Environmental Justice and Reclamation Policy in Canada:
Some Considerations
Anne Dance
PhD Candidate, University of Stirling
How can we learn from the past and explain environmental crises in ways that are
both just and effective? My current research asks how twentieth century contaminated sites in
Canada were understood, and the reasons why they were (or were not) reclaimed. While
mapping out policy affecting my two case studies, the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta and the
Sydney tar ponds in Nova Scotia, I encountered a number of environmental justice concerns.
Indeed, while contaminated landscape policy can be understood through the lens of Canada’s
enduring and fraught jurisdictional schisms, it has also been framed as an environmental
justice policy issue. This is an important consideration when seeking innovative and effective
reclamation strategies.
Contaminated Sites and Environmental Justice
Human-incurred environmental crises, Kim Fortun writes, offer the opportunity to
reassess personal and social ethics,1 and this could equally apply to contaminated sites and
their reclamation. Could continued anxiety around clean-up strategies lead to the
establishment of new development principles, such as those based around environmental
justice? My research thus far has found that reclamation in Canada did indeed come to be
understood in terms of debt and reparation, liability and moral values. Some of the most
heated debates around reclamation weighed concepts of justice. In Sydney, Nova Scotia,
residents portrayed the pollution of local lands and waterways as a serious crime; an external
party should pay, they argued, not simply in financial terms, but by accepting moral
1
Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001), 251-271.
© Anne Dance, 2012
responsibility for decades of contamination and alleged health impacts. Guilt, some residents
asserted, was cumulative. And reclamation strategies, they claimed, were both the means to
and outcome of justice.2
How might such a narrative translate into specific goals and recommendations for
future clean-up projects? A roadmap for a just reclamation is not forthcoming, and
reclamation strategies can be highly contentious. Nevertheless, environmental justice
principles provide one possible avenue for just policies. Indeed, the origins of environmental
justice movement were directly linked to a comparable issue, toxic waste siting in the United
States. Community activists found that toxic waste dumps were disproportionately more
likely to be sited near poorer and marginalised areas with limited political clout. As a
consequence, the health, safety, and social wellbeing of these communities, many of which
were predominantly African-American, suffered.3
During the last half of the twentieth
century, environmental justice considerations came to influence everything from occupational
health hazards, gendered identities, and the relationship between the so-called global “North”
and “South”. In the United States, the most important political moment came in 1994 with
President Clinton’s Executive Order Number 12898; Bolivia’s recent 2011 “Law of the
Mother Earth” has also been heralded as a landmark innovation that goes beyond
environmental justice to give equal weight to nature’s rights.4
In Canada, there has been a marked lack of political will to tackle the legacies of
environmental hazard and exposure by employing environmental justice principles. Indeed,
2 Anne
Dance, “Proof in Uncertainty: Inscribing Contamination on Ghosts and Bodies at the 2006 Tar Ponds
Hearings,” [DRAFT] 1-26.
3 An
extensive historiography exists detailing the emergence of the environmental justice movement. See for
example Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (3rd ed. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2000); E. Setterberg and L. Shavelson, Toxic Nation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993).
4
John Vidal, “Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth,” The Guardian 10
April 2011, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-worldsrights.
© Anne Dance, 2012
contaminated landscape policy has come under heavy criticism from environmental justice
scholars. Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh, for example, note that the laxness of
Environment Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory puts communities in danger. 5 A
handful of Canadian provinces have passed environmental justice legislation or guidelines,
including the two largest, Ontario and Quebec. However, unlike President Clinton’s
Executive Order, which called for all federal operations to consider environmental justice
considerations, national attempts to pass environmental justice legislation in Canada have
foundered, despite significant support from NGOs and the legal community.
The case of the Environmental Bill of Rights is particularly illustrative of this
stalemate.
In 2008, New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament (MP) Linda
Duncan (Edmonton—Strathcona) sought support for her private member’s bill, C-649, An
Act to Establish a Canadian Environmental Bill of Rights. The bill provided for increased
public participation and community decision-making powers; it also encouraged the
enforcement of international health and environmental standards. A private member’s bill in a
minority Parliament, Bill C-649 was in a precarious position. Indeed, it died once on the
order paper, only to be resuscitated during the third session of the 40th Parliament; it struggled
through the committee system and died once again thanks to the 2011 federal election.6
Conservative party MPs openly opposed the bill, asserting the legislation pandered to urban
idealism and would overburden rural communities whilst leading to more litigation and
foreign interference. The Bloc Québécois, one of the three political parties in favour of its
provisions, expressed concern that it would allow the federal government to infringe upon
5 Andil
Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh, Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction
(Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications Limited, 2008), 66.
6
Canada, Parliament, House of Commons, “LEGISinfo: Bill C-469,” (Ottawa: Government Services and Public
Works Canada, 2012), available at http://www.parl.gc.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?
Language=E&Mode=1&billId=4328547.
© Anne Dance, 2012
areas of provincial jurisdiction.7 Encountering opposition from multiple fronts, the fate of
Bill-C649 reflects the tremendous barriers blocking national environmental justice
provisions.
It is worth nothing that whilst describing the politics of toxic waste siting, Barry G.
Rabe argues that community “NIMBYism” (Not in My Backyard) reactions to hazardous
waste facilities were symptomatic of greater problems: a widespread distrust of government
institutions and civic processes.8 This echoes some of the frustrations expressed by Sydney
residents during a hearing: residents chastised the government’s protection of perceived
rights, such as the right to a healthy environment.9 If contaminated site clean-up debates and
the absence of environmental justice provisions reveal and erode levels of public trust, surely
a greater effort should be made by those invested in maintaining these institutions to take
notice of environmental injustices? Perhaps community health and environmental justice
concerns could be integrated within ongoing debates about civic engagement and trust in
public institutions.
Conclusions
It is difficult to deny the continued importance of environmental justice in debates
around site clean up. Despite remarkable advances in technology, contaminated sites are not
7
Canada, Parliament, House of Commons, Proceedings of the Standing Committee on the Environment and
Sustainable Development: November 1, 2010 (Ottawa: Government Services and Public Works Canada, 2010),
available at http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?
DocId=4746498&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=3&Language=E ; Canada, Parliament, House of Commons,
Proceedings of the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development: February 15, 2011
(Ottawa: Government Services and Public Works Canada, 2011), available at http://www.parl.gc.ca/
HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4960661&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=3
8
Barry G. Rabe, Beyond NIMBY: Hazardous Waste Siting in Canada and the United States (Washington DC:
Brookings Institution, 1994).
9
See for example Canada, Nova Scotia, Sydney Tar Ponds Agency and the Joint Environmental Assessment
Review Panel, Hearings on the Sydney Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens Sites Remediation Project, Volume 6, April
19 to May 18, pp. 1252.
© Anne Dance, 2012
likely to disappear in the near or distant future. As reclamation projects continue to evolve, it
is worth reflecting on the generational legacies of such projects, both in terms of potential
costs and dividends. We can ask how concerns about health, ecological sustainability, and
accessibility might be addressed in the present-day, and how attempts to meet these problems
in the past were confronted or neglected. Scholars like Time Edensor have argued that
contaminated sites distort normative boundaries, leading to a number of implications about
our socio-economic systems,10 and there is much to be learned from stories about spaces we
continue to consider derelict, dangerous, and dirty.
On a less philosophical level, the physical presence of contaminated spaces can
contest political borders, requiring some sort of jurisdictional harmonization. A “just”
reclamation also requires the breech of boundaries, for it is at once both deeply personal and
contingent upon universal claims to safety, power, and a “clean” environment. Such broad,
far-reaching policies are problematic in a country where politicians are leery of returning to
the harrowing constitutional battles over rights and values that rattled the nation over twenty
years ago. Instead, MPs are primarily focused on defending their party line and constituencyspecific concerns. Any future attempt to pass environmental justice legislation must somehow
curtail, address, or altogether avoid this politicization and fragmentation. This will likely
prove difficult.
Even when such obstacles are overcome, our expectations of environmental justice
legislation and reclamation policy must also evolve if we are to effectively address the
implications of contaminated landscapes. Leading environmental historian Tina Loo argues
that constructing solutions to massive environmental change requires us to consider of a
10
Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space Aesthetics and Materiality (Berg: Oxford, 2005).
© Anne Dance, 2012
plethora of scales: “not just the large scale space of flows and the small scale space of places,
but…deep time and human time…when history starts and where history happens.”11 For
reclamation policy, this will likely involve reconciling different scales of space, memory,
justice, and evidence to create enduring solutions that honour the past and safeguard the
future.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. An Act to Establish a Canadian Environmental Bill
of Rights. Bill C-469, 40th Parliament, 2nd Session, 2009. Ottawa: Public Works and
Government Services Canada. (First Reading, October 29, 2009). Available at http://
www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Docid=4186037&file=4
--------. “LEGISinfo: Bill C-469.” Ottawa: Government Services and Public Works Canada,
2012. Available at http://www.parl.gc.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?
Language=E&Mode=1&billId=4328547.
--------. Proceedings of the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable
Development: February 15, 2011. Ottawa: Government Services and Public Works
Canada, 2011. Available at http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/
Publication.aspx?DocId=4960661&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=3
--------. Proceedings of the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable
Development: November 1, 2010. Ottawa: Government Services and Public Works
Canada, 2010. Available at http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/
Publication.aspx?DocId=4746498&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=3&Language=E
Canada. Nova Scotia. Sydney Tar Ponds Agency and the Joint Environmental Assessment
Review Panel. Hearings on the Sydney Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens Sites Remediation
Project. Volumes 1-18, 1-3432. April 19 to May 18.
Vidal, John. “Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth.”
The Guardian. 10 April 2011. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-worlds-rights.
Secondary Sources
11
Tina Loo, “Disturbing the Peace: Environmental Change and the Scales of Justice on a Northern River,”
Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 912.
© Anne Dance, 2012
Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. 3rd ed.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
Dance, Anne. “Proof in Uncertainty: Inscribing Contamination on Ghosts and Bodies at the
2006 Tar Ponds Hearings.” [DRAFT] 1-26.
Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space Aesthetics and Materiality. Berg: Oxford, 2005.
Fortun, Kim. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Gosine, Andil and Cheryl Teelucksingh. Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An
Introduction. Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications Limited, 2008.
Loo, Tina. “Disturbing the Peace: Environmental Change and the Scales of Justice on a
Northern River.” Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 895-919.
Rabe, Barry G. Beyond NIMBY: Hazardous Waste Siting in Canada and the United States.
Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1994,
Setterberg, E. and L. Shavelson. Toxic Nation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993.
© Anne Dance, 2012