During the summer and fall of 2002, Canadian business, in an effort to prevent the Chrétien government from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), carried out the single largest political campaign intended to influence environmental policy since the modern regulatory system was first put in place in the late 1960s. The business campaign, which saw millions of dollars spent on television and print advertising, was led and largely financed by the oil and gas industry, the sector most threatened by the Kyoto policy goal of stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions, some two-thirds...

This chapter provides a review of the current state of knowledge and debate concerning political activity by the environmentally regulated firm. The first section, after documenting the emergence of the firm as an organizational entity, the political issues associated with its current legal structure, and the role of corporate culture, reviews literature dealing with the larger context of “business-government relations” within which environmental regulation takes place. The second section of the chapter reviews the current state of research on the more specific topic of environmental policy-making, with the focus primarily on research done to date in Canada.

Without going into...

During this time period, the first of the three historical phases examined in this and the next two chapters, business seems to have paid little attention to the fact that it was becoming subject to new federal and provincial environmental regulations. This is probably because, at the time, environment was only one small part of the overall expansion of the governmental regulatory sphere. That larger phenomenon certainly was noticed by business, which during the 1970s began to arm itself for political battle and by the end of that decade was pressing for a roll-back of the regulatory state. As is...

The era of increasing pressure on business is marked at the beginning by a commitment given by the federal government to act on the issue that dominated the first part of the decade, acid rain, and at the end by the election of the Chrétien administration, which ran on an environment platform but then proceeded to implement the deregulatory agenda of the 1990s. In August 1980, Canada and the United States signed a Memorandum of Agreement that set forth their joint intent to take common action on transboundary air pollution, most notably acid rain, the new issue that was to...

Although the events narrated here go up to the release of the Martin government’s climate-change policy document in the spring of 2005 (Canada, 2005), the period between 2000 and 2005 is addressed only in terms of the business defeat in the very public battle fought over Kyoto ratification, coupled with its victory in the private negotiations with the federal government afterwards. This is because the term “relaxing regulatory pressure” can most properly be applied to the period beginning with ARET, the first major voluntary program, and the first reductions in environment-department budgets and ending with the Walkerton deaths from polluted...

In this concluding chapter, I attempt to pull together the stories presented above, in order to present one coherent view of our subject matter: the interests, strategies, and power of business in the arena of environmental politics. To do that, I first present, in Table 6.1, one overall summary picture of business engagement with environmental politics in this country from the onset of regulation to the present — what might be termed a summary of the three summaries provided at the conclusion of each history chapter. The purpose of the table is to provide a clear picture of the major...