This book has beautiful clear maps and charts, and is an under-discovered gift to the people of Ontario. Whoever decided to create a free download option for avid readers has done a great service, and I can only hope that as many Ontarians as possible are reading this volume. Blue-Green Province is a go-to read-and-reread reference book, and not a book intended to be absorbed by skimming through once. The author is a meticulous scholar, and has an understated nonpartisan style while placing successive Ontario governments under a brilliant environmental lens.
Winfield addresses his potentially vast topic with scrupulous diligence and his professional approach includes extensive and specific notes to important events that would have otherwise been lost in the archives of government data. His authority is indisputably the product of an exacting writer devoted to the merits of his work. Blue-Green Province as a history book divides its sections into a intriguing and entirely readable study of Ontario government eras. Turning point moments in Ontario's environmental policies are described by Winfield in a compelling and coherent way. Environmental scaffolds in place today are suddenly made stark for the readers as the efforts of years of laborious process on the part of environmental advocates who have fought for decades, and fought in decades past to create accountability in this province.
The preface reminds us of Ontario's record of great environmental achievements as well as several historic calamities, transporting us as far back as the 19th century which marked some of the beginnings of action on the part of policing the environment (Winfield, xiiv). Winfield also goes back to the forties and even thirties and references the governments of Frost, Robarts and Davies, and successfully creates needed continuum regarding the history of Ontario in the process (Winfield, page 6).
The book, as an environmentalist history, but rather than being structured around time periods, it is structured around specific government eras in Ontario. The effect of this approach allows readers to slowly build upon their Ontario environmental issue literacy, and use it to contrast the management and policy decisions of Ontario today. This creates for readers a sense of the urgency in past times, when Ontario’s environmental realm was entirely unregulated, and a look at how legal loopholes were left behind by successive governments that placed production above protection. Blue-Green Province gives an overview of past environmental records from each government era, beginning with the long PC "Dynasty" period, a daunting process something Winfield has written in a fairhanded manner and researched extremely well. The entire book is accompanied by footnoted text, providing several footnotes within each paragraph throughout. It is reassuring to read a book by an author so dedicated to ensuring academic sources are present and in place.
Another plot in the book is the tug-of-war between Ontario's private sector, who wanted to extract resources and pollute with a free hand, and environmental lawmakers, who wanted them to comply to environmental regulations, which were developing in response to a greater understanding of the harm pollution caused. Winfield uses the term "incremental" to describe the incredible slow pace and deliberately stalled progress and exemptions-making route that basic environmental regulations and their enforcement took in Ontario (Winfield, page 32). The book is also great at identifying key moments in time, such as the establishment of the Environmental Assessment Act in 1976 which resulted in the government being willing to actually consider prosecution for hazardous waste pollution by 1980 (Winfield, page 32). Blue-Green Province effectively recreates the controversies and challenges of the time and makes understanding these important historical events much more interesting as Winfield is a writer who is skilled at removing obsfucation and letting facts speak volumes.
For me there were many interesting moments and parts in the book, including the acid rain battle (Winfield, page 65) and Winfield's description of the Harris government, and the ways in which Harris sought to undermine past regulations, as well as the legislative and other responses to his attempts (Winfield, page 106).
I highly recommend this book as there is great inspiration between its pages. Anyone who wishes to develop their literacy regarding the evolution of Ontario's environmental protection policies, the history of how they came to be in place and a sense of what more must be done will find Blue-Green Province unparalleled.
If there is a term for dog-eared favourite in the electronic realm, I highly recommended this essential volume become a dog-eared go-to for all Ontarians. The contents are easy to grasp and important for every Ontarian to become versed in. It is an important work of outstanding academic calibre accessible to all.
Winfield, M. (2012). Blue-Green Province: The environment and the political economy of ontario. UBC Press.
