Alberta Minister Rebecca Schulz has called for the immediate end of Bill C-59, a federal gag order that will allow environmentalists to actively sue and potentially jail people in the oil and gas industry.
“In February, federal NDP MP Charlie Angus introduced a bill that threatened fines and jail time for Canada’s oil and gas industry if they tried to defend their record on the environment,” writes Schulz. “Canadians were immediately outraged, and the bill was laughed away as being just plain crazy.”
“A few months later, through last-minute amendments to Bill C-59, MP Charlie Angus has managed to sneak his bill in through the back door.”
As per the amendments to Bill C-59, the act is supposedly meant to prevent “greenwashing”, the use of supposedly “misleading, untrue, or unsupported representations about the environmental characteristics of a product, company, brand, or entity.”
As part of Bill C-59’s ‘prohibition on greenwashing’, companies would be forced to justify pro-oil and gas claims used in advertisements about products. However, this has been expanded to include practically all advertisements, including promoting activities or making public statements, such as ‘using liquified natural gas (LNG) can lead to a greener, more sustainable and economically prosperous future’.
If passed, the determination as to whether a claim is valid will be based on “adequate and proper tests”, which would be decided by some government-appointed council.
“Companies that wish to defend their environmental record will have to prove that their claims can be substantiated by an ‘internationally recognized methodology,’ a vague and undefined phrase that creates needless uncertainty for businesses,” explains Schulz.
“Any company not willing to risk millions of dollars in fines and legal fees will be forced to stay silent. And that is exactly the outcome that Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault and the federal Liberal-NDP-Bloc Québécois alliance wants to happen.”
As Schulz notes, the bill is currently in its third reading and could pass as early as this week before being passed on to the Liberal-dominated Senate.
“C-59, put plain and simply, is an undemocratic gag order. It must be stopped,” Schulz writes.
