January 30, 2016 On Wednesday of this week Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna and Natural Resources Minister Gary Carr announced a new “interim” approval process for certain pipeline and energy resource development projects that were already in or …
Guest Blog – FES Adjunct Professor Peter Love: Energy Efficiency and COP21
Although there has been a tremendous amount of media coverage on the recent COP21 agreement in Paris, there has been very little on how the targets that were set will be achieved. It is certainly remarkable that this marks the …
Letter to the Editor – Globe and Mail and Toronto Star: Re: $37 Billion Hydro Fees
December 3, 2015 Dear Sir/Madam,While Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s report raises legitimate concerns over the breakdown of the electricity system planning process in Ontario, her report incorporates a number of serious misconceptions and oversights: Her claim that Ontario’s have …
The October 2015 Election and its Consequences: A Game changing event in Canadian Environmental Policy?
December 2, 2015 The defeat of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper inspired a host of analogies from the speakers at the November 27th SEI seminar on the Trudeau government, the Environment, Energy and Climate Change. The demise of the …
Implications of the 2015 Federal election outcome for the Environment, Energy and Climate Change
October 20, 2015 Many of those following the 2015 federal election campaign saw the swing in momentum in the direction of the Liberals in the final days of the campaign. Yet the extent of Justin Trudeau’s party’s successes in Atlantic …
Shades of Green: The 2015 Major Party Platforms and the Environment, Energy and Climate Change
October 15, 2015 Overview The 2015 Federal election campaign has been one in which environment was the issue that refused to go away, despite the absence of advocacy efforts on the part of NGOs (a function of CRA’s aggressive ‘audits’ of …
Public Safety in Private Hands Revisited: the Case of Ontario’s Technical Standards and Safety Authority
Over the past twenty years Delegated Administrative Authorities (DAAs) have come to be widely employed as a model for delivering public safety and consumer protection regulatory functions at the provincial level in Canada. Although strongly supported by governments, the model …
“Smart Regulation” and Public Safety: Transport Canada’s Safety Management System (SMS) Model and the Lac- Mégantic Disaster
April 2015 The following is a summary of a working paper posted on the Sustainable Energy Initiative Website at http://sei.info.yorku.ca/working-papers/. In the early hours of July 6th, 2013, an unattended train of 73 car-loads of crude oil from the Bakken …
Response to Ontario Climate Change Discussion Paper: Putting a Price on Carbon
March 27, 2015 Kathy Hering Senior Policy Analyst Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change Climate Change and Environmental Policy Division Air Policy and Climate Change Branch 77 Wellesley Street West Floor 10 Toronto Ontario M7A2T5 Re: EBR Posting 012-3452 …
Federal government’s latest moves on rail safety still leave major gaps – Published in the Montreal Gazette February 25, 2015 – http://montrealgazette.com/news/national/opinion-federal-rail-safety-measures-remain-inadequate
Last Friday afternoon (February 20), the transport minster Lisa Raitt announced the federal government’s latest responses to the July 2013 Lac-Megantic rail disaster in which 47 residents of the Quebec village died. The federal government’s announcement consisted of three components: …