Conservatives’ Rona Ambrose has the authority to force the provinces to adhere to a stricter set of emissions rules and must act now to curb dirty power producers

TORONTO STAR: June 16, 2006

Canada’s environment ministers are on the verge of adopting a pollution standard for coal-fired power plants.

This should have been good news, except the long-awaited standard for mercury emissions sounds as lame as telling your spouse you will now only be cheating once a week. In short, the ministers’ proposal to cut mercury emissions means only that Canadians will be poisoned less, but poisoned all the same.

The ministers’ libertine response to a grave pollution problem gives federal Environment Minister Rona Ambrose the chance to prove her promise to clean up Canada’s air and water is more than the sweet-talking we’ve all heard before.

The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME), which includes all provincial, territorial, and federal environment ministers, first began talking about a standard for these mercury emissions about eight years ago. While they were talking, the amount of mercury emitted from power plants in Canada amounted to thousands of kilograms, when even a gram of mercury can poison a water body.

Emissions from power plants remain the country’s largest unregulated source of mercury emissions.

The wait for the CCME standard might have been worthwhile if it had produced more than the proposed 50 per cent reduction — based on a generous reading and contingent on Ontario following through on its promise to close all of its coal plants — by 2010 and closer to the 90 per cent reduction that can be achieved with affordable technologies. Now all that remains for the weak standard to become official is final sign-off by the ministers, including Ambrose.

Almost everyone agrees that mercury, even in tiny amounts, is toxic; that massive amounts of mercury go up the stacks of coal-fired power plants and come back down into our treasured lakes and rivers; and that this mercury contaminates fish while posing particularly serious health risks to pregnant mothers and children who eat fish.

The risks children face include neurological damage and learning disabilities. The only question therefore is why the CCME put forward such a weak standard.

The proposed Canada-wide standard is weak not only because it ignores our understanding of the danger of mercury and the pollution control solutions, but because it also ignores the advice our federal government gave the U.S. two years ago.

At that time, Canada urged the U.S. to adopt a rule that would achieve a 60 to 90 per cent reduction in mercury emissions by 2010 from American power plants. The proposed Canadian standard falls significantly short even of the low end of the recommended range.

The standard is also weak because it is not enforceable. Instead provinces are left to implement the standard as they see fit.

And since the overall 50 per cent reduction target is very much dependent on Ontario shutting down all of its coal-fired power plants by 2010, it helps to keep in mind that Ontario itself will decide what penalties it will face if it fails to comply.

Indeed, given Ontario’s announcement that it will not live up to its pledge to close all of its coal-fired plants by 2009 — including the massive Nanticoke plant — the question is whether the standard that is eight years in the making isn’t already obsolete.

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The other problem is that the reduction target does not include emissions from new plants.

For instance, if Alberta, responsible for the biggest share of mercury emissions from coal-fired plants nationwide, or British Columbia build new plants — as they appear eager to do — overall emissions will be higher than the standard would have us believe.

New plants would only be required to capture a certain percentage of the mercury in their emissions instead of falling under a specified Canadian cap.

In one respect it is not surprising that the result of the lengthy CCME discussion is a lazy standard. Critics have long argued that giving a dominant role to the provinces on such decisions of national importance is likely only to achieve the lowest common denominator.

If the CCME proposal is adopted, all Canadians will be left to suffer under a standard that pleases even the dirtiest provincial power producer.

All of this simply leads to the conclusion that the federal government should, in the national interest, impose its own mercury reduction requirement on the coal-fired power industry.

The government has the power to take action under the regulatory authority of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which listed mercury as a substance targeted for “virtual elimination” some years ago.

Ambrose therefore has the authority to do what the federal government should have done long ago instead of leaving the matter to provincial ministers, namely, pass a regulation requiring the same 90 per cent reduction (as the higher end of the range) in mercury emissions by 2010 it recommended to the U.S.

In the long run, being a little tough on our dirty power producers would be a lot fairer than being very tough on our kids and other vulnerable populations.

A strong national regulation would not only protect Canadians but also give the federal government the moral authority to challenge the U.S. — and other large global emitters, such as China — on the massive mercury emissions that drift across our border and contaminate thousands of our lakes and rivers.

In the Great Lakes region of Canada 38 percent of mercury deposits are from U.S. sources. This is not surprising given that 50 per cent of U.S. electricity is produced from coal, compared to about 20 per cent in Canada.

And it may, unfortunately, also not be surprising that one in seven American women of childbearing age has mercury in her blood at, or in excess of, levels considered safe, according to a recent study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Given that millions of Canadians live downwind of U.S. coal-fired plants, this is not good news.

Provincial ministers may think themselves clever for coming up with a mercury standard that allows their power industries to carry on within loose limits.

In truth they are only cheating all of us out of a healthy environment.