By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 27, 1997; Page A01

The Canadian Rockies are like the nation's church. They have stoked the aspirations of political leaders and provided many of the country's central images, challenges and resources. And it is in mountain locales like this, on the altar of the Rockies, that Canada is struggling to define its modern relationship with the land.

A few miles to the west, in the shadow of Jasper National Park, an open-pit coal mine recently approved by Prime Minister Jean Chretien's government will cut a 25-square-mile swath through the habitat of grizzly bears and other animals that Canada wants to protect. It means jobs for the people of nearby Hinton; but it also means a spoiled view, and possible loss of business, for people who lead tours through the surrounding hills.

"There is all this incremental destruction," said Ben Gadd, a local naturalist and hiking guide. "Pretty soon it is like the Colorado Rockies, all full of mines and farms and ranches and ski resorts. That all happened one nick at a time, and this is a big nick."

From logging sites that have crept disruptively close to a rural monastery in Nova Scotia to smog and traffic worries in Vancouver, from hazardous waste near downtown Sydney, Nova Scotia, to pesticide worries on bucolic Prince Edward Island, Canada is finding it increasingly hard to reconcile the demands of global trade and its own naggingly high unemployment rate with the tough environmental standards it advocated until a few years ago. After seeing Canada create an image as one of the world's "greener" industrialized countries, environmentalists here argue that jobs, trade and deficit-fighting now hold sway.

Canada led the push for a biodiversity agreement at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, for example, but failed to pass a federal endangered species law.

In tandem with the United States, Canada also failed to reach the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emission goals set at the summit and is hedging on the targets it is willing to accept at an upcoming conference in Japan on global climate change. With Canada's oil and gas sector booming, provinces like energy-rich Alberta are pressuring the country not to promise too much.

Discussing a possible international forestry convention, a former resource minister said that such an agreement is needed to protect the country's logging industry from "environmental terrorists," as much as it was needed to protect the environment – a sign, environmentalists say, of Canada's emphasis on jobs and trade.

"There is no doubt that in the late 1980s, environmental concern in Canada was second to none in the world. . . . That is really when the reputation was formed," said Paul Muldoon, a lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association. Since then, he said, "there has been a large gap between what Canada is known for and what it does."

Canada's new environment minister, Christine Stewart, does not disagree that economic worries have been paramount in recent years as the Liberal Party government focused on reducing public spending deficits, boosting trade and trying to lower an unemployment rate lodged at around 9 percent. That, she hopes, will change now that the federal government's books are balanced and economic growth is strong.

"Canada is very concerned about the environment," Stewart said. "You did not hear that loudly in the past several years because of our economic problems. But we are turning the corner."

Environmental Rivals

Measured against the size of the economy and the population, Canada rivals and in some instances surpasses the United States in the waste it generates and the resources it uses.

A 1995 Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) review of Canada's environmental performance found that the country emitted as much carbon dioxide as the United States per dollar of gross domestic product, and more sulfur and nitrogen. The percentage of its population served by sewage treatment systems is low compared with many other developed economies; raw waste is still discharged into the waters around such major cities as Halifax.

Despite an extensive history of creating parks and wilderness areas, the percentage of land protected – about 9 percent, according to the OECD study – is less than the average of nearly 10 percent set aside in more land-scarce European countries, or the 10.6 percent protected by the United States.

Statistics like that reflect one of Canada's two central but contradictory images that took root before its founding and have endured in its politics, economics and cultural life. On one hand, this is a country whose economy remains resource dependent, and proudly so, a place where "hewers of wood and drawers of water" – an Old Testament image that became part of Canadian lore – harnessed a sometimes wild climate with dams and logging roads, mines and oil wells. The other image is of a pristine wilderness, a still-intact frontier nation where sports enthusiasts, canoeists and hikers can blaze new trails.

The size of the place – the world's second-largest land area, with a population largely clustered along the U.S. border – allowed those two ideals to coexist for decades. Major environmental problems often related as much to the United States as they did to Canada. Air pollution, degraded water quality in the Great Lakes and acid rain were chief among those border issues. Canadian pressure helped lead to joint agreements that have cut some air and water emissions by as much as 90 percent.

Pollution from the United States remains a concern. More and more frequently, however, Canada's two ideals clash because of the country's own choices, as logging, mining and other economic staples push farther into the bush, the population grows, and competition increases among those who would use the same resource differently.

"The big challenge Canada has to get over in the 1990s is that we don't have unlimited wilderness anymore," said Harvey Locke, past president of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and an oil industry lawyer in downtown Alberta. "We are hitting the wall. . . . It has never clicked in our minds, and it is pretty surprising."

Some of the disputes have played out internationally. British Columbia, for example, is the scene of annual battles between activists from Greenpeace and other groups and the forest industry over management of the province's temperate rain forests. Cathedrals in their own right, the forests of towering 400- and 500-year-old trees are revered for spiritual reasons by the province's native tribes, by naturalists for the diversity of habitat they offer, and by many others for aesthetic reasons. In a province known for its hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities, they hold an economic value as well.

For the logging industry, however, to stop cutting old-growth forests is to stop cutting altogether. Second-generation forests, planted when the original ones were felled, generally aren't mature enough to begin harvesting, so the older trees will need to keep coming down for years to come if the industry is to sustain itself.

Conflicting Views

The logging issue in British Columbia mirrors the country's conflicting tendencies. The provincial government, sensitive to labor and economic development concerns, has been adamant about keeping the forest industry buoyant; at the same time, it said in October it would put millions of acres of northern Rockies wilderness off-limits to development. Similarly, 120 miles south of the coal mine site in Alberta, federal officials recently rejected plans for more commercial development in Banff National Park, saying the environmental health of the park is too important to sacrifice.

Yvan Hardy, the assistant deputy minister in charge of the Canadian Forest Service, said battles like those in British Columbia were unheard of when he entered forestry in the 1960s and forest professionals "were the only ones there."

"It was a world by itself; there were no pressures," he said. Since then, "all of the rules have changed."

And not just in British Columbia. What's evident in Canada today is that those same types of disputes have spread beyond marquee topics like the rain forest or seal hunting and blanketed the country.

About half of Toronto's air pollution is of U.S. origin. Environmental groups say the other half, the domestic problem, stands to worsen with increased traffic congestion, growing suburban sprawl and the reopening by Ontario Hydro of several aging fossil fuel power plants.

In rural northern Ontario, logging around the small town of Temagami has generated feelings as intense as those in British Columbia. Though the forests are not as grand or as renowned internationally, Toronto's expanding urban area – and the tens of thousands of country cottage owners it supports – puts a premium on Ontario's rural areas.

In the Northwest Territories, a series of lakes will be destroyed to make way for a diamond mine; in Newfoundland, the provincial government was willing to let the world's largest nickel mine, and the attendant smelter, proceed without a full environmental assessment, until local groups sued and the courts ordered the study.

Across the country are an estimated 5,000 hazardous waste sites, with no fully defined program for pursuing those responsible or for funding the cleanup. As of 1994, only a handful had been cleaned or assessed. One, the Sydney Tar Ponds in northern Nova Scotia, has 700,000 tons of contaminated soil, 30 sewer outfalls and a 90-year-old unlined landfill clustered around a defunct coal furnace. Cleanup has been ongoing for a decade, with millions spent but little progress made.

Even places considered to be Canada's garden spots, like Prince Edward Island, are feeling the pressure. The island's main business, agriculture, has switched from its tradition of family farms growing a variety of crops to growing potatoes for factories that process them into french fries. Potato cultivation is harder on the soil and uses more chemicals, raising concerns about pollution, erosion and water quality on an island whose healthy, rural lifestyle was immortalized in the "Anne of Green Gables" books.

These and other issues are being debated in a society where the rules for making and enforcing environmental standards are in flux. Basic questions, such as which branch of government can regulate the release of toxic chemicals, are subject to dispute.

In one recent case, Quebec challenged the federal government's authority to regulate the release of PCBs. The Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 in favor of the federal government, with three justices saying that control of toxics is a provincial matter.

In Canada, said environmental lawyer Rod Northey, "the federal government does not come in . . . and do whatever it wants in the national interest" because of the country's structure and politics.

Additionally, federal regulators in Ottawa, the nation's capital, are working on a plan that will delegate more authority for setting and enforcing environmental standards to the provinces. The effort is aimed at making environmental regulation as efficient as possible, with only one level of government responsible for any given issue.

But it is also linked to the ongoing argument between federal and provincial authorities, particularly in Quebec, over who should do what. Since the provinces have vastly different economies and interests, as well as varying abilities to pay for monitoring and enforcement, environmental lawyers say it will be more difficult for Canada to guarantee that minimum standards are met.

Particularly when it comes to international agreements, like the upcoming climate-change talks in Japan, the authority of Canada's federal negotiators may be undercut if enforcement of any new standards is left to the provinces.

"That continues to be the challenge of our federation," Stewart said. "It can be frustrating. . . . In this kind of scenario, you are never going to please all the people all the time."