EDITORIAL PAGE (December 02, 1991)

Have some spare time on your hands? Need a little extra cash? Well, we’ve got a project for you. It’s called “bash the uranium mining business” and it’s all paid with taxpayers’ money.

The Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office (FEARO) is offering up to $125,000 to anyone who wants to put in their two cents’ worth about the Rabbit Lake uranium project in northern Saskatchewan, a joint venture of Cameco Corp. and Uranerz Exploration and Mining.

To be fair, that might be overstating the case. Not just anyone will get funding to complain about the project. It’s up to a “funding administration committee” to determine who are eligible participants in the review. The committee, of course, is appointed by the government.

This committee — guided by “eligibility criteria” — will decide who gets the money and who doesn’t. But, essentially, the money will be available to opponents of the project who want to hire legal or technical help. Perhaps taxpayers are glad to pay to ferret out objections to this project that have not already been considered. If those objections are taken into account, the argument goes, the project will be improved.

But is it fair for taxpayers to pay for only one side of the story? If public funds are going to finance objectors’ arguments, perhaps they should cover the cost of hearing both sides.

That might sound like advocating more unnecessary government spending. The result, however, might be the realization that it doesn’t pay to foster this adversarial approach to environmental protection.

Establish fair environmental standards by all means, and enforce them vigorously. But don’t go through the process of paying special interest groups to prepare opposition to a project if it’s only going to promote their political anti-development positions.

“The province of Ontario should petition the federal government to include, as part of its GATT negotiations, specific requests for the reduction of tariffs on higher-value-added mineral and metal imports among such countries as Japan, Brazil, etc. Failure for our metal processors to gain access to these markets will force production down the value-added scale (toward raw material exports), a trend counter to that fostered by the provincial government since the turn of the century. Further, such a restructuring would place the industry at greater risk since it would be competing with countries selling the same products but doing so in a highly subsidized environment.

“In line with this thrust, the provincial government might consider joining with industries to examine the precise extent of effective protection accorded domestic processors, especially in countries with potentially large markets for Canadian products.”

From a working paper titled The Evolution of the Manufacturing Component in the Ontario Metal Mining Industry, published by the Centre for Resource Studies.