Ontario’s new environment commissioner wants an end to cheap diesel for farmers and a rethink of sprawl-minded transportation and land-use policies, and that’s just for starters.
“We don’t have a true level playing field in transportation, in agriculture, we don’t have it in land development. We have a regulatory system that got us what we’ve got,” says Dianne Saxe, who’s been the province’s environment commissioner for a month. She comes to the job after a 40-year career as an environmental lawyer, the consensus choice of all three parties at Queen’s Park.
The new commissioner was drawn to environmental law by “a mad passion for trees and a love for any place you could put a paddle,” she half-jokes. She was sent off to camp on Lake Couchiching near Orillia as a small child, from the family postage-stamp sized property in Toronto (her father was crusading coroner Morton Shulman), and was inspired.
But a law practice is a retail business. Most of your victories are small. “What I really wanted was to work on larger social issues,” she says.
Well, here she goes. Saxe is the first new environment commissioner in 15 years, after her three-term predecessor Gord Miller left to run for the Greens in the last federal election.
She says she wants to look forward and warn the province about how its policies get in the way of its supposed goals, rather that reporting on what the government did a year ago.
‘Fossil-fuel subsidies do not reduce inequality, they increase inequality. Because most of the money goes to the better-off’
She’s in the early days yet, and spent her first couple of weeks at international climate talks in Paris (Canada’s equally new environment minister, Ottawa’s Catherine McKenna, is very impressive, Saxe says). So she’s still studying up. But one sacred cow she’s prepared to harpoon is coloured diesel. That’s fuel that’s been sold without the taxes that make up a big part of the pump price. It’s meant to be used industrially, like in farm equipment, and it’s dyed red so that if it’s found in a truck on the road, it’s easy to identify.
“We in Ontario, according to the provincial budget, subsidize diesel consumption by $190 million a year,” Saxe says. “That’s not providing better outcomes, it’s not providing income support. It’s not targeted. … Fossil-fuel subsidies do not reduce inequality, they increase inequality. Because most of the money goes to the better-off.”
Although small farmers are the most visible beneficiaries of tax-free fuel, plenty of it just helps large companies that Ontario should be looking to for innovation, Saxe says. Cheap fuel sabotages that goal. “It just makes it cheaper for them to use more diesel,” she says.
Road tolls, where they encourage more efficient driving, are another tool Ontario’s been reluctant to use, in spite of near-unanimity among economists that they’d reduce traffic.
And then there’s urban sprawl, driven by a combination of economics — people want houses, and land distant from urban cores is a cheaper place to build them — and deliberate provincial policies that require cities to make sure there’s enough land for all sorts of different housing types. The property-tax system that funds city governments also makes downtowns more expensive places to live than they should be.
“Land-use planning and development is really Ontario’s oilsands,” Saxe says. “It’s our biggest factor driving (greenhouse-gas) emissions. It’s tied very strongly to important parts of the economy. It has long-lasting important impacts.”
Reviews of how Alberta handles its oilsands have ended careers. Ed Stelmach led the Progressive Conservatives to a huge majority in 2008, fiddled with the royalties Alberta charges oilsands producers, and was forced out before finishing his term. Messing with property development in Ontario means messing with many billions of dollars.
Saxe, who answers to nobody but the legislature, could provide Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government with cover for policy changes it might want to make anyway. Let’s see about diesel and road tolls first, before we wait for big changes to land-use policy.
But if Saxe lives up to her promise to tell us the real costs of government policies we take for granted, she’ll only help.