If there was one moment that was emblematic of Tom Mulcair’s tenure as Quebec environment minister, it was the confiscation of the pigs. And there were a lot of pigs.
On a frosty January day in 2006, a dozen inspectors from Quebec’s environment ministry, accompanied by a dozen members of the Sûreté du Québec, rolled into the farm of Clément Roy, in the Beauce countryside south of Quebec City. Together, they loaded all of Roy’s livestock – 585 sows, hogs and piglets, plus 12 cows – onto a fleet of transport trucks and drove them to the regional auction house to be sold. Vast quantities of the pig slurry and manure stored in Roy’s barns were sucked onto 50 tank trucks and removed.
The bill for this unprecedented “nettoyage,” plus a stiff fine, went to Roy. For more than a decade, the intransigent farmer had been violating environmental and agricultural regulations, ignoring repeated requests from the farming union and the environment ministry to clean up his act.
The message was clear: rules are rules. And the messenger was Tom Mulcair. The decision to put Clément Roy out of business reflected Mulcair’s conviction that for sustainable development to be anything more than a lofty goal, it needed to be codified in law, and that law needed to be enforced. This belief led to the crafting and passing of Quebec’s Sustainable Development Act, which anchored the principles of sustainable development in all facets of the provincial government’s administration while also adding the right to a healthy environment to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. It was the first legislation of its kind in Canada.
This year, Corporate Knights is honouring Mulcair’s efforts with the 2024 Award of Distinction, announced in June. Past recipients include former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell and Adèle Hurley, co-founder of the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain.
From the outset, it was clear that the government of Jean Charest, elected in 2003 after two terms of Parti Québécois rule, was going to make the environment a priority. Having served as federal environment minister in Brian Mulroney’s government, Charest had led the Canadian delegation to the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992 – where 154 countries signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreeing to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and where Agenda 21, the action plan for achieving sustainable development, was launched. As premier, he renamed the Quebec portfolio the Ministry for Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks – the first and only of its kind in Canada – and appointed Mulcair, a whip-smart jurist and feisty parliamentarian, minister.
Mulcair was 49 when he joined the Charest cabinet; he had previously served two terms as a Liberal MNA for a Laval suburb and, prior to that, ran a private law practice and worked in legal capacities for multiple government ministries. His first priority as minister was to address two major – and related – environmental problems in Quebec: the blue-green algae blooms that were causing major ecosystem die-offs in many of the province’s lakes and rivers, and the agricultural run-off that was feeding them.
Having established itself as a major pork producer and exporter, Quebec had seen its pig farms grow in size and number and become a major source of leaked manure. Mulcair describes the relationship between pork producers and the government when he took office as “open warfare.” In an effort to bring the parties together, he agreed to lift the moratorium on new hog farms that had been declared by the previous government, on condition that all farms meet clearly established environmental standards. He also made it clear that there would be zero tolerance for violations, which is what led to that morning in mid-January, and the order that Mulcair now calls the toughest decision he made as minister.
“Sustainable development is not something you pound over people’s heads,” he says on the phone from his lake home in the Laurentians north of Montreal. “You have to work with people, to accompany them in their challenges. But you also have to enforce the rules.”
Mulcair’s determination to cultivate widespread understanding – and support – for the idea of sustainable development was reflected in the four-month road tour he took in 2005 with the first draft of his Sustainable Development Act. In a series of public hearings held in 21 municipalities across Quebec, Mulcair listened to Quebecers’ suggestions and concerns. He says the “super worthwhile” process resulted in a much stronger piece of legislation.
“It’s not Moses and the tablets,” he says of effective environmental policy. “This can’t just be the work of parties and bureaucrats.”
The Sustainable Development Act baked the idea of sustainable development into every aspect of the public service. It made “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” the government’s goal and enumerated 16 principles to guide it in getting there. Among them are the precautionary principle, which requires actors to err on the side of caution with respect to potential environmental impacts; polluter pays; and the internalization of costs, which insists that the value of a good reflect its entire life-cycle cost – including disposal. Mulcair considers the principle of “subsidiarity,” which delegates decision-making authority to the level of government closest to the citizens and communities concerned, to be a critical one. It has enabled Quebec municipalities to take a lead role in climate action. Key to the legislation’s effectiveness was the establishment of the position of sustainable development commissioner: a senior bureaucrat who evaluates each ministry’s implementation of the act and reports back to the auditor general.
It’s not Moses and the tablets. This can’t just be the work of parties and bureaucrats.
-Tom Mulcair, 2024 Award of Distinction
“There were lots of initiatives at the time,” says legal scholar Corinne Gendron, a professor of strategy and social and environmental responsibility at the Université du Québec à Montréal, “but they weren’t coordinated. The act meant that all ministries had to use the same strategy. The government had to change its practices to actually engage. It made sustainable development a core preoccupation.”
It also made it a human right. The Quebec charter was amended to include the clause “Every person has a right to live in a healthful environment in which biodiversity is preserved, to the extent and according to the standards provided by law.” It would be 17 more years before the federal government added this right to the Environmental Protection Act; it has yet to amend its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It seems unfortunate, but fitting, that Mulcair stepped down from his ministerial position on a matter of principle. When he objected to the Quebec government’s proposal to sell a good chunk of Mont-Orford, a large national park in the Eastern Townships, to private developers, Charest shuffled him out of his ministry. The two had already done battle over Mulcair’s insistence that a developer restore a wetland in Laval that he had built on illegally. Clearly Mulcair’s convictions were, at times, inconvenient. So he packed them up and left provincial politics for the federal stage.
In 2007, he was elected MP for the Montreal riding of Outremont, representing the New Democratic Party, which had never made inroads in Quebec. As lieutenant to party leader Jack Layton, Mulcair helped grow support for the NDP in Quebec to the point that the party won the majority of Quebec seats in the 2011 federal election. This “orange wave” put the NDP in Official Opposition in Ottawa. Following the death of Layton, Mulcair was elected leader of the federal NDP, a position he held until 2017. As leader of the Official Opposition, Mulcair opposed the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines, pushed for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and called for a cap-and-trade system for emissions and more rigorous environmental review processes.
Now retired from politics, Mulcair has made sustainable development the focus of his academic career. Having taught for several years in the political science department of the Université de Montréal, he is now expert in residence at the Université du Québec’s École nationale d’administration publique in Quebec City. This year he stepped down as chair of the board of Earth Day, a position he held for seven years.
As a political commentator, Mulcair disparages all the “emoting” he hears from politicians over the climate. What’s required, he says, is action. Easier said than done, some might say. To which Mulcair would doubtless respond: better said and done.
