This month’s release of the auditor-general’s damming report on the Ford government’s Made-in-Ontario environmental plan left Environment Minister Jeff Yurek calling for “help” in dealing with climate change. But the reality is that on environmental and energy issues, the government remains on the same path of disruption and destruction that defined its first piece of legislation that dismantled the previous government’s climate change strategy.

Rather than changing direction in response to the auditor’s report, the government’s assault on the environment seems to be continuing. Its most recent iteration is Bill 132, a massive omnibus bill ostensibly aimed at reducing “red tape” adopted last week. Buried in its details is an attempt to undo the previous Liberal government’s moratorium on neonicotinoid pesticides, widely identified as posing serious risks to pollinators.

Other provisions of the act weakened the rules around forestry operations, mining, water taking, gravel pits and quarries and pollution.

The government is moving forward with a parallel proposal that would dismantle the province’s regulatory framework for controlling industrial water pollution, first established in the early 1990s as the Municipal-Industrial Strategy for Abatement (MISA) program.

The province is proposing to move away from the MISA program’s province-wide pollution limits for each major industrial sector and return to the pre-MISA model of negotiating pollution limits on a facility-by-facility basis. The underlying goal seems to be to make it easier to authorize increased discharges of both conventional and toxic water pollutants.

The MISA rules are now 25 years old, and there have been calls from the former environmental commissioner’s office and others for their overhaul and updating. Instead, the Ford government is effectively proposing to turn the clock back on how the province manages industrial water pollution to more than half a century ago.

The ongoing tragedy of mercury poisoning at Grassy Narrows from a pulp mill that operated at Dryden, Ont. in the 1960s and 1970s speaks to the effectiveness of that kind of regime.

The Ford government seems to have missed the point of the October federal election. The inability of the federal Conservatives to articulate an effective strategy to deal with climate change was one of the reasons they failed to make any electoral inroads in Ontario.

Where the government goes from here is an open question, but there is an old saying that if you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the first thing you do is to stop digging.

For the Ford government on the environment, good places to stop digging would be to end its quixotic crusade against carbon pricing, reconsider implementation of the retrograde measures in Bill 132 and halt the effort to dismantle the MISA program. From there the government needs to move forward, fast, on the very real environmental problems facing the province.

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