For decades, the Precautionary Principle has been a cornerstone of environmental policy — and, too often, a justification for decisions that have cost working people and First Nations their livelihoods, their communities, and their confidence in the institutions that claim to speak for them. It is time to take into account the impacts on working people and communities.
In Canada and other developed countries, PP overreach is disproportionately borne by industrial workers, rural residents, and those First Nations choosing to participate in resource extraction and exports — the very people NGOs and other institutions claim to speak for.
It is also true that workers and unions in resource industries have, at times, politicized the Precautionary Principle — using safety as leverage in contract and regulatory disputes.
Since the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development of 1992, which enshrined the Precautionary Principle, the examples of overreach have multiplied — with serious local and global consequences: lost opportunity, higher prices, and costs that cascade through the broader economy.
The economic costs
Energy
The very long permitting process for LNG Canada and the forced abandonment of Energy East illustrate the real cost of regulatory overreach. LNG Canada took 14 years from inception to completion — raising costs, putting Canada behind the United States as a North American LNG exporter, and leaving us unable to meet today’s market demand.
Germany’s nuclear decision
The German Green Party, founded in 1980, grew out of the 1970s anti-nuclear weapons movement. In Canada and elsewhere, those who took over the movement quietly dropped weapons from the campaign — redirecting opposition toward nuclear power itself.
The 2001 decision to retire Germany’s fleet of nuclear power plants had wide-ranging consequences: high energy costs, the erosion of Germany’s manufacturing base, energy dependence on Russia, diminished capacity to support Ukraine, and the forced restart of coal plants that had already been closed.
This despite Our World in Data showing that nuclear power has virtually identical safety and CO2 emissions profiles as wind and solar.
Agriculture
An ideological campaign against agricultural science has been active for decades, contributing to lower yields, higher prices, expanded land use, and, in some cases, civil disruption.
The EU maintains an agricultural regulatory regime that bans or restricts hundreds of chemicals used in crops and livestock, including herbicides, plant-growth regulators, and veterinary growth promoters. The European Commission Joint Research Centre reports double-digit drops in yields and double-digit rises in prices under these restrictions.
OECD global modelling suggests EU-style restrictions could add roughly 600 million hectares of demand for agricultural land. Meanwhile, Our World in Data shows that the global population doubled since 1961, while arable land use per person fell from 0.4 to 0.2 hectares.
A 2019 Nature Communications study found that implementing similar regulations in England and Wales would require more imported food — increasing both land use and GHG emissions abroad.
Sri Lanka’s 2021 overnight switch to organic farming triggered civil disruption and economic collapse, as reported by TIME Magazine.
The broader costs
Health
The World Health Organization has documented coordinated misinformation campaigns targeting vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, pain medications, psychiatric medications, hormone therapies, cancer drugs, and other treatments. WHO finds that these campaigns fuel vaccine hesitancy, delay health care, and have contributed to the re-emergence of diseases once considered under control.
The consequences are real. The 2025 measles resurgence in the United States and Canada, documented in Social Science & Medicine, is a direct result of the vaccine hesitancy these campaigns have produced.
Ecosystems and evolution
All living matter, including humans, is shaped by climate, volcanoes, droughts, floods, disease, and other forces — whether natural or human-caused. Humanity is not separate from nature but a species formed by the same pressures, and one that has always chased survival and prosperity, sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly.
That drive is universal and legitimate. Yet over the past three decades, environmental idealism has too often treated human needs — particularly those of working people — as obstacles to ecological goals rather than as part of the same equation.
PP overload
When individual decisions are never assessed in aggregate, they can overwhelm working people — at the local, national, and global levels. British Columbia offers a clear example.
When the spotted owl replaced nuclear weapons tests, pollution, and whaling as the anchor of environmental activism in BC in the 1990s, the War in the Woods was born — and remains unresolved today.
Decades of one-off decisions — parks, old-growth carve-outs, large conservation areas, and continual regulatory change — have exhausted all stakeholders and left the industry in a tangle, while successive BC governments have struggled to balance old-growth protection with the needs of First Nations, communities, and workers.
The ban on ocean pen salmon farming is another case of overreach. Salmon farming is far from the most consequential threat to wild salmon, and many mitigation tools have been proven to reduce impacts. Yet Canada and BC have declined to adopt the Norwegian model — which permits pens in less sensitive locations — maintaining jobs, sustaining the industry, and providing incentives for R&D.
It’s time for balance
GHG emissions and biodiversity goals have largely been aspirational. Lamenting the failure to reach perfection rather than celebrating what has been accomplished does little to motivate working people.
Nor does fear. People living paycheck to paycheck are consumed with the here and now, or feeling gaslit by the same old talking points about retraining and up-skilling.
PP overreach has weakened economies and left young people doubting they will ever be as prosperous as their parents. That combination is explosive.
The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance finds that carbon reduction policies disproportionately burden low-income households — and that the more effective ESG measures become at reducing emissions, the heavier that burden grows for the poor.
Offshoring GHG emissions and industrial capacity was a mistake on both counts. The economic and social costs have empowered those who threaten the global order and rule of law, including populists within Western countries themselves.
The rise of isolationist populism on the right and anti-capitalist populism on the left is not unrelated to the disaffection of working people. For pragmatic environmentalists, corporations, and legislators, that should be a serious concern. International cooperation and stable economies are the foundation for meaningful progress on climate and biodiversity.
Working People Matter!
Jim Rushton is a 46-year veteran of BC’s resource and transportation sectors, with experience in union representation, economic development, and terminal management. Reach him at [email protected].
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