Harper’s Choices 2010: Conservatives gut environmental protection

Budgets are about choices.

With record level smog and pollution, and growing concern over air and water quality throughout Canada, Stephen Harper had an opportunity in the 2010 budget to crack down on big polluters and bring in effective environmental protection laws.

But instead, he chose to reward polluters and take a pass on reigning in his big oil friends in the tar sands.

Harper’s budget makes it easier for companies to pollute by slashing environmental regulations even further.

Harper’s budget further weakens environmental protection by:

• Weakening environmental assessment by stripping authority of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and handing it to federal departments.
• Ending all funding to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science.
• Cutting $43 million from the Ministry of Natural Resources for environmental protection.

Canadian Wind Energy Association

The Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) today expressed its serious disappointment with the federal government’s failure to expand and extend its very successful ecoENERGY for Renewable Power Program in the 2010 federal budget. Despite its expressed desire to harmonize climate change and clean energy policies with the United States, the federal government is now clearly moving in the opposite direction with respect to efforts to attract wind energy investment and jobs.