From the Toronto Star
December 13, 2020
Published in the Hamilton Spectator December 15, 2020.
Last week’s resignation of most of the province’s Greenbelt Council has again highlighted the Ford government’s apparent disregard for environmental issues, and its willingness to acquiesce to demands presented to it by the land development industry. The resignations included the council’s chair, former Toronto mayor, federal PC cabinet minister, and the head of the Royal Commission on the Toronto Waterfront that laid the foundation for the greenbelt initiative, David Crombie.
The immediate cause for the resignations was provisions buried in the government’s November 2020 budget bill that undermine the role of local Conservation Authorities in controlling development on lands that are at risk of flooding and other hazards - significant considerations in the age of climate change - as well as wetlands and shorelines. The dramatic growth in the province’s use of Ministerial Zoning Orders (MZOs) to override municipal and provincial rules on specific sites, were another factor. The wider gutting Planning rules intended to curb urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area contributed to the council members’ decisions as well.
The government’s wider record on the environment is well known: the shredding of the province’s climate change strategy; the elimination of the independent office of the Environmental commissioner; weakening or eliminating rules on endangered species, gravel pits, forestry and toxic chemicals; and the evisceration of longstanding rules on industrial water pollution and environmental assessment. The overall result has been a turning of the clock back on the province’s approach to environmental issues, in some cases, by half a century or more.
The situation begs questions about the reasons for the government’s apparent hostility to environmental issues.
A large part of the problem, hinted at in the Progressive Conservative Party’s 2018 election platform, is that the Ford government seems to have no foundational notions of how to approach the task of governing, or what the provincial government is supposed to do, other than cut taxes, hydro rates and ‘red tape.’ Implicit in this is the absence of any clear concept of a constructive role for government, other than perhaps to facilitate the advancement of private interests, as illustrated by the increasingly aggressive use of MZOs.
This lack of an underlying sense of direction for what the provincial government should do explains in part the government’s consistently slow-footed responses on the COVID-19 pandemic. Time after time, the province has been caught off-guard by what were known risks around the pandemic. The government’s initial response to the global spread of the pandemic was sluggish – infamously encouraging people to “go away” and “have fun,” at the beginning of March break. Vulnerabilities in locations like long-term care facilities and among foreign agricultural workers were similarly known, but not acted on until too late. The province again seemed unprepared for the widely predicted arrival of a second COVID-19 wave this fall.
The notion that governments should play a more proactive role, identifying potential problems and taking steps to avert them seems beyond the reach of the Ford government. Rather the government’s style has been fundamentally reactive, waiting for problems to become obvious before acting. This has been most apparent around COVID-19 and public health. But it is implicit in its approach to a range of other issues including climate change, the role of Conservation Authorities, and environmental assessment. All of these areas involve processes focussed on the early identification of emerging problems, and then taking action to prevent them from occurring in the future.
The second defining feature of the government’s style has been a strikingly uncritical attitude towards certain business interests, particularly the development industry, natural resource and other traditional industries, and a few other voices like sport hunters, to the exclusion much of the rest of Ontario society. A good deal of what the government has done on environmental and land-use issues have been industry lobbyists’ agendas for decades. The key difference was that previous governments had the good sense to realize many of these ideas served no one’s interests but their proponents. Behind that was a willingness to listen to expert input from public servants, as well as a wider range of outside constituencies.
The consequences of this ungrounded and reactive approach to governance are becoming apparent through the second COVID-19 wave, as the province hits record high infection rates. The environmental consequences may take longer to become evident, but past history tells us they may be severe.
The political costs of the government’s approach are unknown at this stage, but Ontario voters have traditionally placed a high value on the administrative competence of their governments, a test which the Ford government seems to be struggling to meet over the pandemic.
There is also a long history in Ontario of overly cozy relationships with the development industry leading to political downfalls. The Patty Starr affair and the questions it raised around the Peterson government’s connections with developers was a contributing factor that government’s loss of the 1990 election to Bob Rae’s NDP. In the mid-1990s, Harris government’s developer-friendly approach to urban development around Toronto led to a major political backlash, which contributed to its ultimate defeat in 2003. Those experiences should be additional sources of caution for the Ford government, as it looks towards an election now less than two years hence.