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Book launch explores corporate rules and big energy

Book launch explores corporate rules and big energy

The Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change and the Sustainable Energy Initiative (SEI) presents “Corporate Rules and Big Energy” on Wednesday, May 11 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. 

Book cover for Corporate Rules: The Real World of Business Regulation in Canada
Book cover for Corporate Rules: The Real World of Business Regulation in Canada

The virtual event welcomes guests to the launch event of EUC Adjunct Professor and former Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Bruce Campbell’s new book Corporate Rules: The Real World of Business Regulation in Canada (James Lorimer and Company, 2022).  

Campbell will join a panel of contributing authors to focus on the environmental, health and safety regulation of big energy in Canada, looking at the cases of federal climate change and energy policy, the Alberta oil industry and the tar sands, and nuclear energy.  

This book offers documentation for the first time of how corporations have captured Canadian government agencies set up to protect the public. 

Twenty-one authors, experts in their fields, describe how federal agencies do their job to regulate industries – oil, nuclear, pharmaceuticals, construction, international mining, finance and more. In virtually every case, they find that the agency has set aside the public interest to favour corporate interests. The authors also find government legislation, policies limiting regulations, ongoing working relationships with “stakeholders” often take place in secret, lobbying, financing of regulatory agencies by regulated industries, and job movement between industry and government all combine to produce these captive regulatory agencies. The result is that government continuously and often disastrously fails to protect the public interest. The results are a degraded environment, increased inequality in society, loss of trust in government and avoidable deaths. 

As editor, Campbell concludes the book with a set of proposals that would restore the primacy of the public interest in the work of government agencies. 

EUC Professor and SEI Co-Chair Mark Winfield will moderate the event.  

The panel features, Jason MacLean, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of New Brunswick and an adjunct professor at the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan; Theresa McClenaghan, executive director and counsel for the Canadian Environmental Law Association; Nathan Lempers an adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and former postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Smart Prosperity Institute; and William K. Carroll is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria. 

All members of the York community are welcome to attend. Registration is required on eventbrite.