Bill66 I must state my…

Bill66
I must state my objection to the passage of this bill. It is presented in the format of a routine omnibus housekeeping bill, but is in fact a broad ranging deregulation bill that destroys years of effort to create reasonable protocols for management of the environment and other matters such as workplace safety and urban planning. Having spent many years teaching on matters dealing with the environment, I understand how difficult it is to develop environmental laws that survive intense lobbying by industry to make them as little trouble as possible to the conduct of business. Bill 66 would change this to no trouble at all by allowing certain businesses to by-pass regulations that provide essential environmental protection, as stated in Schedule 10, or to not have them at all, as stated in Schedule 5.
Schedule 5 would repeal the Toxic Reduction Act, as though we had learned nothing from the Walkerton tragedy. True, it was the consequence of human error in monitoring water quality, but water would not have been poisoned in the first place had there been proper control of agricultural contamination. The same could easily result from other toxins that leach into the groundwater around a well, or into lake waters from which communities draw water.
The theme of removing regulations that safeguard water quality is strongly featured in Schedule 10, with the non-application of Section 39 of the Clean Water Act, Section 20 of the Great Lakes Protection Act, Section 7 of the Greenbelt Act and Section 7 of the Lake Simcoe Protection Act to any Open for Business By-law that a community might enact. The other major theme in Section 10 is to ensure that an Open for Business By-law will preempt existing zoning by-laws, thus creating an open zoning situation that compromises effective urban planning. At this point one realizes that Bill 66 is not a carefully crafted document to fine tune the regulation of business within the context of effective environmental management and urban planning. It is a shopping list of regulations that certain business elites find to be irritating, which they demand to be removed in the name of making Ontario more competitive.
In fact, Ontario has always been competitive due to its connection to America’s industrial manufacturing belt and its ability to diversify. Among the areas of diversification are environmental management and urban planning which have grown, both as stand-alone enterprises and as units within large industrial operations thanks to the need to respond to regulation, a response that also fuels innovation. I think that the perceived benefits of Bill 66 will give way to the realization that by allowing business a free pass on the environment this bill is moving the province in the direction of less business competitiveness, both within and outside the businesses it is supposed to help.