Options for environmental protection and management in Ontario

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a framework that can be used to determine the applicability of economic instruments in future policy decisions, based on the characteristics of the environmental problem under consideration. To reach this objective, we review the status quo mix of "command-and-control" and "economic instruments" in Ontario environmental policy, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of various policy mechanisms against a range of criteria based in part on past experience in environmental protection and other fields of government policy in Ontario and other jurisdictions. In view of the breadth of the scope of our study, we were not asked to design a specific economic instrument approach to any given environmental policy. Since much of the extensive theoretical literature on this topic is already well-known to both the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Treasury and Economics, the focus of this study is on the practicality of the various approaches to Ontario environmental policy, based on empirical evidence of how such policies have performed in the past in Ontario and elsewhere.