Austerity and obscurantism. These were the defining features of the first full calendar year of Stephen Harper’s majority government, which came to a quiet close this week.

Take, for instance, Bill C-38, Canada’s longest-ever federal budget. Setting out $5-billion in spending cuts, the budget was the most austere in over a decade. And yet, despite the depth of the slashes and thus their potential to remake the country, their nature and likely impacts remain intentionally obscure. As part of an omnibus budget, most of the cuts were not evaluated by the relevant parliamentary committees; details about their implementation were withheld from watchdogs and opposition MPs; and many cuts were to programs without which it will be very difficult to measure the price we’ve paid for austerity.

This was particularly true, and particularly unsettling, in the case of the government’s approach to environmental policy in 2012. Bill C-38 included more than $160 million in cuts to environmental spending, significantly impairing our ability to measure or mitigate our impact on Canada’s wilderness and wildlife. Yet it was never put before the Commons environment committee, nor does the bill ever mention climate change.

Here are just a few of the measures, buried deep within the 400-plus-page budget, that were passed with little or no public debate:

Oil and water

The government explicitly invited resource companies to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the world’s largest estuary, and amended the Coasting Trade Act to make it easier for them to do so. This despite the fact that the seismic method of exploratory drilling that would be used in the area is known often to maim or kill some of the 2,000 species of marine wildlife that live in the Gulf and are essential to the Atlantic and Great Lakes fisheries. Worse, an oil spill would likely permanently disrupt that ecosystem, not to mention sully the coastlines of Canada’s five easternmost provinces.

Unfortunately, we’re no longer able to ascertain the probability of an oil spill. The budget lifted the requirement for environmental assessments of offshore drilling and gutted the Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research, the one environmental agency capable of doing them.

Moreover, the decimation of COOGER, in addition to the deep cuts to oil-spill-response units and Pacific fisheries scientists, make the government’s proposed plan to ship raw bitumen from Canada’s west coast to Asia considerably riskier than it already was.

Data deep-sixed

The budget also withdrew funding from the Experimental Lakes Area, the world’s leading freshwater research centre, which has done groundbreaking work on acid rain, household pollutants and much more.

Apparently the Department of Fisheries and Oceans can’t find the $2 million per year required to run the facility, though it will have to scare up the $50 million needed to remediate the lakes in the area upon the centre’s closing. It’s a bewildering decision that calls into question whether the government’s motivations are, as it claims, fiscal, or whether the Conservatives are instead trying to silence a source of inconvenient data.

Meanwhile, we needn’t wonder about the motivations behind the government’s scrapping of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a federally funded environmental watchdog created by the Mulroney government in 1988. When asked in Parliament how the government justified its decision to cut funding for the organization, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird implied it was because the Conservatives objected to the Round Table’s repeated endorsements of a carbon tax.

In 2012, the government’s environmental policies showed a commitment to pursuing short-term economic gain, even if at a great long-term cost. We need something better than austerity at the expense of the environment and obscurantism at the expense of democracy. There’s an important debate to be had about how to negotiate between the economic potential of Canada’s natural resources and the environmental cost of exploiting them. Let’s hope the government is willing to have it in 2013.