Mr. Janowitz also recommended that Gloria Chao, LL.M., might have the legal expertise to suggest how the suggested amendment could be incorporated into the existing legislation. Ms. Chao agreed to give this question consideration, and I hope that you will be hearing from her on this point. Again, I want to emphasize that I am not a lawyer, and have no experience with the mechanics of writing legislation. Nevertheless, I hope these comments will have some relevance to your process. What occurred to me after the hearing is that there are already provisions in the existing Environment Act that completely depend, for their implementation, on the existence of integrated economic-environmental accounts, and that may be practically ineffectual without the existence of such accounts.
Examples follow below.
GPI Atlantic, in close cooperation with Statistics Canada and other agencies, is already developing these integrated accounts for Nova Scotia, and similar initiatives are under way elsewhere. The methodologies have actually become quite well established and accepted. To give one concrete example, the current recognition of the polluter pay and precautionary principles in the Environment Act has not hitherto led to any concerted actions to reduce provincial greenhouse gas emissions, despite an explicit international commitment to do so, and despite the fact that future generations will pay the costs of climate change. Integrated environmental-economic accounting that explicitly includes the costs of greenhouse gas emissions, as the Genuine Progress Index does, for example, would lead to the introduction of tax penalties for vehicles that consume more fuel, incentives for energy conservation, the promotion of a freight shift from road to rail, and a series of other concrete initiatives and measures. Quite simply, legislative adoption by the government of the principle of integrated economic-environmental accounting, can help make these sections of the Act a reality.