A number of agencies and regulations have been overrun, annihilated and buried by our nice Conservative, Steven Harper led government in the noble name of saving money. Depending on how much you worry about the risk of being suddenly incinerated while sipping a cold drink, this might not be such a bad thing. The circle, beginning with lax regulations, could become positively virtuous for our citizens, as such parsimony leads quite naturally to lower taxes, more money in the hands of consumers to buy the goods made by our newly liberated businesses; liberated from the shackles of regulations and, yes, believe it or not, science. The circle is closed as unfettered enterprise creates more employment which turns into more consumption. Who could object, we may ask, as the rousing dream chorus “bad regulations, bad science, good Conservatives,” drowns out all else, to the delight of Mr. Harper? Can there conceivably be anything objectionable to policies that make possible the acquisition of more stuff by more people?
Other countries have gone down the same saintly road of unrestrained industrial development, China being the most notable, widely admired by, among others, Justin Trudeau, the sometimes addle-minded leader of Canada’s third ranking political party. And look what they’ve got to show for it: It has, in the last 15 years, tripled its output and brought hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. In the process China has also severely degraded its water supply: 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in rivers that supply drinking water to Shanghai; waste water from a paper mill was used to grow wheat which the farmers themselves would not eat. The air in many urban areas is unfit to breath and kills thousands with respiratory ailments as regulations around power plant and heavy industrial emissions are either non-existent or unenforced so as not to hamper the growth of industry. The World Health Organization has recently classified these types of emissions as carcinogenic to humans, a designation shared with tobacco smoke.
The big story in Canada and the US has been the huge expansion in the shipment of crude oil by rail to overcome inadequate pipeline capacity. It’s gone from almost nothing in 2009 to 175,000 carloads for Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways in Canada and to 109,000 carloads just in the three months of April to June 2013 for the big railways in the US. How could they have pulled off such an astounding expansion?
You’d imagine that this huge increase in the transport of hazardous material would have required major upgrades to the rail system and the rolling stock. And you would be wrong. While there has been much talk of safety upgrades very little has been done, and quite legally, as the government has not imposed any new stringent regulations. So, why should a railway company increase its expenses when all it has to do is increase the risks of disastrous derailments, particularly since that increased risk would be borne by others.
Rail safety regulations that would have imposed extra costs on the railways, when they found a bonanza in the transport of oil, were actually relaxed. It is quite obvious that transporting hazardous goods such as highly explosive oil requires more stringent regulation to avoid catastrophic derailments such as the one in the community of Lac Megantic, which incinerated 47 people and wiped out the centre of the town. But more expensive infrastructure would cut into profits so why not take the extra risk with the existing infrastructure not designed or built to handle such a many orders of magnitude leap in hazardous material transport. That very large extra risk, in any event, would be borne by others, like the people living near the rail lines and who needn’t be offered even the tiniest profit share from the rail companies.
And what might science have to do with hampering business that the Harper government found it necessary to declare war on this most reliable approach to discovery and knowledge? But science is right up there with regulations as another enemy of saintly industrial progress. A big coup for the ruling Tories, and a win for industry and cheaper goods, has been the termination of the Experimental Lakes Area, the pristine freshwater bodies used by scientists to study the effects on lakes of everything from climate change to industrial pollutants. The fear, of course, being that adverse effects of industrial processes might be discovered, which would, in turn, lead to evil, costly regulations. Happily the Ontario government has opted to pick up the measly $2 million tab to keep it running. But there’s more. What if researchers were to dig through already archived scientific material and find damning evidence of harmful effects which could also lead to a clamor for more oversight. Our diligent faith based government has the solution: close down Oceans and Fisheries libraries across the country. The list goes on, but I’m sure you all get the point.
There is this perverse and dangerous belief that if you can surreptitiously pass on costs to someone else, you can produce lower priced goods, which will make more people happier and so create a larger pool of voters who will opt for the Conservatives. We need only look at China, Russia, Brazil, the Central Asian Stans, Nigerian oilfields, not to mention the looming disaster of Climate Change to see that this is entirely self-defeating and, in the end, more costly than a policy of openness. However, until governments accept that the price of stuff we produce should include all relevant costs discussions will remain at a ludicrous level. We can see this in the current Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) debate surrounding Greenhouse Gases emitted by fossil fuel, particularly coal, burning power plants. The argument goes something like this: Global Warming gases are bad and will create huge costs later on and should be eliminated; it is really expensive to install CCS technologies which would eliminate these gases; however, if we don’t impose binding regulations to do so then there won’t be any increased costs; ergo, don’t impose the regulations and hide the real cost of generating electricity. Hello! The real cost of generating electricity from coal is staggeringly high and you can hide it but you can’t make it go away.
As long as voters are willing to close their eyes to the inevitable consequences of ignoring the real cost of producing much of what they consume, there is no incentive for governments to set things right and so ensure the proper allocation of society’s scarce resources. Indeed, being but human, a man like Harper and his ilk in leadership positions around the global, would be acting quite abnormally if they unilaterally enacted policies that appeared to disadvantage their own consumers relative to those in other countries. It is the willfully blind leading the happily sightless. Obviously, sane regulatory policies can only be possible under one circumstance: all countries undertake them simultaneously. That, my friends, is about as likely to happen as humans suddenly renouncing sex.
