Guilbeault’s quasi-religious environmentalist ideology was always disconnected from reality and proved damaging to Canada.
Last week, the Canadian government announced proposals to streamline and speed up the regulatory process. The government’s summary of those changes can be read below:
These proposals will improve regulatory efficiency, while maintaining robust environmental standards and respecting Indigenous rights, by:
– Ensuring federal reviews and decision-making timelines take no more than one year, once all information from the project proponent has been received;
-Establishing a Crown Consultation Hub to strengthen Crown consultation on project reviews and coordinate one Indigenous consultation process, per community, per project;
-Creating a regulatory system where a single comprehensive federal decision is made on permits and approvals for major projects;
-Assigning responsibility and authority for certain projects to the federal regulatory organization with the most expertise; and
-Creating federal economic zones through regional impact assessments, in consultation with Indigenous Peoples.
The Government is also advancing a number of proposals to diversify Canada’s trade and attract new investment:
-National Trade Corridors: Modernize Canada’s National Transportation Policy to emphasize the importance of supply chain efficiency through the designation of National Trade Corridors. This will better reflect the reality of how transportation supply chains support trade corridors and identify solutions to increase performance.
-Modernize Port Governance: Modernize Canada’s port governance framework to better reflect the realities of modern trade and the role of marine infrastructure in supporting Canada’s non-US trade diversification goals, and foster collaboration amongst the port authorities.
-Simplifying Regulatory Reporting: Adopt a “tell-us-once” approach to information sharing between departments and agencies and streamline redundancies and inefficiencies in transportation regulations.
Guilbeault not impressed
While many in the business community are welcoming these proposed changes, former Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is among those raising concerns. As reported by Radio-Canada, Guilbeault compared the changes to the Harper era, and thinks the government is “going too far”:
(Translated from French)
“What is being proposed, factually, in terms of changes to the various laws, goes further than what Prime Minister Harper had proposed at the time , said Mr. Guilbeault, former Minister of the Environment under Justin Trudeau.”
“For Steven Guilbeault, changes were necessary, but I think we are going too far, since for all practical purposes there would no longer be federal environmental impact assessments except for electricity transmission line projects, offshore projects.”
“They are even calling into question the principle that a project can threaten the existence of a species, which is a cornerstone of the Species at Risk Act. I think we’re going too far , he added in an interview with Radio-Canada.”
Greenpeace Canada has also raised concerns:
“Harper took years to dismantle environmental protections. Carney, on the other hand, is doing it in just a few months , lamented Louis Couillard, climate and energy campaign manager at Greenpeace Canada. Abolition of the carbon tax. Suspension of electric vehicle quotas. Weakening of environmental assessments. And now: accelerating the approval of major projects and pipelines, with the potential to lock Canada into fossil fuels for decades.”
A shift towards rationality
There is a quasi-religious fervour to Guilbeault’s environmentalism. He appears to sincerely believe that Canada limiting our own prosperity by slowing/stopping the development of the oil & gas sector and raising prices for consumers to lower consumption would somehow impact not only this country, but also shift global emissions. Guilbeault had the opportunity to put his ideas into practise in the Trudeau era, and the result was Canada underproducing oil and gas relative to what we could have with a less restrictive federal stance, energy investment that could have gone to Canada going to the United States, the Gulf nations, and other oil/gas producing jurisdictions, and a rise in regional tensions. Canada was left worse off than it could have been, while other countries pursued their own interests.
Thus, the concerns expressed by Guilbeault and others are a sign that Canadian policy is shifting in a more rational direction.
The application of the human mind
At a fundamental level, the environmentalism of Steven Guilbeault is a rejection of the human mind. It represents a desire to treat Canada as a static nature preserve, rather than a nation that the human mind must act upon in the pursuit of transforming raw materials into things of value that generate prosperity. To create opportunities for young people and to generate the growth and wealth required to enhance our sovereignty, we need to unleash the greatest minds in Canada’s private sector, and that requires embracing rationality. The government should continue to head in this direction and continue moving away from the irrationality Guilbeault represents.
Spencer Fernando
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