Climate Change, Environment, Headlines, North America

CANADA: Groups Back Off Pollution Complaint, Turn to Government

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Jun 1 2004 (IPS) - In a rare move, environmental activists are backing a decision to refrain from pushing Canada to get tougher on pollution from coal-fired power plants, saying that a new government in one province seems intent on meeting its promise to abolish the operations within three years.

The Ontario Clean Air Alliance was responding Tuesday to a decision from the Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which said it would not pursue a complaint from 49 environmental groups in Canada and the United States over the Province of Ontario’s coal plants.

“Basically their decision is right because things have changed dramatically in Ontario since May 2003,” said Alliance Chairman Jack Gibbons.

The province elected a new Liberal Party government in October 2003, which then pledged to close the three coal-burning plants in 2007.

The administration “is moving as quickly as is reasonably possible to phase out coal and to minimise the adverse impacts the coal plants have on Ontario residents and people in New York State and New England”, Gibbons said in an interview.

“Really, now we need some progressive politicians in the United States to follow up on this leadership example and do the same thing,” he added.

The CEC was formed to police the environmental side accord of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into force 10 years ago between Canada, Mexico and the United States.

In December 2002, the body concluded that free trade had, on the whole, been good for the North American environment.

On Jun. 14 an independent panel will release its 10-year review of the CEC and NAFTA’s environmental accord, which experts have suggested could be the model for environmental side agreements in future pacts like the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which will comprise 34 nations, stretching from Alaska to South America’s Patagonia region.

“We will see, I think, attempts to use the (NAFTA) side agreement and the CEC as a sort of example of what ought to be embedded in the FTAA,” said David Runnalls, president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, based in Winnipeg, Canada.

“I think it’s a second-best solution because what it essentially allows governments to do is to sort of ‘ghettoise’ the environment and say ‘oh yeah, we’ve got a commission to deal with that’,” he told IPS in a previous interview.

The CEC has no power to enforce its decisions but acts to spotlight environmental issues.

Ontario, Canada’s largest province and the country’s industrial heartland, is the third-most polluting jurisdiction in all of Canada and the United States. It borders the northern U.S. states of Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania.

One of the province’s three coal-burning plants – Nanticoke, on Lake Erie near the New York border – was responsible for one-half of the increase in Canada’s air pollution from 1998 to 2000, according to the CEC.

During the same period, air pollution from U.S. industries decreased, the body added in a 2000 report.

In May 2003, Gibbons’ Alliance joined crusading New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer in announcing the complaint against Nanticoke and two other coal-fired plants in the province.

According to a Canadian public health expert who also joined the action, air pollution kills 85 people a year in Niagara, the region south of Toronto that borders the United States and is home to the world-famous Niagara Falls.

The groups’ complaint was the first environmental claim against a Canadian government under NAFTA.

In its decision released Monday the CEC said it would not purse the petition because action by the governments of Ontario and Canada “indicates a dynamic and improving situation in regard to the transboundary pollution of concern”.

But the agency left the door open to a future investigation if those efforts prove unsuccessful.

In a report released Tuesday, Gibbons’ Alliance, a coalition of health, environmental and consumer groups, municipalities, utilities, religious bodies and unions that says it represents over six million Ontarians, gave the province’s new Liberal Party leader a B+ grade for pledging to phase out coal burning, but warned of dangers ahead.

“Ontario can achieve a coal phase-out by 2007 through a combination of energy conservation and efficiency, ecologically sustainable renewable sources of electricity (e.g., biomass, water-power, wind-power) and high-efficiency natural gas-fired power plants if it takes steps in the next six months to secure these sources of new supply,” said ‘Phasing out Coal: A Six-Month Progress Report’.

The report also suggested that reinvesting in nuclear power – an option the power-hungry province is considering – would threaten to delay the phase-out of coal.

“Given the history of problems with Ontario’s nuclear generating stations, a reinvestment in nuclear could lead to increased coal generation due to the ongoing demand for replacement power created by the almost inevitable underperformance of the nuclear stations.”

But according to Gibbons, if the government succeeds in closing the coal-fired plants on schedule, the reduction in pollution would equal at least 50 percent of the province’s target set out in the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that aims to cut the emission of greenhouse gases that are believed to cause climate change.