Building a Culture of Sustainability
Priority 1: Restoring and Sustaining New Brunswick Ecosystems
A Green government would:
- Establish an Environmental Bill of Rights to: (a) guarantee citizens’ right to information about pollution threats and hazards, existing and potential, within their communities; (b) provide the right to petition for investigations and guarantee access to the justice system to prevent environmental harm; (c) appoint an environmental ombudsman as an Officer of the Legislature.
- Establish a transition plan and timeline to move finfish aquaculture from open-net pens to closed-containment systems which capture and treat wastes and prevent parasite infestations. In the meantime, prohibit the expansion of open-net pen finfish aquaculture and the use of chemicals to control parasites in open pens.
- Provide technical support and financial incentives to commercial fisheries to achieve Marine Stewardship Council certification.
- Prohibit oil and gas exploration, quarrying and mining on submerged Crown land.
- Require all sewage treatment systems that discharge into water bodies to be upgraded to tertiary levels using ecological engineering approaches.
- Require all industries that discharge effluent into water bodies to adopt closed loop waste water systems according to set timelines based on the availability of technology.
- Restrict the use of clearcutting as a harvesting method on Crown and industrial freehold land and prohibit logging in all remaining old growth Acadian forest.
- Ban aerial spraying of chemical herbicides and insecticides in New Brunswick forests.
- Develop a plan for the restoration of the Acadian forest biodiversity.
- Ensure that biomass harvesting for energy is managed so that wildlife habitat is protected and and biodiversity maintained.
- In collaboration with First Nations communities, private woodlot owners, freehold land owners and Crown licence holders, establish a transition plan for all forestry operations on Crown and freehold land to adhere to ecoforestry practices as established by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).
- Prohibit field-testing and adoption of genetically modified trees.
- Develop a Genuine Forest Health Indicator that assesses the state of the Acadian forest every decade and measures changes in all forest values.
- Establish biodiversity protection and restoration plans for all provincial parks and protected areas and expand protected areas not large enough to protect vulnerable or endangered species.
New Brunswick’s reserves of natural gas should be used strategically to reduce our region’s dependence on oil and coal, but they must be developed so that the environment and the quality of life for adjacent residents are not degraded. A Green government would:
- Impose a moratorium on natural gas development until proper regulations are in place to protect local ecology and communities, and to sustainably extract the resource, with the burden of proof on the developer to prove that no harm will be caused prior to issuing any approvals.
- Require shale gas developers to publically disclose the chemicals and processes to be used.
- Require shale gas developers to set up an escrow account -- money set aside to properly deal with unforeseen issues for local communities and for site reclamation.
- Map and test aquifers prior to shale gas development, paid by the developer, to establish a baseline against which quality and quantity of groundwater is compared during and after development.
- Establish a community controlled planning process to determine the scale, pace and form of natural gas development with the decisions of that process to be final.
Priority 2: Changing from a Consumer to Conserver Society
In a global economy we are often shielded from the direct impacts of our over-consumption of consumer goods and energy, but they are our responsibility nevertheless. We need to shift from today’s Consumer culture to a Conserver culture based on ecological and social sustainability. A Green government would:
- Ban commercial advertising to children.
- Ban the use of public spaces for commercial advertising.
- Establish sales tax differentials for durable goods and essentials versus non-essentials/disposables.
- Expand the product stewardship programs of Recycle New Brunswick (currently for tires and paint) to cover more consumer goods, beginning with electronics. These include a waste management fee paid by the consumer at the point of purchase and the involvement of the manufacturer and/or retailer in the collection and management of the product at the end of its useful life
- Establish a province-wide public transportation system including rail where feasible and support public transit within municipalities.
