Insurance Information Institute
January 1st 2003
The average cost of auto insurance rose by about 8.4 percent in 2002 and is expected to rise by about 9 percent in 2003.
New Brunswick Department of Justice
January 1st 2003
Auto Insurance
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2003
Department of JusticeP. O. Box 6000 Fredericton, N.B. CANADA E3B 5H1 tel.: (506) 462-5100 fax: (506) 453-7483 |
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
December 31, 2002
This article is a response to a letter by Scott Vaughan
The Carnegie Endowment’s Scott Vaughan chose an apt example by invoking Indira Gandhi’s memorable speech in Stockholm at the 1972 UN Conference on Human Environment. “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” Mrs. Gandhi said famously, in arguing that the environment should take a back seat to the economy.
But few remember that Mrs. Gandhi was then focusing on a major Indian controversy, the widespread destructive conduct of villagers such as “the tribal people and those who live in around our jungles, we cannot prevent them from combing the forests for food and livelihood; from poaching and from despoiling the vegetation.”
And almost no one in the West realizes – and evidently not Mr. Vaughan – that the widespread destruction caused by millions of India’s villagers and tribal people began in 1865, when the state – first the British Raj, later Indian governments – claimed rights over the nation’s forests and began to seize villagers’ communal forests. Before the villagers lost their property rights to remote governments, they had managed their forests sustainably, using traditional laws analogous to the Western world’s common laws, to protect both private and communal property rights.
When state legislation transferred their forests to the state and later to government-run forest development corporations, the villagers not only lost their stake in the forests, they lost their incentive to protect them. They took to plundering the forests, before outsiders did. In the 1980s, the Indian government under Indira Gandhi extended its right to seize land by redefining “forest land” as “any land containing trees and shrubs, pasture lands and any land whatsoever . . . which the state government declares to be a forest.” The plunder, as could be expected, increased.
The story was similar in Nepal, where the king nationalized forests in 1957, leading to deforestation in parts of the Himalayas. And in Indonesia and the Amazon. When land, or rights to waterways, or access to any resource is owned on paper by all, it is owned, in practice, by none. It becomes a commons, an invitation to plunder. When markets are not allowed to function, the dysfunction of the commons becomes all the worse.
Mr. Vaughan flippantly suggests that I expect the world’s poor to buy land that they can then protect. I have no such expectation. But I do expect that, at a minimum, the West will stop aiding Third World governments in dispossessing the world’s poor, for most of the dispossession could not occur without Western government financing through international development agencies such as the World Bank, through national aid agencies such as the Canadian International Development Agency, and through government-subsidized export agencies, such as Export Development Canada. All three of these taxpayer-funded agencies, for example, have collaborated in helping the Chinese government forcibly evict some 1.2 million people off their land to make way for the Three Gorges dam, the world’s single-largest environmental abomination. Where these newly impoverished people will end up is unknown. We do know that well-meaning Western agencies like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who have been silent on Three Gorges despite the Chinese military’s role in evicting people at the point of a gun, will deplore the short-sightedness of the oustees. Tut-tuts Mr. Vaughan: Such people “are less inclined to take a long-term view about conservation as they struggle to feed and shelter themselves and their families.”
An analysis by India’s Planning Commission of two decades of dam building found that many of the dams would never have been built if the ignored costs – the loss of agricultural and forest lands, resettlement costs and landslides among them – had been accounted for. One dam in the state of Maharashtra had costs that amounted to twice the benefits. The Three Gorges dam will surely have an even higher cost-benefit ratio. Because these dams and other development projects are uneconomic, they could not generate the wealth needed to repay the debts incurred in financing them, leading to past and future Third World debt crises. All of these projects required the wanton extinguishment of property rights held either by individuals or communities.
Although Mr. Vaughan dislikes the case I have made for the primacy of property rights and free markets in environment protection, his own letter makes the same case. When property owners are not empowered to protect themselves from their neighbours’ pollution, the environment suffers. When property rights are hard to establish, such as with migratory species, the environment suffers. When governments subsidize large-scale agriculture and other polluting activities, the environment suffers.
To maximize environmental health, we must maximize the ability of property rights and free markets to encourage responsible stewardship, not just in the Third World – Mr. Vaughan’s emphasis – but in Western nations as well, where subsidized roads, power plants, mines, logging operations and industrial activities of all kind also cause great environmental and economic harm.
Mrs. Gandhi asked: “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” Her policies and those of like-minded leaders, provide the answer: No. The greatest polluters, and the greatest creators of poverty, the evidence incontrovertibly shows, are central governments.
Readers’ response
Letter re: Property Rights No Panacea, No Property Leads to Plunder, Dec. 31, 2002.
by Charles Leduc, Vancouver, National Post, Jan. 06, 2003
Comparing the arguments of Lawrence Solomon versus Scott Vaughan, it seems that one is living in the real world of environmental degradation, whereas the other would like to be living in an ideal world of true land stewardship and conservation (Property Rights No Panacea, No Property Leads to Plunder, Dec. 31).
The problem is that, in reality, subsidies to industry do exist on the one hand, and on the other, only about half the world’s population has the actual means to acquire land. Though the dream of full ownership and stewardship of the Earth’s land and resources is a noble one, it is so far from being realizable as to be laughable to anyone but the most dogmatic.
Please see the original article: Crazy eco-curve by Lawrence Solomon, National Post December 18/2002
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
December 11, 2002
It’s NAFTA’s 10th anniversary and what a great decade for the environment it’s been. Sulphur dioxide emissions are down, ground level ozone levels are down, inhalable airborne particle levels are down and energy efficiency is up. Our air is clearer, our water is cleaner and, as a by-product, we’re healthier, too.
Acid rain was once a hot-button issue. No more. With harmful emissions slashed, formerly threatened lakes have been making a comeback, Environment Canada data shows. Only 9% of lakes continue to decline, a consequence of past acidifying pollution. Fifty per cent of lakes are now classed as stable and 41% show improvement.
The Great Lakes have also come back impressively, according to The Great Lakes Binational Toxics Strategy 2001. Mercury pollution is down, PCBs are down, dioxins and furans are down, HCBs are down, alkyl-lead is down. As a result, the environment of the Great Lakes is off the front pages.
When the NAFTA treaty was signed, the Canadian Environmental Law Association and labour unions predicted a decline in environmental standards. Industry would blackmail governments into ratcheting environmental standards downward, this environmental-union coalition claimed. The result would be a “race to the bottom” in which industries gravitated to the jurisdictions with the laxest regulations. Harmonization of standards – a goal of trade treaties – would inevitably lead to lower standards and environmental ruin, they believed.
Under different circumstances, it might have worked out that way. Had U.S. environmental standards been lower than those of Canada and Mexico, the United States might well have bullied its NAFTA partners into playing by weak rules.
But CELA and the unions didn’t realize that U.S. standards are, in almost all cases, superior to those of Canada, and that the United States was not about to lower its standards to those of Canada or Mexico. Instead, Canada and Mexico generally found themselves harmonizing their standards upwards, to meet those of the United States. Citizens in Canada and Mexico were the better for it.
Before NAFTA and its predecessor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Canada-U.S. relations were marked by major environmental controversies. Many Canadians feared the wholesale export to the United States of our natural resources: The sale of our oil and gas, of our water, and of our forests – giveaways, they were called – inflamed public opinion.
With the passage of NAFTA, these concerns have not only been calmed, they have been turned on their heads. Because Canadians trust deal-making between businessmen more than deal-making between politicians, we no longer fear giveaways. Today, no one talks of the United States taking too much of our oil and gas, and the chief cries heard over lumber exports – which are still political and largely outside NAFTA’s beneficial influence – blame the U.S. government for taking too little of our wood. As for large-scale water exports – a wonky, uneconomic proposition that could only proceed with major subsidies from Canadian governments – nary a word is now heard in serious circles. Big water diversions may have seemed likely in the former era of closed economies run by Big Government, but in a more liberal, free-trade world, they have become economically unthinkable.
In the entire decade since NAFTA was passed, no major NAFTA-related environmental issue has arisen between Canada and the United States. The only environmental issues warranting press coverage – mini dust-ups with obscure names like Metalclad and Methanex – loom large in the anti-globalization movement but would make few environmentalists’ lists of Top 10 concerns. NAFTA-spawned institutions did, however, generate a wealth of information comparing the environmental performance of Canadian provinces and Canadian industries to those south of the border, thus shedding light on the distance Canada must go to catch up with the United States, and serving to keep our polluters’ feet to the fire.
NAFTA alone can’t be credited with all these environmental accomplishments. Thanks to other trade liberalizations, both before and after NAFTA, the need to compete has forced industries to use resources ever more efficiently, leading to the transformation we’ve seen away from the resource sector and toward the information and knowledge economy. That transformation will get a further boost on NAFTA’s 10th anniversary, when more free-market reforms take effect.
Much, much more needs to be done, however. The areas that remain in the grip of government – our fisheries, our forests, our farmlands, our power utilities and our water works among them – remain paragons of environmental mismanagement. Fortunately, other trade treaties – the Free Trade Area of the Americas, to incorporate South and Central America, and the General Agreement on Trade in Services – are in the works. With their passage, we can look forward to Canadian drinking water becoming as safe to drink as water in the United States, for example, and to meaningful nuclear reactor safety standards.
In the meantime, we can count our blessings. The Commission for Environmental Co-operation, a NAFTA-created watchdog, in a study last year of the industrial pollutants landing on the continent’s air, land and water, was heartened by a downward trend in emissions. So should we all be. NAFTA and the advent of continent-wide competition has given us a present of one of the most precious gifts of all – a much, much cleaner environment.
Urban Renaissance Institute 