CKNW Editorial
for July 25, 2000

The swing to the right seems to be on in many parts of the world, Britain’s Tories have made a huge comeback George W Bush seems to be slated for the White House and there is no doubt, pollsters aside, that Canadians are listening to Stockwell Day. What troubles me about this comes not from promised fiscal policy but from the point of view of an environmentalist.

Let me start with this proposition – no capitalist is an environmentalist except by compulsion. Look at the Forest Industry. One of the principal reasons the forests are in bad shape – as with the fishery – is the bankruptcy of environmental policy when forest companies did as they pleased. They will now tell you that they’ve learned their lesson which is barnyard droppings. The bottom line for shareholders is not enhanced by refraining to cut down trees.

This doesn’t mean that capitalists are evil … not at all. It simply says that the game they play is the bottom line. The resource based unions are no different. If trees aren’t cut down, jobs are lost and rewards are diminished. My point is not one of criticism but merely that you can’t expect anyone whose livelihood depends on extracting resources to be wild about setting aside parks or treading gently over a cruddy little stream that some environmentalist thinks may have fish values.

Business always says that it can and will police itself. It doesn’t. The Vancouver Stock Exchange didn’t do it and public governors became necessary as they did for the BC Law Society. 25 years ago builders came up with a Home Warranty Plan that they said made it unnecessary for government to get involved and we know what happened. The automobile business is much better all around because governments refused to accept industry self policing as all that what was necessary.

Factories didn’t become safer because of industry enlightenment but because of government intervention with Factories Acts and Workers’ Compensation. The list is a long one.

Look at the environmental record. The Pharmaceutical and chemical industries now offer us Aspartame and genetically altered foods with the same enthusiasm with which they gave us DDT, Thalidomide, PCP, the Love Canal and the Bhopal disaster. And who can forget the way those who opposed it were patronized by the Nuclear Energy industry which offered us safe, cheap power. Had they not been stopped, Alcan would have further jeopardized the Stuart system sockeye run (it is to the lasting credit of the NDP that they stopped the project and to their lasting discredit that they haven’t restored and further protected the Nechako.) Seattle Light and Power would have flooded the Skagit Valley so that Seattle could have cheaper power – why would they care for a beautiful fishing stream?

I remember debating a man from the Fraser Institute who insisted that private ownership, left to its own devices, would take great care of rivers because of the fish values. He said that in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In Britain, as here, the best available use of rivers was to throw industrial and farm waste into them. Many have now been brilliantly restored and are in private hands subject to environmental rules. Why the rules? Because it’s still more productive to use rivers as the toilet for industrial and farm waste than to lease them out to fishermen.

It takes a great deal of political will to make and enforce environmental will. You’ll always be up against the cry of industry that they can’t compete if they have all those damned bureaucrats and their rules to deal with. And to some degree they’re right and it comes down to what the public will is. Do we, as a society, care more about the short term bottom line than we do for the long term health of our environment? And that question is not an easy one for as industry is slowed down, so are jobs and so are the dividends that go into the pockets of elderly and retired people, often with union pension funds.

We look askance at Brazil, where at an alarming rate hardwood forests are being destroyed because there is no other option. It’s that or starve and the fact that at the end of the day it’s starvation anyway doesn’t much impress a family with starving kids.

Governments very much to their credit, including the one in Victoria, have recognized these truths and have tried to widen our industrial base to wean us off relying on the lumber business for everything. But this often looks better on the drawing board than it does in the towns and villages around the province that have relied on resource extraction.

But here again my point is made. Industry has neither the mandate nor the will to look at decentralizing industry and helping those dislocated by problems in various sectors of the economy. The people of Tumbler Wells as were the people of Logan Lake and Gold River were largely left to their own devices.

I do not make the case that governments are especially good planners – the opposite argument would be easier to make. But government has a role both in making an economy a welcome place for all capital and taking a role in helping places and people hit by the vagaries of a fast changing world. It’s the role of a catalyst and sometimes, perhaps, the policeman. But it’s an important role because government does, at least in theory, represent society as a whole, not any special interest groups within that society.

So when we’re told by industry and people like Stockwell Day that everything will just be peachy if government would just back off and get out of the way, don’t eat that Elmer, them’s horse buns.