INSTITUTIONAL BARRIERS TO ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION FRANCOIS B R E G H A
Rawson Academy of Aquatic Science, Ottawa (Received June 1990) Abstract. Several barriers impede the free flow of environmental information in the government's hands to the public. The most important of these are the compartmentalization of environmental information among several departments, the manipulation of information to protect vested bureaucratic or political interests and, lastly, the withholding of information. The media's ineffective coverage of environmental issues and the small number of well-funded environmental groups constitute two additional institutional barriers to the broader dissemination of environmental information. Solutions proposed to reduce these barriers include the creation of an independent Commissioner on the environment reporting publicly to Parliament about the government's performance and the development of a widely-available system of indicators to inform the public about changes in environmental quality.
I. Introduction Governments control the flow of information for various purposes: to protect national security and commercial interests; to protect the privacy of its citizens; to facilitate the uninhibited consideration of policy options; to manage public opinion, etc. In this regard, environmental policy-making differs little from policy-making in any other area. The structure of the policy-making process itself contributes to fettering the flow of information to the public. In 1988, the Hon. Tom McMillan, then Minister of the Environment, described policy-making as a testing of whose will prevails among vested interests: More and more decisions are being made by powerful governments wielding great authority in favour of strongly organized groups... Government in most Western democracies is now less a matter of leadership than a matter of brokerage politics. Politicians are reduced to distributing public spoils based more on who shouts the loudest than on who speaks the most sense. (McMillan, 1988) The environment is consistently under-represented in such a tug-of-war because it has no strong institutional advocate. Being diffuse and all-embracing, the environment cannot compete effectively with economic sectors which have vested interests to promote them. Thus, agricultural policy is less concerned about conserving the long term productivity of soils and more about the immediate needs and demands of farmers. Similarly, energy policy is designed more to protect or direct the energy industry than to address end-use needs efficiently at minimum environmental cost. In the trade-offs inherent in policymaking, adverse impacts are too often borne by the environment rather than by one of the stakeholders (Bregha et al., 1990). Not surprisingly, the release of balanced environmental information is often a casualty in such circumstances. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 20: 191-200, 1992. 9 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
192
FRAN(~O1S BREGHA
2. I n s t i t u t i o n a l B a r r i e r s
In their roles as managers and protectors of the environment, governments generate the bulk of the environmental information in Canada. Few Canadians realize the magnitude of this activity: in 1985, for example, the federal government alone spent $550 million and allocated 6470 person-years to its environment and natural resource surveys (Study Team, 1985). Much of this information is highly technical and is neither published nor made readily available to the public. The public availability of technical information on the environment, however, is not what concerns us here. The focus of this article, instead, is what happens to environmental information which has been 'processed', in other words, information which has been synthesized or aggregated to serve as the basis for policy-making. For reasons that will be explored below, some of this information is available but of limited value because it cannot be analysed usefully in order to draw policy conclusions. In other cases, the information may be manipulated to present a more favourable impression than is warranted by the facts. Lastly, some information is simply withheld. It would be wrong, however, simply to blame the government's tendency to secrecy or self-interest for the unavailability or quality of some desired environmental information. If Canadians do not have access to all the environmental information which exists in this country, inadequate media coverage of environmental issues and the ability of some corporations to control information in their possession are also to blame. The absence of independent institutes specializing in environmental matters and the limited resources available to environmental non-governmental organizations are two additional factors limiting the generation and distribution of environmental information in Canada. The analysis below is far from a comprehensive survey of the issue. Rather, it represents the result of 15 years of personal experience and observation of public policy inside and outside the federal government. Although many of the examples given below are anecdotal, they cast a broader light on how government handles environmental information. 2.1. COMPARTMENTALIZATIONOF GOVERNMENTALINFORMATION Perhaps the most profound barrier to the greater use of already existing environmental information results from the administrative organization of government both at the federal and provincial levels. Many government departments collect environmental information for their own policy-making or regulatory uses. They have no reason to ensure the consistency of the information they gather. The 1987 report of the stakeholder group on environmental reporting noted the following barriers to environmental information in Canada: - no comprehensive network of information sources; - no comprehensive framework describing the scope or extent of interactions between human actions and the environment; - little knowledge of, and often no means of obtaining, data collected by industry, hospitals, universities and research institutions for their own specific purposes;
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TO ENVIRONMENTAL
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insufficient data to permit understanding of linkages between economic activity and resource activity or to permit effective risk analysis or epidemiological studies; no independent institution or agency capable of assembling environmental data and assisting in interpretation; inadequate ongoing national monitoring program to determine levels of toxic substances in human, fish and wildlife populations; significant regional variations in the availability of data. (Stakeholder Group, 1987) These problems, of course, are not limited to the federal level. Recently, la Commission d'enqu~te sur les drchets dangereux ('Commission Charbonneau') concluded that it was impossible to calculate the volume of hazardous wastes in Quebec, in part because the provincial ministry of the environment, which is responsible for managing these wastes, has no jurisdiction over the wastes produced by mines, the aluminum industry, pulp and paper plants, hospitals or the agricultural sector, all of which are regulated by different provincial departments (Commission d'enqu~te, 1989).
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2.2. MANIPULATIONOF INFORMATION Governments have a natural tendency to exaggerate their achievements. The Prime Minister, for example, has often claimed that Canada was an international leader in environmental policy. For his part, the Minister of the Environment proudly described the Canadian Environmental Protection Act as the toughest environmental legislation in the western hemisphere when it was passed by the House of Commons. Although such hyperbole is manipulative, it is also transparent and a normal part of political discourse. The manipulation of information, however, is not always so blatant. More often, it results from a self-serving interpretation of available information. Environmental information, whether it concerns acid rain, global climatic change, the long range transport of air pollutants, or the assimilative capacity of a particular water body, is often ambiguous and leads to genuine differences of opinion among scientists. These differences carry obvious policy implications where large investments are at stake: Canada has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to abate emissions causing acid rain and would have to spend several tens of billions of dollars to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2005, as many environmentalists and scientists propose. As a policy decision to cap carbon dioxide emissions could be expected to have major implications for Canada's economy, including regionally and on its international competitiveness, it is obviously not a decision to be taken lightly. Given the ambiguity which often exists on the significance of environmental information and the high economic stakes of acting on it, it is not surprising that both private and public decision-makers have tended to interpret such information conservatively. The fact that environmental costs, beside often being uncertain, are almost always difficult to quantify, while the economic costs of mitigating environmental degradation can be calculated more easily, understandably biases an analysis of the trade-offs involved. When confronted with ambiguous environmental information which suggests the need for additional spending, decision-makers will typically pursue the following strategy:
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(1) first, they deny that an environmental problem has been proven and call for more research. This is the approach which the US government followed for many years to justify inaction in combating acid rain. In Canada, the government of Nova Scotia justified in part its approval of the construction of a coal-fired thermal electricity plant at Point Aconi on the basis that the contribution of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide to global climatic change had not been established; (2) when this position becomes untenable as a result of new information, decisionmakers often retreat to arguing that no technical solution to the problem exists or that an available solution would be socially unacceptable. In early 1990, the Hon. Jake Epp, Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, justified further government delay in developing a Canadian policy on carbon dioxide emissions on the ground that, to meet the widely called-for 20% reduction target in this gas, would force Canadians to stop driving cars in urban areas; (3) as technical solutions are developed, decision-makers will often present evidence which purports to demonstrate that action would be prohibitively expensive; thus, the Canadian oil industry argued in the 1980's that eliminating lead in gasoline would impose excessive costs in refinery modifications; (4) finally, when they run out of all other arguments, decision-makers ask for more time. In 1990, the federal government - with strong support from local politicians, fishermen and the fishing industry - chose to disregard scientific advice concerning the decline of the East Coast fishery because of the adverse socio-economic implications of reducing fishing quotas as quickly as new environmental information was indicating. It must be underlined that the behaviour described above is rational in the presence of scientific uncertainty and large potential expenditures. At at time of rapid environmental change, however, the cost of inaction can carry significant risks, namely that an environmental treshold will be crossed beyond which the cost of remedying the problem increases significantly or the problem itself becomes irreversible (viz. the extinction of a species). In the words of the Worldwatch Institute: The challenge is to act before it is too late - which means before the scientific evidence is conclusive. The longer society waits, the more radical and draconian the needed responses will be (Brown et al., 1989, p 12). 2.3. WITHHOLDINGOF INFORMATION Governments and corporations withhold information for various reasons. Sometimes, they fear that the information may unjustifiably alarm the public. For example, as our ability to measure the presence of contaminants in the environment, including in food and human tissue, outstrips our understanding of the significance of these concentrations, there is an understandable reluctance to fan public concern by releasing data without proper qualifications. This reluctance, however, is sometimes used to justify other motives. A recent instance of such pretense was the controversy surrounding the release of the report Toxic Chemicals in the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem: Some Observations by Tom Muir and Anne Sudar of
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Environment Canada. Environment Canada initially withheld the report's publication for being scientifically unsound only to criticize it after it had been leaked. Although the scientific basis for all the report's observations had indeed not been established absolutely*, the real concern behind the government's unwillingness to publish the report lay much more in the links it was suggesting between toxic chemicals and human health than in its scientific method. This controversy is an excellent example of how administrative arrangements can frustrate making full use of the environmental information available. Scientists at Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries of Oceans are entitled to observe and comment upon the presence and implications of toxic chemicals though every step of the food chain, except in the case of humans, where the Department of Health and Welfare jealously guards its prerogative to protect human health. Such an administrative distinction is purely artificial when it ignores ecosystemic relationships. It also fragments the research effort and, as a result, reduces the utility of the environmental information generated. The institutional compartmentalization described above is sometimes reinforced by an ostrich-like attitude ('what we don't know won't hurt us'): a former director of the US Environmental Protection Agency testifying on behalf of the Government of the Northwest Territories at the Environmental Assessment hearings on the proposed Alberta-Pacific pulp mill in northern Alberta, argued that 'we know very little about the impacts of these [persistent toxic] compounds on ourselves as human beings ...[because] we've been afraid, as governments, to fund studies to look at those kinds of impacts' (Swain, 1989). Information, however, is also sometimes withheld for more self-serving, competitive reasons. Policy-making is not a dispassionate exercise. On the contrary, it frequently engenders conflict, particularly when the future of a programme is at stake. In such circumstances, policy-makers are often reluctant to provide potential critics, including government colleagues, with the information needed to make a real choice, particularly when this information could be used to mobilize support against their preferred course of action. Inasmuch as the free dissemination of environmental data may threaten existing power relationships within bureaucratic institutions, it may exacerbate the hoarding of information. The Alberta Department of Forestry, for instance, withheld information on the loadings and transport of toxic chemicals in the Athabaska river during the course of the Alberta-Pacific Environmental Assessment hearing even after this issue had become identified as the main environmental risk posed by the mill because it wanted the mill to proceed. Fortunately, the study was leaked to the assessment panel before it completed its report. * In its Filth Biennial Report on Great Lakes Water Quality (April 1990, Part II, p. 15), the International Joint Commission notes that "when available data on fish, birds, reptiles and small mammals are considered along with ... human research, the Commission must conclude that there is a threat to the health of our children emanating from our exposure to persistent toxic substances, even at very low ambient levels."
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The hoarding of information is most often manifested in the tendency to classify information in order to restrict its circulation. Such classification, however, does not always take the form of a 'confidential' label on a document. Often, it is more in the nature of an unwritten rule to the effect that government officials are not to speak to members of the public (e.g., Members of Parliament or representatives of the media) without receiving prior consent from their superiors*. The extensive exclusions in the Access to Information Act and the inability of the Environmental Assessment Review Process (EARP) to compel the production of information or test it rigorously constitute two systemic barriers which inhibit the free flow of environmental information. Legislation to strengthen the operations of EARP is expected in the near future. It is unclear at the time of this writing whether it will correct the flaws noted above. 2.4. INEFFECTIVEMEDIA COVERAGE One reason why governments have successfully compartmentalized, manipulated or withheld environmental information is that they have not been challenged vigorously and persistently for doing so. This is one of the roles which the media have long claimed for themselves. It is a paradox that there should be so few full-time environmental reporters in Canada when environmental issues have ranked high in public opinion polls for several years. Out of 115 newspapers in Canada, only 32 assign a reporter to environmental issues (Matthews, 1989). This number in fact exaggerates how many reporters actually work on environmental issues as it also includes journalists who are responsible for other 'beats'. As a result of the disparate demands placed upon them, journalist can cultivate fewer contacts and develop less expertise in environmental issues, both of which reduce their effectiveness as investigative reporters. The media's tendency to rotate their staff frequently, pay low wages, offer limited training and demand a steady flow of news stories, all, inhibit in-depth analysis of environmental issues. As a result, the public is exposed to superficial coverage: a supertanker spill will attract headlines but the chronic discharge of oil into the sea by ships cleaning their ballast tanks will go unreported, even though this practice is responsible for more oil entering the oceans every year than accidents are. The media's tendency to engage in 'balanced reporting' also contributes to reducing its effectiveness in conveying environmental information by creating confusion in the public's mind over an issue. In an effort to be seen as objective, reporters will sometimes present both sides of an issue, without properly qualifying the scientific merit of either side. Thus, a story on global climatic warming may be accompanied by the view of an 'expert' that the Earth is in fact getting colder. When no context is provided as to where the weight of scientific opinion may reside - on this particular issue, the vast majority of * An exampleof this unwrittenrule was providedat a panel discussionof the Canada-US Councilof Great Lakes ResearchManagersin September1989when Len Good, Deputy Ministerof the Environment,said in responseto an anecdoteof a Memberof Parliamentseekinginformationon ozonethat 'if that ozoneexperthad beena DOE scientistand he gaveyou an answerwithoutcalling[his]deputyministerfirst,you wouldnot have had a verydociledeputy minister'.
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scientists believe that human activity is in fact warming the Earth's climate - the public is understandably confused. The resulting mystification allows government to procrastinate when it is enclined to do so and may delay action even when the government is prepared to move because the needed public consensus is missing. 2.5. LIMITEDPLURALISM By and large, Canadian environmental groups do not have the financial and professional resources necessary to generate their own primary research and analysis in competition with government and industry. These groups, therefore, are in a poor position to challenge government information, particularly when it is highly technical. Paradoxically, public opinion polls indicate that the public places greater trust in the information these groups provide than in the government's. The large number of Canadian environmental groups and the obvious public concern over environmental issues should not disguise the lack of effective pluralism in the environmental policy field. This limited pluralism allows vested interests in government and industry to control the public debate on environmental issues to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case and represents a major institutional constraint to the circulation of environmental information in Canada. 3. Overcoming the Barriers Since the early 1970's, Canadian environmental groups have called on both the federal and provincial governments to entrench and expand public access to governmental information on the environment. This call was heard recently in Greenprintfor Canada."a Federal Agenda for the Environment, in which 34 environmental, conservation and aboriginal organizations argued 'the right [of the public] to participate fully in the federal government's environmental decision-making'. (Greenprint for Canada Committee, 1989) Such calls have been echoed at the international level. As part of its report Our Common Future, the World Commission on Environment and Development (better known as the 'Brundtland Commission'), for example, proposed several legal principles which could serve as the basis for an international convention on environmental protection. One of these principles is that States shall inform in a timely manner all persons likely to be significantly affected by a planned activity and to grant them equal access and due process in administrative and due process in administrative and judicial proceedings. (WCED, 1987) Two solutions are proposed below to help overcome the institutional barriers identified in this paper to the freer flow of environmental information. Additional solutions would of course include taking specific steps to correct some of the barriers that have been listed: thus, a more effective environmental assessment process, a less restrictive Access to Information Act, more, and better qualified environmental reporters, environmental groups with more resources, etc. would obviously all help. Because to a large extent these
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solutions merely represent the mirror of the barriers listed, they will not be described further here. It has been argued that, in the United States, 'the [environmental] impact statement system depends on outsiders, public and private, having sufficient resources to challenge the intertwined technical and value premises of the organizations preparing the impact analysis' (Taylor, 1984). Inasmuch as this system represents no more than a formalized process for the release and evaluation of environmental information, its conclusions could be said to apply more broadly to environmental policy-making. It provides the general theme underlying this section on solutions. 3.1. A PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSIONER
An independent Commissioner for the Environment reporting to Parliament has frequently been mentioned as a promising approach for reinforcing environmental accountability by government departments and for helping overcome the institutional and political barriers to the free flow of environmental information. A Commissioner for the Environment can best be seen as the environmental equivalent to the Auditor General. The office would be responsible for publicly monitoring the performance of government agencies and departments according to designated standards of environmental protection or resource conservation. New Zealand has created the office of Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment to fulfill such responsibilities. Under the provisions of the New Zealand Environment Act 1986, the Commissioner has the powers, inter alia to: review ... the system of agencies and processes established by the Government to manage the allocation, use, and preservation of natural and physical resources...; investigate the effectiveness of planning and environmental management carried out by public authorities; investigate any matter in respect of which ... the environment may be or has been adversely affected; - report to the House ... on any ... Bill ... the subject matter of which may have a significant effect on the environment; Although the New Zealand Office of the Commissioner for the Environment has been operating for only a few years, its experience is clearly relevant to the Canadian situation and deserves therefore to be evaluated thoroughly. In 1989, the Federal Environmental Assessment and Review Office (FEARO) estimated that the creation of an office of a Parliamentary Commissioner in Canada would cost $3 million annually and require a staff of 15 person-years (FEARO, 1989). The creation of such an institution, not surprisingly, is not popular with the government which fears the potential for embarassment. However, unless one assumes that the built-in incentive to secrecy which now exists within government can be overcome purely by internal reform, an outside 'watchdog' will be required to ensure that environmental information in the government's possession is published. -
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3.2.
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SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS
The public can judge a government's economic performance informally by relying on a wide array of economic indicators: every day, the value of the Canadian dollar and fluctuations in the stock market are widely reported; every week, the Bank of Canada's setting of interest rates is eagerly awaited; every month, Statistics Canada publishes figures on the balance of trade, unemployment, the rate of economic growth and inflation. These indicators play a powerful role in communicating to the electorate what is the state of the economy. They not only influence decisions taken by consumers and investors but also the government's political popularity. There is no parallel system of environmental indicators in Canada today which would allow the electorate to judge the government's environmental performance. What indicators exist cannot be integrated and therefore do not provide a meaningful measure of progress: gains made in preserving endangered species or cleaning up urban air, for example, are offset by continuing acid rain and the loss of wetlands. A more systematic index of environmental quality is therefore required. Environment Canada took a first step in this direction in 1986 when it published the first national State of the Environment Report. The second report, to be published in 1991, unfortunately, uses a different approach in reporting environmental information and will not be directly comparable to the first report. The need for environmental indicators to measure progress is now widely understood and the federal government (Environment Canada and Statistics Canada), the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council and the National Round Table on Environment and Economy are all engaged in their development. In its Framework for Discussion on the Environment (better known as the 'Green Plan' consultation document), the government commits itself 'to improving the technical quality, consistency, reliability and public accessibility of environmental information' (Environment Canada, 1990), including the incorporation of environmental factors into national economic accounts (i.e., the GNP) and more frequent state of the environment reports. One of the advantages of such indicators is that they would help to focus the large expenditures in environment and natural resource surveys some of whose objectives are now unclear (Study Team, 1985). In order to achieve the same role which economic indicators now play, environmental indicators will have to be: - clear and easily understood; - scientifically sound, and - useful to both the public and government policy-makers. In other words, the public will have to accept that the indicators provide a valid description of the environmental quality as they experience it; and the policy-maker will have to be able to make decisions (e.g., drawing up regulations or allocating financial resources). For these indicators to meet their intended purpose - i.e., that they inform and empower the public and decision-makers -judgement will be required in choosing, designing and interpreting them. In other words, although 'scientific', they will also be subjective to a certain degree. It will be essential, therefore, that their production be seen as
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free from any possible political interference. For this reason, it would be desirable that government privatize the development, analysis and publication of environmental indicators by endowing a private policy institute. The preparation of state-of-the-environment reports, on the other hand, should remain a government function because it would be impractical to transfer to an independent institute the enormously large volume of raw data required, data which only governments (federal and provincial) now possess and can analyze. 4. Conclusion
More information about Canada's environment is available than ever before. This trend is the result of both growing public interest and concern over the environment and the government's increasing readiness to make available the information in its possession. In addition, the greater sophistication of non-governmental organizations, as evidenced in reports such as Great Lakes: Great Legacy? by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, imply that Canadians will be able more and more to find publicly accessible and authoritative sources of environmental information outside government. It is unreasonable to expect, however, that governments's tendency to manipulate information for political motives will not continue to apply to environmental issues as it does to all others. This is why institutional reform, including the creation of a Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the privatization of environmental reporting, is necessary to ensure that Canadians have greater access to sound environmental information. References Fran~:ois Bregha, Jamie Benidickson, Don Gamble, Tom Shillington, and Ed Weick: 1990, The Integration of Environmental Considerations into Government Policy, Ottawa, Canadian Environmental Assessment Research Council. Government of Canada: 1990, A Framework for Discussion on the Environment, (Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services. Greenprint for Canada Committee: 1989, Greenprint for Canada: A Federal Agenda for the Environment, Ottawa, Canadian Arctic Resources Committee. Federal Environmental Assessment and Review Office: 1989, Draft Memorandum to Cabinet. The Honourable Tom McMillan: 1988, 'The Built and Natural Environments: Forging the Link', Notes for remarks at the 1988 Heritage Canada Conference. Syd Mathews: 1990, The Mathews List, Meaford, Syd Mathews and Partners. New Zealand, House of Representatives: 1986, Environment Act, 1986, Wellington, Government Printer. Study Team Report to the Task Force on Program Review: 1986, Major Surveys, Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services. The Stakeholder Group on Environmental Reporting: 1987, A Study of Environmental Reporting in Canada, Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services Canada. Dr. Wayland R. Swain in The Alberta-Pacific Environment Impact Assessment Review Board: 1989, Transcript, Vol. 44, pp. 5929. Serge Taylor: 1984, Making Bureaucracies Think: The Environmental Impact Statement Strategy of Administrative Reform, Stanford, Stanford University Press. World Commission on Environment and Development: 1987, Our Common Future, Toronto, Oxford University Press.
Rawson Academy of Aquatic Science, Ottawa (Received June 1990) Abstract. Several barriers impede the free flow of environmental information in the government's hands to the public. The most important of these are the compartmentalization of environmental information among several departments, the manipulation of information to protect vested bureaucratic or political interests and, lastly, the withholding of information. The media's ineffective coverage of environmental issues and the small number of well-funded environmental groups constitute two additional institutional barriers to the broader dissemination of environmental information. Solutions proposed to reduce these barriers include the creation of an independent Commissioner on the environment reporting publicly to Parliament about the government's performance and the development of a widely-available system of indicators to inform the public about changes in environmental quality.
I. Introduction Governments control the flow of information for various purposes: to protect national security and commercial interests; to protect the privacy of its citizens; to facilitate the uninhibited consideration of policy options; to manage public opinion, etc. In this regard, environmental policy-making differs little from policy-making in any other area. The structure of the policy-making process itself contributes to fettering the flow of information to the public. In 1988, the Hon. Tom McMillan, then Minister of the Environment, described policy-making as a testing of whose will prevails among vested interests: More and more decisions are being made by powerful governments wielding great authority in favour of strongly organized groups... Government in most Western democracies is now less a matter of leadership than a matter of brokerage politics. Politicians are reduced to distributing public spoils based more on who shouts the loudest than on who speaks the most sense. (McMillan, 1988) The environment is consistently under-represented in such a tug-of-war because it has no strong institutional advocate. Being diffuse and all-embracing, the environment cannot compete effectively with economic sectors which have vested interests to promote them. Thus, agricultural policy is less concerned about conserving the long term productivity of soils and more about the immediate needs and demands of farmers. Similarly, energy policy is designed more to protect or direct the energy industry than to address end-use needs efficiently at minimum environmental cost. In the trade-offs inherent in policymaking, adverse impacts are too often borne by the environment rather than by one of the stakeholders (Bregha et al., 1990). Not surprisingly, the release of balanced environmental information is often a casualty in such circumstances. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 20: 191-200, 1992. 9 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
192
FRAN(~O1S BREGHA
2. I n s t i t u t i o n a l B a r r i e r s
In their roles as managers and protectors of the environment, governments generate the bulk of the environmental information in Canada. Few Canadians realize the magnitude of this activity: in 1985, for example, the federal government alone spent $550 million and allocated 6470 person-years to its environment and natural resource surveys (Study Team, 1985). Much of this information is highly technical and is neither published nor made readily available to the public. The public availability of technical information on the environment, however, is not what concerns us here. The focus of this article, instead, is what happens to environmental information which has been 'processed', in other words, information which has been synthesized or aggregated to serve as the basis for policy-making. For reasons that will be explored below, some of this information is available but of limited value because it cannot be analysed usefully in order to draw policy conclusions. In other cases, the information may be manipulated to present a more favourable impression than is warranted by the facts. Lastly, some information is simply withheld. It would be wrong, however, simply to blame the government's tendency to secrecy or self-interest for the unavailability or quality of some desired environmental information. If Canadians do not have access to all the environmental information which exists in this country, inadequate media coverage of environmental issues and the ability of some corporations to control information in their possession are also to blame. The absence of independent institutes specializing in environmental matters and the limited resources available to environmental non-governmental organizations are two additional factors limiting the generation and distribution of environmental information in Canada. The analysis below is far from a comprehensive survey of the issue. Rather, it represents the result of 15 years of personal experience and observation of public policy inside and outside the federal government. Although many of the examples given below are anecdotal, they cast a broader light on how government handles environmental information. 2.1. COMPARTMENTALIZATIONOF GOVERNMENTALINFORMATION Perhaps the most profound barrier to the greater use of already existing environmental information results from the administrative organization of government both at the federal and provincial levels. Many government departments collect environmental information for their own policy-making or regulatory uses. They have no reason to ensure the consistency of the information they gather. The 1987 report of the stakeholder group on environmental reporting noted the following barriers to environmental information in Canada: - no comprehensive network of information sources; - no comprehensive framework describing the scope or extent of interactions between human actions and the environment; - little knowledge of, and often no means of obtaining, data collected by industry, hospitals, universities and research institutions for their own specific purposes;
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TO ENVIRONMENTAL
INFORMATION
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insufficient data to permit understanding of linkages between economic activity and resource activity or to permit effective risk analysis or epidemiological studies; no independent institution or agency capable of assembling environmental data and assisting in interpretation; inadequate ongoing national monitoring program to determine levels of toxic substances in human, fish and wildlife populations; significant regional variations in the availability of data. (Stakeholder Group, 1987) These problems, of course, are not limited to the federal level. Recently, la Commission d'enqu~te sur les drchets dangereux ('Commission Charbonneau') concluded that it was impossible to calculate the volume of hazardous wastes in Quebec, in part because the provincial ministry of the environment, which is responsible for managing these wastes, has no jurisdiction over the wastes produced by mines, the aluminum industry, pulp and paper plants, hospitals or the agricultural sector, all of which are regulated by different provincial departments (Commission d'enqu~te, 1989).
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2.2. MANIPULATIONOF INFORMATION Governments have a natural tendency to exaggerate their achievements. The Prime Minister, for example, has often claimed that Canada was an international leader in environmental policy. For his part, the Minister of the Environment proudly described the Canadian Environmental Protection Act as the toughest environmental legislation in the western hemisphere when it was passed by the House of Commons. Although such hyperbole is manipulative, it is also transparent and a normal part of political discourse. The manipulation of information, however, is not always so blatant. More often, it results from a self-serving interpretation of available information. Environmental information, whether it concerns acid rain, global climatic change, the long range transport of air pollutants, or the assimilative capacity of a particular water body, is often ambiguous and leads to genuine differences of opinion among scientists. These differences carry obvious policy implications where large investments are at stake: Canada has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to abate emissions causing acid rain and would have to spend several tens of billions of dollars to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2005, as many environmentalists and scientists propose. As a policy decision to cap carbon dioxide emissions could be expected to have major implications for Canada's economy, including regionally and on its international competitiveness, it is obviously not a decision to be taken lightly. Given the ambiguity which often exists on the significance of environmental information and the high economic stakes of acting on it, it is not surprising that both private and public decision-makers have tended to interpret such information conservatively. The fact that environmental costs, beside often being uncertain, are almost always difficult to quantify, while the economic costs of mitigating environmental degradation can be calculated more easily, understandably biases an analysis of the trade-offs involved. When confronted with ambiguous environmental information which suggests the need for additional spending, decision-makers will typically pursue the following strategy:
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(1) first, they deny that an environmental problem has been proven and call for more research. This is the approach which the US government followed for many years to justify inaction in combating acid rain. In Canada, the government of Nova Scotia justified in part its approval of the construction of a coal-fired thermal electricity plant at Point Aconi on the basis that the contribution of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide to global climatic change had not been established; (2) when this position becomes untenable as a result of new information, decisionmakers often retreat to arguing that no technical solution to the problem exists or that an available solution would be socially unacceptable. In early 1990, the Hon. Jake Epp, Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, justified further government delay in developing a Canadian policy on carbon dioxide emissions on the ground that, to meet the widely called-for 20% reduction target in this gas, would force Canadians to stop driving cars in urban areas; (3) as technical solutions are developed, decision-makers will often present evidence which purports to demonstrate that action would be prohibitively expensive; thus, the Canadian oil industry argued in the 1980's that eliminating lead in gasoline would impose excessive costs in refinery modifications; (4) finally, when they run out of all other arguments, decision-makers ask for more time. In 1990, the federal government - with strong support from local politicians, fishermen and the fishing industry - chose to disregard scientific advice concerning the decline of the East Coast fishery because of the adverse socio-economic implications of reducing fishing quotas as quickly as new environmental information was indicating. It must be underlined that the behaviour described above is rational in the presence of scientific uncertainty and large potential expenditures. At at time of rapid environmental change, however, the cost of inaction can carry significant risks, namely that an environmental treshold will be crossed beyond which the cost of remedying the problem increases significantly or the problem itself becomes irreversible (viz. the extinction of a species). In the words of the Worldwatch Institute: The challenge is to act before it is too late - which means before the scientific evidence is conclusive. The longer society waits, the more radical and draconian the needed responses will be (Brown et al., 1989, p 12). 2.3. WITHHOLDINGOF INFORMATION Governments and corporations withhold information for various reasons. Sometimes, they fear that the information may unjustifiably alarm the public. For example, as our ability to measure the presence of contaminants in the environment, including in food and human tissue, outstrips our understanding of the significance of these concentrations, there is an understandable reluctance to fan public concern by releasing data without proper qualifications. This reluctance, however, is sometimes used to justify other motives. A recent instance of such pretense was the controversy surrounding the release of the report Toxic Chemicals in the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem: Some Observations by Tom Muir and Anne Sudar of
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Environment Canada. Environment Canada initially withheld the report's publication for being scientifically unsound only to criticize it after it had been leaked. Although the scientific basis for all the report's observations had indeed not been established absolutely*, the real concern behind the government's unwillingness to publish the report lay much more in the links it was suggesting between toxic chemicals and human health than in its scientific method. This controversy is an excellent example of how administrative arrangements can frustrate making full use of the environmental information available. Scientists at Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries of Oceans are entitled to observe and comment upon the presence and implications of toxic chemicals though every step of the food chain, except in the case of humans, where the Department of Health and Welfare jealously guards its prerogative to protect human health. Such an administrative distinction is purely artificial when it ignores ecosystemic relationships. It also fragments the research effort and, as a result, reduces the utility of the environmental information generated. The institutional compartmentalization described above is sometimes reinforced by an ostrich-like attitude ('what we don't know won't hurt us'): a former director of the US Environmental Protection Agency testifying on behalf of the Government of the Northwest Territories at the Environmental Assessment hearings on the proposed Alberta-Pacific pulp mill in northern Alberta, argued that 'we know very little about the impacts of these [persistent toxic] compounds on ourselves as human beings ...[because] we've been afraid, as governments, to fund studies to look at those kinds of impacts' (Swain, 1989). Information, however, is also sometimes withheld for more self-serving, competitive reasons. Policy-making is not a dispassionate exercise. On the contrary, it frequently engenders conflict, particularly when the future of a programme is at stake. In such circumstances, policy-makers are often reluctant to provide potential critics, including government colleagues, with the information needed to make a real choice, particularly when this information could be used to mobilize support against their preferred course of action. Inasmuch as the free dissemination of environmental data may threaten existing power relationships within bureaucratic institutions, it may exacerbate the hoarding of information. The Alberta Department of Forestry, for instance, withheld information on the loadings and transport of toxic chemicals in the Athabaska river during the course of the Alberta-Pacific Environmental Assessment hearing even after this issue had become identified as the main environmental risk posed by the mill because it wanted the mill to proceed. Fortunately, the study was leaked to the assessment panel before it completed its report. * In its Filth Biennial Report on Great Lakes Water Quality (April 1990, Part II, p. 15), the International Joint Commission notes that "when available data on fish, birds, reptiles and small mammals are considered along with ... human research, the Commission must conclude that there is a threat to the health of our children emanating from our exposure to persistent toxic substances, even at very low ambient levels."
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The hoarding of information is most often manifested in the tendency to classify information in order to restrict its circulation. Such classification, however, does not always take the form of a 'confidential' label on a document. Often, it is more in the nature of an unwritten rule to the effect that government officials are not to speak to members of the public (e.g., Members of Parliament or representatives of the media) without receiving prior consent from their superiors*. The extensive exclusions in the Access to Information Act and the inability of the Environmental Assessment Review Process (EARP) to compel the production of information or test it rigorously constitute two systemic barriers which inhibit the free flow of environmental information. Legislation to strengthen the operations of EARP is expected in the near future. It is unclear at the time of this writing whether it will correct the flaws noted above. 2.4. INEFFECTIVEMEDIA COVERAGE One reason why governments have successfully compartmentalized, manipulated or withheld environmental information is that they have not been challenged vigorously and persistently for doing so. This is one of the roles which the media have long claimed for themselves. It is a paradox that there should be so few full-time environmental reporters in Canada when environmental issues have ranked high in public opinion polls for several years. Out of 115 newspapers in Canada, only 32 assign a reporter to environmental issues (Matthews, 1989). This number in fact exaggerates how many reporters actually work on environmental issues as it also includes journalists who are responsible for other 'beats'. As a result of the disparate demands placed upon them, journalist can cultivate fewer contacts and develop less expertise in environmental issues, both of which reduce their effectiveness as investigative reporters. The media's tendency to rotate their staff frequently, pay low wages, offer limited training and demand a steady flow of news stories, all, inhibit in-depth analysis of environmental issues. As a result, the public is exposed to superficial coverage: a supertanker spill will attract headlines but the chronic discharge of oil into the sea by ships cleaning their ballast tanks will go unreported, even though this practice is responsible for more oil entering the oceans every year than accidents are. The media's tendency to engage in 'balanced reporting' also contributes to reducing its effectiveness in conveying environmental information by creating confusion in the public's mind over an issue. In an effort to be seen as objective, reporters will sometimes present both sides of an issue, without properly qualifying the scientific merit of either side. Thus, a story on global climatic warming may be accompanied by the view of an 'expert' that the Earth is in fact getting colder. When no context is provided as to where the weight of scientific opinion may reside - on this particular issue, the vast majority of * An exampleof this unwrittenrule was providedat a panel discussionof the Canada-US Councilof Great Lakes ResearchManagersin September1989when Len Good, Deputy Ministerof the Environment,said in responseto an anecdoteof a Memberof Parliamentseekinginformationon ozonethat 'if that ozoneexperthad beena DOE scientistand he gaveyou an answerwithoutcalling[his]deputyministerfirst,you wouldnot have had a verydociledeputy minister'.
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scientists believe that human activity is in fact warming the Earth's climate - the public is understandably confused. The resulting mystification allows government to procrastinate when it is enclined to do so and may delay action even when the government is prepared to move because the needed public consensus is missing. 2.5. LIMITEDPLURALISM By and large, Canadian environmental groups do not have the financial and professional resources necessary to generate their own primary research and analysis in competition with government and industry. These groups, therefore, are in a poor position to challenge government information, particularly when it is highly technical. Paradoxically, public opinion polls indicate that the public places greater trust in the information these groups provide than in the government's. The large number of Canadian environmental groups and the obvious public concern over environmental issues should not disguise the lack of effective pluralism in the environmental policy field. This limited pluralism allows vested interests in government and industry to control the public debate on environmental issues to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case and represents a major institutional constraint to the circulation of environmental information in Canada. 3. Overcoming the Barriers Since the early 1970's, Canadian environmental groups have called on both the federal and provincial governments to entrench and expand public access to governmental information on the environment. This call was heard recently in Greenprintfor Canada."a Federal Agenda for the Environment, in which 34 environmental, conservation and aboriginal organizations argued 'the right [of the public] to participate fully in the federal government's environmental decision-making'. (Greenprint for Canada Committee, 1989) Such calls have been echoed at the international level. As part of its report Our Common Future, the World Commission on Environment and Development (better known as the 'Brundtland Commission'), for example, proposed several legal principles which could serve as the basis for an international convention on environmental protection. One of these principles is that States shall inform in a timely manner all persons likely to be significantly affected by a planned activity and to grant them equal access and due process in administrative and due process in administrative and judicial proceedings. (WCED, 1987) Two solutions are proposed below to help overcome the institutional barriers identified in this paper to the freer flow of environmental information. Additional solutions would of course include taking specific steps to correct some of the barriers that have been listed: thus, a more effective environmental assessment process, a less restrictive Access to Information Act, more, and better qualified environmental reporters, environmental groups with more resources, etc. would obviously all help. Because to a large extent these
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solutions merely represent the mirror of the barriers listed, they will not be described further here. It has been argued that, in the United States, 'the [environmental] impact statement system depends on outsiders, public and private, having sufficient resources to challenge the intertwined technical and value premises of the organizations preparing the impact analysis' (Taylor, 1984). Inasmuch as this system represents no more than a formalized process for the release and evaluation of environmental information, its conclusions could be said to apply more broadly to environmental policy-making. It provides the general theme underlying this section on solutions. 3.1. A PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSIONER
An independent Commissioner for the Environment reporting to Parliament has frequently been mentioned as a promising approach for reinforcing environmental accountability by government departments and for helping overcome the institutional and political barriers to the free flow of environmental information. A Commissioner for the Environment can best be seen as the environmental equivalent to the Auditor General. The office would be responsible for publicly monitoring the performance of government agencies and departments according to designated standards of environmental protection or resource conservation. New Zealand has created the office of Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment to fulfill such responsibilities. Under the provisions of the New Zealand Environment Act 1986, the Commissioner has the powers, inter alia to: review ... the system of agencies and processes established by the Government to manage the allocation, use, and preservation of natural and physical resources...; investigate the effectiveness of planning and environmental management carried out by public authorities; investigate any matter in respect of which ... the environment may be or has been adversely affected; - report to the House ... on any ... Bill ... the subject matter of which may have a significant effect on the environment; Although the New Zealand Office of the Commissioner for the Environment has been operating for only a few years, its experience is clearly relevant to the Canadian situation and deserves therefore to be evaluated thoroughly. In 1989, the Federal Environmental Assessment and Review Office (FEARO) estimated that the creation of an office of a Parliamentary Commissioner in Canada would cost $3 million annually and require a staff of 15 person-years (FEARO, 1989). The creation of such an institution, not surprisingly, is not popular with the government which fears the potential for embarassment. However, unless one assumes that the built-in incentive to secrecy which now exists within government can be overcome purely by internal reform, an outside 'watchdog' will be required to ensure that environmental information in the government's possession is published. -
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SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS
The public can judge a government's economic performance informally by relying on a wide array of economic indicators: every day, the value of the Canadian dollar and fluctuations in the stock market are widely reported; every week, the Bank of Canada's setting of interest rates is eagerly awaited; every month, Statistics Canada publishes figures on the balance of trade, unemployment, the rate of economic growth and inflation. These indicators play a powerful role in communicating to the electorate what is the state of the economy. They not only influence decisions taken by consumers and investors but also the government's political popularity. There is no parallel system of environmental indicators in Canada today which would allow the electorate to judge the government's environmental performance. What indicators exist cannot be integrated and therefore do not provide a meaningful measure of progress: gains made in preserving endangered species or cleaning up urban air, for example, are offset by continuing acid rain and the loss of wetlands. A more systematic index of environmental quality is therefore required. Environment Canada took a first step in this direction in 1986 when it published the first national State of the Environment Report. The second report, to be published in 1991, unfortunately, uses a different approach in reporting environmental information and will not be directly comparable to the first report. The need for environmental indicators to measure progress is now widely understood and the federal government (Environment Canada and Statistics Canada), the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council and the National Round Table on Environment and Economy are all engaged in their development. In its Framework for Discussion on the Environment (better known as the 'Green Plan' consultation document), the government commits itself 'to improving the technical quality, consistency, reliability and public accessibility of environmental information' (Environment Canada, 1990), including the incorporation of environmental factors into national economic accounts (i.e., the GNP) and more frequent state of the environment reports. One of the advantages of such indicators is that they would help to focus the large expenditures in environment and natural resource surveys some of whose objectives are now unclear (Study Team, 1985). In order to achieve the same role which economic indicators now play, environmental indicators will have to be: - clear and easily understood; - scientifically sound, and - useful to both the public and government policy-makers. In other words, the public will have to accept that the indicators provide a valid description of the environmental quality as they experience it; and the policy-maker will have to be able to make decisions (e.g., drawing up regulations or allocating financial resources). For these indicators to meet their intended purpose - i.e., that they inform and empower the public and decision-makers -judgement will be required in choosing, designing and interpreting them. In other words, although 'scientific', they will also be subjective to a certain degree. It will be essential, therefore, that their production be seen as
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free from any possible political interference. For this reason, it would be desirable that government privatize the development, analysis and publication of environmental indicators by endowing a private policy institute. The preparation of state-of-the-environment reports, on the other hand, should remain a government function because it would be impractical to transfer to an independent institute the enormously large volume of raw data required, data which only governments (federal and provincial) now possess and can analyze. 4. Conclusion
More information about Canada's environment is available than ever before. This trend is the result of both growing public interest and concern over the environment and the government's increasing readiness to make available the information in its possession. In addition, the greater sophistication of non-governmental organizations, as evidenced in reports such as Great Lakes: Great Legacy? by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, imply that Canadians will be able more and more to find publicly accessible and authoritative sources of environmental information outside government. It is unreasonable to expect, however, that governments's tendency to manipulate information for political motives will not continue to apply to environmental issues as it does to all others. This is why institutional reform, including the creation of a Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and the privatization of environmental reporting, is necessary to ensure that Canadians have greater access to sound environmental information. References Fran~:ois Bregha, Jamie Benidickson, Don Gamble, Tom Shillington, and Ed Weick: 1990, The Integration of Environmental Considerations into Government Policy, Ottawa, Canadian Environmental Assessment Research Council. Government of Canada: 1990, A Framework for Discussion on the Environment, (Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services. Greenprint for Canada Committee: 1989, Greenprint for Canada: A Federal Agenda for the Environment, Ottawa, Canadian Arctic Resources Committee. Federal Environmental Assessment and Review Office: 1989, Draft Memorandum to Cabinet. The Honourable Tom McMillan: 1988, 'The Built and Natural Environments: Forging the Link', Notes for remarks at the 1988 Heritage Canada Conference. Syd Mathews: 1990, The Mathews List, Meaford, Syd Mathews and Partners. New Zealand, House of Representatives: 1986, Environment Act, 1986, Wellington, Government Printer. Study Team Report to the Task Force on Program Review: 1986, Major Surveys, Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services. The Stakeholder Group on Environmental Reporting: 1987, A Study of Environmental Reporting in Canada, Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services Canada. Dr. Wayland R. Swain in The Alberta-Pacific Environment Impact Assessment Review Board: 1989, Transcript, Vol. 44, pp. 5929. Serge Taylor: 1984, Making Bureaucracies Think: The Environmental Impact Statement Strategy of Administrative Reform, Stanford, Stanford University Press. World Commission on Environment and Development: 1987, Our Common Future, Toronto, Oxford University Press.
