Lizzie May Outs Trudeau as "Harper-Hybrid"

Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, seem to have had her fill of Justin Trudeau's duplicity.

Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May says proposed rule changes for environmental assessments in Canada still leave the country’s environmental protection regime behind where it was prior to the Stephen Harper government.

May said she’s worried the regulation changes are too ambiguous and open to political interference while failing to bring back the kind of stringent regulations Canada had 15 years ago before the Harper government weakened them.

“It’s a substantially weird piece of hybrid legislation,” May told The Tyee. “It keeps much of what Harper did without restoring all of our protections.”

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May said the changes break election promises, ignore advice from expert panels and don’t address Harper-era omnibus bills that weakened environmental legislation. Those bills removed protections for fish habitat and opened up development on bodies of water.

May said the regimes lost with those bills have not been reinstated with Bill C-69.

Meanwhile, the Dogwood Initiative, is baring its teeth.

McKenna and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have repeatedly said the pipeline will get built.

But if Bill C-69’s regulations were meant to gain goodwill back from British Columbians it likely won’t work, said Kai Nagata of the Dogwood Initiative.

Rhetoric from pro-pipeline groups saying B.C. is defying the Constitution and bravado from the prime minister insisting the pipeline will be forced through because it is in the national interest is not helping matters, Nagata said.

B.C. is merely trying to protect its own interests he said.

“It’s not British Columbians that are threatening the fabric of Canada. It’s the people who are calling for the federal government to crack down on us like some sort of doormat compared to the other provinces.”