Minor but encouraging changes in MOE’s latest enforcement report

Yesterday the Ministry of Environment released its 1st Quarter Compliance and Enforcement Report for 2010.  Ordinarily this would not be news (there are 4 of them a year, after all), but this one caught my eye – primarily because we’d given the Ministry such a hard time about plummeting enforcement levels earlier this year (here’s the Times Colonist story).  Indeed, I’d been wondering – given that it’s August and there had been no reports released – whether they might stop releasing the reports altogether. 

Convictions.jpgBut although the report is late it’s interesting to note that Ministry has taken the time to rework the information included. 

  • For the first time they are identifying the names of individuals who receive tickets under environmental offences. 
  • They’re now listing the tickets for statutes that the Ministry of Environment actually administers separately from tickets for laws that are administered by other ministries or other levels of government.  In the past the level of environmental enforcement has been somewhat obscured by the many non-environmental statutes that the conservation officer service enforces.  (For example, in response to our allegation that ticketing for 6 major environmental statutes had dropped, Minister Barry Perry pointed to overall ticketing levels as being more stable, although this included tickets for many non-environmental statutes). 

These are both minor, but positive, moves.  At least they suggest that the Ministry is talking internally about enforcement and what changes it needs to improve the situation.  That being said, neither of these changes in reporting accomplish anything if the Ministry does not get its enforcement levels up.  This single report for the first quarter of 2010 provides no real answers about how the Ministry is doing in terms of actual enforcement levels. 

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