OTTAWA — The fall session of Parliament isn’t looking especially green as the Harper government focuses on the economy and crime-fighting.
The Conservatives say they aren’t planning to table major environmental legislation in the coming months. That has opposition MPs accusing the Tories of shirking.
But Environment Minister Jim Prentice said Monday the government will use existing laws and regulations to do its work.
“Quite simply, the government is focused in terms of climate change on using existing legislative authorities,” Prentice said in an interview from New York.
“In that regard, we have a very heavy agenda of regulations, which are in the publication phase and public consultation process.”
Prentice said the House of Commons environment committee is already busy reviewing three pieces of legislation, which MPs should deal with before new bills are introduced.
Those bills deal with species at risk and environmental protection.
He also recited a list of regulations the government is fine-tuning. They deal with wastewater, biofuels and tailpipe-emission standards for cars and trucks.
Tory House Leader John Baird said recently the government would focus this fall on the economy and fighting crime and made no mention of where the environment sits on the list of priorities.
Gerard Kennedy, the newly appointed Liberal environment critic, accused the Conservatives of using the economy as an excuse to avoid their environmental responsibilities.
“The fact that Mr. Prentice has a do-nothing agenda isn’t entirely surprising,” Kennedy said.
“I think he’s there to simply suppress problems in the file.”
Yet the environment crept into a nearly hour-long phone chat last week between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and NDP Leader Jack Layton.
They spent most of their time on the economy, with some discussion of the long-gun registry, but at one point, talk turned to an NDP climate-change bill that’s stuck in the Senate.
Layton urged the prime minister to let the Climate Change Accountability Act go to a vote. The Conservatives hold a slight majority in the Senate and Layton accused them of holding up the bill, which passed the House of Commons this spring.
“I said, at a minimum, that bill should be allowed to proceed to a vote,” Layton said.
Linda Duncan, the NDP environment critic, said she hopes to put the green file “front and centre” in Parliament heading into a major United Nations climate-change conference later this year.
She also says the Tories are stalling on promised greenhouse-gas regulations.
The Harper government says it intends to wait for the Obama administration to get its environmental house in order before moving ahead with regulations.