranked for environmental stewardship by the Conference Board of Canada. The assessment scores performance on 15 indicators across six dimensions of stewardship: air quality, waste, water quality and quantity, biodiversity and conservation, natural resources management, and climate change and energy efficiency. The Board ranks Canada near the bottom, awarding it a ‘C’ grade and singling out its poor performance on climate change, its heavy water use and the volumes of waste produced.<a href="#fnref:31" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:32">
<p>Canada is last among eight top industrial countries in climate stewardship. Consulting company Ecofys ranks the top eight industrialized countries and five major developing countries according to their climate policy for the conservation organization WWF and the global insurance firm Allianz SE. Canada comes last among the leading industrial nations. “Nowhere else on Earth do fewer people steward more resources, yet Canada now stands dead last amongst the G8 Nations in protecting our shared home from the threat of dangerous climate change,” says Keith Stewart, Director of WWF-Canada’s Climate Change Campaign.<a href="#fnref:32" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:33">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks 46th in world. The Yale/Columbia/European Commission Environmental Performance Index for the World Economic Forum, compares 163 countries' environmental performance across 25 indicators. <a href="#fnref:33" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:34">
<p>Two environmental-law groups and three Canadian citizens ask the Montreal-based Commission on Environmental Cooperation, established under NAFTA, to investigate the allegation "that the Government of Canada is in breach of its commitment… to effectively enforce … the Canadian Fisheries Act against the practice of leaking deleterious substances from oil sands tailings ponds.” The act prohibits the direct or indirect "deposition of deleterious substances into waters frequented by fish,” their submission notes. Environmental Defence and US-based Natural Resources Defense Council cite studies showing that oil sands operations leak four billion litres (one billion gallons) of toxic fluids into the surface environment each year. “The Canadian government has neither prosecuted any company for documented surface water contamination,” the brief adds, “nor has it pursued regulation governing tailings pond leakage. It relies on the Government of Alberta to alert it to possible violations of the Fisheries Act, and Alberta in turn relies on industry self-reporting.” (Two years later, the government will amend the Fisheries Act to replace those general prohibitions with narrower ones.)<a href="#fnref:34" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:35">
<p>Canada is second-last in the OECD in eco-stewardship. Examining 28 indicators of effective environmental care reported by industrial-state members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, researchers at the School of Resource and Environmental Management, at Simon Fraser University, rank Canada 24th among 25 countries, just ahead of the United States.<a href="#fnref:35" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:36">
<p>Britain's first-ever National Ecosystem Assessment calculates that wetlands, natural pollinators, and greenspace amenities contribute the equivalent of $6 billion CAD (£3.23 billion) a year in economic value to UK citizens.<a href="#fnref:36" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:37">
<p>Canada’s delegation to an international meeting held under the Rotterdam Convention on the control of toxic products blocks the listing of chrysotile asbestos, a powerful carcinogen, among products whose producers must warn purchasers of their dangers, and which importing countries may choose to ban for health reasons. It is the third time Canada, a major asbestos producer from mines in Quebec, has blocked asbestos’ listing. In 2012, Canada will abandon its opposition.
<a href="#fnref:37" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:38">
<p>U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon marks the day that estimated global population reaches seven billion people. “Today, we welcome baby seven billion,” Ban said told international media in New York. “In doing so we must recognize our moral and pragmatic obligation to do the right thing for him, or for her.” Ban observes that the world’s last population milestone--six billion people--passed just 13 years ago in 1998, and called on world leaders to meet the challenge of growing human populations by ensuring the supply of food and clean water, and guaranteeing equal access to human security and justice. <a href="#fnref:38" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:39">
<p>Hours after returning from a United Nations climate conference, Environment Minister Peter Kent announces that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol rather than pay $14 billion in penalties for failing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by six per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. In fact, Canada's emissions have risen 30 per cent, mainly from oilsands development. Russia and the United States have also withdrawn from the Protocol.<a href="#fnref:39" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:40">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranks 37th among 132 countries. Developed by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the index provides a way to compare different countries' environmental performance across multiple indicators.<a href="#fnref:40" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:41">
<p>Canada and the United States renew the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, first signed in 1972. It is the second time the agreement has been renewed. This update addresses the effects of climate change on the Great Lakes for the first time, but also abandons the specific objectives of earlier versions.<a href="#fnref:41" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:42">
<p>Canada announces it will no longer block the listing under the Rotterdam Convention of Canadian-mined chrysotile asbestos, a powerful carcinogen, among products whose producers must warn purchasers of their dangers, and which importing countries may choose to ban for health reasons. <a href="#fnref:42" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:43">
<p>A comparison by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of its member countries' national, provincial and local government support for scientific research and development (spending as a percentage of GDP) ranks Canada in 18th place out of 23 countries. With science spending about 25 per cent below the OECD average, Canada falls below Hungary.<a href="#fnref:43" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:44">
<p>Canada informs the United Nations that it is withdrawing from the international Convention to Combat Desertification. No announcement is made to the Canadian public, although media report the decision the following week. The government cites the Convention as ineffective and bureaucratic. Canada is the only signatory to withdraw from the Convention, and becomes the only UN member not a party to it. The world continues to lose about 12 million hectares of productive land to expanding deserts every year--roughly the equivalent of all the farmland in Ontario and Manitoba combined.<a href="#fnref:44" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:45">
<p>The non-profit Social Progress Imperative, directed by Harvard economist Michael Porter, ranked most of the world's countries for factors that encourage human well being. Overall, Canada scored very well: in seventh place, the best of any major industrial economy. On environmental care, however, Canada wasn't even in the top third, coming 51st among 132 countries.<a href="#fnref:45" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:46">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship remains the second-poorest among advanced nations. Canadians generate more garbage per person than any other developed country. That, our world-leading energy consumption, and water withdrawals of twice the industrial country average, place Canada 15th out of 17 leading countries in The Conference Board of Canada’s "How Canada Performs" environmental ranking, earning us a 'C' grade.<a href="#fnref:46" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:47">
<p>Canada becomes an early signatory of a new international treaty to control and reduced the emission of mercury to the environment. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin (the convention is named after Minamata, Japan, the site of an infamous contamination episode). The treaty calls on signatory nations to reduce air emissions of mercury in particular, but does not take effect until 50 nations have ratified it. Although Canada signed, it did not ratify the convention. Separately, Canadian scientists have identified rising mercury emissions as the number one pollution concern from expanding oil sands extraction. <a href="#fnref:47" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:48">
<p>The Washington, DC-based Center for Global Development ranks Canada in last place among 20 wealthy nations scored for their stewardship of the environment. The report identifies as weaknesses Canada's high greenhouse gas emissions, low gas taxes, and "poor compliance with reporting requirements" under its international biodiversity commitments.<a href="#fnref:48" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:49">
<p>Canada's eco-stewardship ranking recovers slightly to 24th place, according to the Yale/Columbia/European Commission Environmental Performance Index for the World Economic Forum. The 2014 index ranks 178 countries across a reduced number of 20 indicators.<a href="#fnref:49" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:50">
<p>Documents released to the Broadbent Institute under an Access to Information request reveal that Canada closed the environment section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) in 2011, and was no longer engaging diplomatic partners in maintaining or expanding seven international conventions to control the spread of pollution. The documents redact the names of the affected conventions, but independent research indicates they include the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, the Basil Convention on the movement of toxic wastes, International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution From Ships, and several others.<a href="#fnref:50" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:51">
<p>A quarter-century after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound on the south Alaska coast, the area's wildlife have not completely recovered. Salmon and sea otters have returned to the area in pre-spill numbers, but crab, herring, orca and some seabird populations have not recovered. <a href="#fnref:51" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:52">
<p>Two U.S. agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (responsible for most of the country's dykes and many water diversions) issue a joint draft rule to greatly expand federal jurisdiction over "waters of the United States." The new ruling declares that upland tributaries and wetlands that contribute to the health and stability of larger rives and lakes, also fall under federal oversight.<a href="#fnref:52" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:53">
<p>Canada pulls up, but still fails to break into the top one-third of countries in environmental stewardship. The non-profit Social Progress Imperative, directed by Harvard economist Michael Porter, ranked countries for a variety of factors that encourage human well-being. On the environment, Canada moves up four spots to 47th from 51st place among 132 countries. Overall, Canada holds its seventh place ranking, the best of any major industrial economy. <a href="#fnref:53" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:54">
<p>The Montreal-based Commission on Environmental Cooperation notifies Canada that it is recommending that an investigation prepare “a factual record” to “provide the public with a better understanding of Environment Canada’s [Fisheries Act] enforcement strategy and actions as they pertain to oil sands tailings ponds in northern Alberta.” Its notification responds to a four-year-old complaint by Environmental Defence, the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, and three Canadian citizens. Media report that Canada is lobbying the Commission—made up of the federal Canadian Environment Minister, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Mexico’s secretary of the environment--to dismiss the recommendation. Canada and Mexico previously voted to block a CEC recommendation that Canada be investigated for failing to enforce its Species At Risk Act.<a href="#fnref:54" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:55">
<p>The world's major economies are falling further behind the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are needed to keep the planetary temperature within 2°C of its pre-industrial average, a leading research and accounting firm reports. The world’s governments have set a goal of capping warming at 2°C in the belief that anything more will trigger dangerous climate disruption. However, “the gap between what we are achieving and what we need to do is growing wider every year," said a spokesman for Pricewaterhouse Cooper, which compiled the study. "Current pledges really put us on track for 3 degrees [of warming].” A more positive sign is that emerging economies including China, India and Mexico have reduced their economy’s carbon ‘intensity’ (how much carbon is emitted for every dollar of value produced) faster than the United States, Japan or the European Union.<a href="#fnref:55" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:56">
<p>The degradation of 800,000 hectares of boreal forest for oil and gas exploitation in northern Alberta, increasingly large forest fires and old-growth logging elsewhere in Canada, make this country the world leader in degrading intact forest landscapes. According to the World Resources Institute, Greenpeace and other groups, the Amazon had the second-worst record of forest degradation, followed by Russian Siberia and the Congo River basin. <a href="#fnref:56" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:57">
<p>A thirty-minute supper-time hailstorm does $300 million in damage to vehicles and buildings, becoming Canada's second-costliest storm to date.<a href="#fnref:57" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:58">
<p>The federal government announces a moratorium in fishing for Atlantic cod in an effort to forestall collapsing numbers of the once-abundant species. The moratorium puts an end to a 400-year-old mainstay of Newfoundland's economy. It fails to halt the collapse in cod stocks, which by 2014 still have not recovered, 22 years later.<a href="#fnref:58" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:59">
<p>Researchers calculate that British Columbia earns $2.75 billion a year (updated to 2014 dollars) from the non-lumber value of its forests and other natural landscapes. The value comes mainly from outdoor recreation, but also from wildlife viewing and recreational fishing and hunting.<a href="#fnref:59" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:60">
<p>Flooding in Quebec's Saguenay region forces 12,000 people to flee their homes and leaves 10 people dead. Damage makes the flooding Canada's first billion-dollar disaster.<a href="#fnref:60" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:61">
<p>A series of moisture laden 'Pineapple Express' storm systems lash southern Vancouver Island and the lower B.C. mainland, dropping a meter of snow on Victoria. The storms strand scores of motorists on B.C. highways and at one point leave 150,000 homes without power.<a href="#fnref:61" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:62">
<p>Heavy snowfall followed by warm temperatures releases near-record amounts of spring runoff water into the Red River in the United States and Canada. Manitoba suffers over US$500 million in damages, although its 30-year-old diversionary floodwater ‘spillway’—operating at full capacity—saves downtown Winnipeg from the disastrous flooding that inflicts $3 billion in damage on upstream cities like Grand Forks, ND.<a href="#fnref:62" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:63">
<p>Hail, rain, and winds of over 100 km/h, rip through British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, destroying nearly 40 per cent of the valley's fruit crop. The rain and hail also cause power outages and traffic accidents while the wind capsizes boats on Lake Okanagan.<a href="#fnref:63" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:64">
<p>Days of freezing rain, wind and snow across Ontario and Quebec topple 130 power transmission towers, throwing four million people into the dark and contributing to three dozen deaths. Power outages last between a few days and four weeks. Damage is estimated at $3 billion.<a href="#fnref:64" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:65">
<p>A series of storms over two weeks drops 118.4 cm of snow across southern Ontario. Toronto receives more than a year's worth of white stuff, in its snowiest two weeks since 1846, prompting Mayor Mel Lastman to call in the military to help clear it all away at a cost of $70 million. Across Ontario, the storm is blamed for 11 deaths.<a href="#fnref:65" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:66">
<p>A winter storm blasts Atlantic Canada with blizzard snow, rain, and hurricane-force winds, damaging wharves, knocking a lighthouse off its foundation, relocating seaside cottages, and driving a storm surge of sea water into the streets of downtown Charlottetown, PEI.<a href="#fnref:66" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:67">
<p>Southern Alberta suffers its worst drought since 1918--even drier than the 'Dust Bowl' 1930s--as barely a quarter of its normal rainfall arrives between May and August, 2000. The following year is not much better, and before normal rain returns in mid-2002, Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan lose 40,000 jobs and suffer what some estimate to be the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history to this date.<a href="#fnref:67" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:68">
<p>Unobservant and poorly trained public utility employees fail to notice a surge in pathogens entering a small Ontario town's water supply from local farms' field runoff. Before the contamination is detected and corrected, seven people die and 2,500 must be treated for gastro-intestinal infections.<a href="#fnref:68" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:69">
<p>The worst drought in a century on the west coast, and interior temperatures that reached 40°C, set the stage for forest fires to rage over 2,650 sq. km of woodland--11 times the average of the previous decade--sparking British Columbia's longest province-wide state of emergency. In late August, after 44 rainless days in a row, a lightning strike ignites a fire south of Kelowna. Over the following week it destroys 250 homes, forcing a third of the city to be evacuated.<a href="#fnref:69" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:70">
<p>The longest Atlantic hurricane season in 50 years spawns 16 named storms. On Sept. 29, Hurricane Juan, a Category 2 storm, strikes Halifax with sustained winds of 158 kmh. The first hurricane to hit the Nova Scotia capital in over a century topples an estimated 100 million trees, damaging countless homes, throwing thousands into the dark, and contributing to eight deaths across the Maritimes. The 19-floor Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth is evacuated.<a href="#fnref:70" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:71">
<p>A study in four Canadian provinces identifies “hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars” in annual costs for everything from flood control to respiratory health care, that Canadians are saved every year by natural landscapes such as wetlands, forests and natural stream-banks. The study by environmental economist Nancy Olewiler finds that wetlands and forests in the lower Fraser River valley of British Columbia generate services worth at least $231.7 million a year and possibly as much as $973 million. Natural areas in agricultural regions of Manitoba, southern Ontario, and Prince Edward Island, deliver eco-services—largely water purification—worth from $70 to $342 a hectare. In several areas, that exceeds the land’s lease value for farming.<a href="#fnref:71" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:72">
<p>A violent summer wind and rain storm across southern Ontario does $400 million in provisionally estimated damage in just a few hours, making it the province's most costly storm to date.<a href="#fnref:72" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:73">
<p>Commissioned by the British government, economist Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, reports that on the present course, the impacts of a disrupted climate on water resources, food production, health, and ecosystems will cost humanity at least five per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) each year—forever. His conclusion implies a global economic loss of $4.25 trillion in 2012; $91 billion for Canada. It describes unmitigated climate change as the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen in the global economy. Stern later estimates the annualized cost of stabilizing climate-heating atmospheric carbon at between 500 and 550 ppm CO2e (well above what many scientists believe is necessary to limit climate disruption) at about two per cent of world GDP.<a href="#fnref:73" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:74">
<p>Starting with a tempest dubbed the “Hanukkah Eve Storm,” BC is battered by a series of wind and rain storms that generate 17,000 damage claims in the lower BC mainland, Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands. Winds of over 100 km/h topple thousands of trees in Vancouver's Stanley Park. The $135 million in claimed damage is ranked as the province’s worst weather-related disaster loss since fires swept the interior in 2003.<a href="#fnref:74" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:75">
<p>A line of violent storms across southern Alberta drops heavy rain, snarling traffic at 300 flooded Calgary intersections and sending at least four people to hospital after they are struck by or were near lightning strikes.<a href="#fnref:75" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
</li>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:76">
<p>Canada’s first recorded F5 tornado touches down at 6:25 p.m. near the community of Elie, Man., with winds estimated at over 500 km/h. Despite tearing a 300m-wide track over 5.5 km, the tornado’s half-hour rampage takes no lives, although it rips bark off trees and moves an entire house off its foundations.<a href="#fnref:76" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>