Bill C-38 is now law. After a marathon (22 hour plus) parliamentary session and quashing the more than 800 proposed amendments, sleepy MPs passed the 425-page omnibus budget bill.

Every proposed amendment was defeated, rendering weeks of committee hearings, parliamentary debate and expert witnesses as useless exercises in faux democratic policy making.

Bill C-38 is an oil baron’s dream come true. It’s the largest environmental bill ever adopted in Canada and it does not strengthen any aspect of environmental protection. It radically weakens the laws used to protect our natural environment, including exempting projects from environmental assessment, limiting the time provided for public and expert input into environmentally sensitive projects and removing habitat protection from the Fisheries Act. That prompted even two former Conservative fisheries ministers to publicly oppose the bill.

The scope of this bill is overwhelmingly opposed by most Canadians. In a CARP poll taken at the end of May, a staggering 85 per cent of Canadians disagreed with the Conservatives bundling so many changes into a single bill.

The Harper Conservatives are gambling that by stuffing massive changes to everything from Old Age Security to immigration and habitat protection into one bill, people won’t notice. By doing it in the early days of their mandate, they are betting voters will forget, come the next election.

This bill is more than a legislative juggernaut. It erodes what can best be described as fundamental Canadian values: a social safety net for seniors, welcoming new Canadians and protection of our natural heritage.

Something is clearly wrong with our parliamentary system. Canada’s “first past the post” electoral system negates the opinion of a clear majority of Canadians and is eroding fundamental Canadian values. Sixty-one per cent of Canadians did not vote for the Harper Conservatives a year ago, yet they control 54 per cent of the parliamentary seats, and they just voted down 100 per cent of the amendments proposed to this bill.

A majority of Canadians (74 per cent) want our government to take action on climate change, even if that may lead to higher energy prices. In Montreal, 250,000 people took to the streets in April on Earth Day, demanding the government live up to the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the Harper government continues to question the science behind climate change and Bill C-38 makes it official: Canada has withdrawn from Kyoto.

Harper’s political gamble may pay off in the next election, but he is gambling with the future of our country. When a government sacrifices the views of whole regions of the country and simply ignores the view of the majority of its citizens, people walk away. And democracy only works when people take part.

The environment is a leading issue for young people who will inherit our planet and are the foundation of future elections in this country. When they see those in power ignore their concerns they lose faith in the democratic process. Heartbroken or cynical, no matter how you describe it, this is how democracies become so eroded they fall apart.

Wikipedia — that democratic bastion of knowledge — defines democracy as “an egalitarian form of government in which all the citizens of a nation together determine public policy, the laws and the actions of their state, requiring that all citizens have an equal opportunity to express their opinion.” Our “first past the post” system has become so dysfunctional that 40 per cent of eligible voters stayed home in the last election, and “voter suppression” (encouraging people not to vote) has become as common a tool of some parties as lawn signs.

If we had a proportional representative system, the votes cast in the last election would have given us a parliament more reflective of Canadian’s views. The Conservatives would have garnered 122 seats, the NDP 95 and the Liberals 59. The Bloc would have party status and the Greens would have a small but robust caucus. And Bill C-38 would never have been.

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The Conservatives’ Bill C-38 will have a massive negative impact on our environment. It will have an equally negative impact on our democratic system. While the global scientific community is warning of a looming environmental crisis in collapsing fish stocks, climate change, ocean acidification and unsustainable consumption, Canada is suffering a serious democratic crisis.

Bruce Cox is executive director of Greenpeace Canada.

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