Thank you for inviting Ecojustice to this committee meeting.
Ecojustice is a group of lawyers in Canada who have been in practice for 20 years with an objective of seeking a healthy environment, using the law as a tool to achieving that.
You may wonder what a lawyer has to tell this committee and to say on the economy. No, we're not economists, but there are obvious places where the law and the economy do intersect. I will offer two concrete examples that Ecojustice has identified. At the very least, if adopted they would be cost-neutral, if not ultimately affording government savings in the end.
As I was in the audience, I heard the earlier comments about Canada's fragile economy. We're certainly cognizant of that and are not in the position of advocating enormous spending on environmental enforcement that simply won't happen. We're trying to be creative and look at ways in which we can achieve better outcomes for the environment, enforce and uphold Canada's environmental laws, and not put us in an economically disadvantaged position.
The first of those two ideas is making environmental law enforcement information readily available to Canadians. This is something that's available in the U.S.; it's something that is available piecemeal in Canada. If one wants to know if enforcement action has been taken against a certain polluter, for example, it can often be very hard to get that information.
From a transparency standpoint, I think it's obviously not good for the public to be unable to get that information, but it has deeper consequences that we're aware of. One of those, for example, is the inability for investors to easily obtain information when they're doing their due diligence on a facility as to whether they ought to buy an entity. Such information is not very easy to get right now. It requires access to information requests that can be costly and time-consuming. These go into the government bureaucracy and are not an ideal way to get that information.
What we're advocating is the creation of a database that would be easily searchable online. It would contain the following: inspection information, investigations, warnings, orders, prosecutions, convictions, and penalties. It would be a comprehensive database that would allow all of the different agencies throughout Canada that engage in environmental law enforcement to put their information there. The obvious cost saving would be that this information would no longer be subject to access to information requests; it would simply be available. So we're putting this forward as ultimately a cost-neutral outcome.
Beyond that, there are the greater, loftier ideals about democracy and the notion that access to information is democracy in action, more or less. I think it would be a good thing. No matter what our environmental laws say and what they are, we want to enforce them—whatever is on the books—and this would be an excellent tool for doing so.
The second issue is the notion of capped liability for offshore drilling. This is something that's very important to Ecojustice. Right now, our legislative regime caps liability at $40 million for a spill in the Arctic, like the BP Horizon offshore spill. That's a very low figure. In the U.K, I believe it has gone up to $125 million. To give a perspective to this, the BP spill has cost around $40 billion already, so there really is no reason for a government to be acting as an insurer for these companies. It creates disincentives for companies to enact proper policies to ensure safety and that kind of thing.