If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
The Harper government is waging war on Canada's fresh water. Industry will now have unprecedented influence over water protection policy and the Harper cabinet will make decisions about which watersheds deserve protection based on political, not scientific, grounds. What a travesty Harper has decided to sacrifice our freshwater heritage in order to please his industry friends.
In this week's editorial pages we got to meet Thomas Muclair, SCARY ENEMY OF NATIONAL UNITY when he railed against the Alberta oil industry. All the western premiers quickly fired back, calling Mulcair's grasp of economics "tenuous and "goofy." But some are conceding that Muclair is being pretty damn "clever" in rejecting one of the dominant pieces of conventional wisdom in post-Harper Canadian politics: that you need the West to win.
Canadians are generally an obedient lot, so what gives with the plan of a group of Canadians to block Warren Buffett's coal trains near Vancouver this Saturday? Those on the train tracks and those standing up for alternatives to the tar sands, while maybe considered radical, might just be the new responsible.
Not only should China be banned from construction or bidding, but Investment Canada should ban Chinese companies from buying resource companies, or related assets. They low-ball to get contracts, then use shoddy materials, and have no respect for the rule of the law in Canada.
So many questions about Canada today. So few answers. What are the Conservatives scared of, indirectly gutting environmental laws via the budget, rat...
As well-documented as the environmental hazards of 48217 may be, there is no shortage of stories deserving to be told.
On the night of July 25, 2010, a section of the continent's vast pipeline network spilled around a million gallons of chemical-laden crude into western Michigan waterways. In the debate over our nation's energy future, the Kalamazoo River spill may prove even more important than the BP blowout.
The battle over the proposed Enbridge pipeline represents the clash of the new oil-driven Conservative coalition versus an unwilling province packed with people who have never been known to roll over and play dead. This will rock the country.
The future of Canadian government depends on Ontario's suburbs where the Liberal brand is by far the most credible alternative to the Conservatives, at a time when the NDP is in ascendance everywhere else. So, despite the westward shift in Canada, Ontario is still the pivot point when it comes to who runs things in Ottawa.
Conservative Senator Nicole Eaton is holding hearings into foreign funding of charities engaged in environmental issues, saying that they should disclose their foreign revenue sources, and that they should disclose their political activities. Uh, the thing is, they already do.
By most reports, Alberta's Premier Redford is a smart politician, capable of moving beyond mere platitudes, but she is at risk of drinking the tar sands Kool-Aid too quickly in her mandate and resorting to the name-calling we have come to expect from Alberta's politicians.
Props to HuffPost for getting Peter Kent into its office to answer some questions. Goodness knows Canadians need better answers from an Environment Minister whose reputation is that of acting on behalf of the tar sands industry rather than the environment. But the printed interview came off very much in the vein of "kid gloves."
So tar sands are not only a source of enough carbon to increase global climate by a huge amount -- they are also the key to keeping diesel prices low enough to enable the world to fry itself by shipping long distance coal where it can be burned profitably, if lethally -- for the climate.
Pipelines are like marriages: they are meant to last several decades. We have to ask ourselves not only whether we want the Keystone XL pipeline now, we have to determine whether we want to spend the rest of our lives with it.
There's a new sickness sweeping across Canada that medical experts have diagnosed as Selective Parochialism Disease. It afflicts mostly the ideological, and in particular those who think that cooking the planet for our children is a good idea.
Alberta's carefully constructed web of secrecy was pierced this week by news that Canada is planning to poison thousands of wolves in a desperate effort to save caribou decimated by oil development.
