New Media

Urban sprawl is going to kill us all.

Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic. But if a Globe and Mail report about urban sprawl in beautiful British Columbia is to be believed, our goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this province by 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 is already being undermined by the phenomenon. Simply put, skyrocketing housing prices in the coastal metropolis of Vancouver is forcing ever-increasing numbers to seek shelter in outlying communities.

The resulting increase in automobile commuting (since not everyone moving out to the boonies is taking the train) is driving our greenhouse gas emissions up. Global warming, here we come.

This isn’t actually news. Urban sprawl has been an issue for decades. The solution is less than clear-cut, though. You can’t force people to pay insane prices for tiny condos in Vancouver when they can still get a mid-sized house for a slightly less insane price just outside the operational range of Skytrain. And until we put all private homes under the direct ownership of the state a la Cuba, there’s no way to keep prices down.

The only way to artificially lower the cost of real estate would be to build coal plants and prisons right in the middle of Vancouver and other big cities like some demented SimCity mayor and watch people start actually leaving this province. I don’t see Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan or his metropolitan counterparts going the route of political suicide, though.

Sullivan’s ideas about building density in our city isn’t getting the attention it deserves. We’ll have to see whether Vancouverites and other Canadians will be willing to give up their big house dreams for convenient apartment living – like most people in virtually every other part of the world already have.

Poverty and homelessness activists in Vancouver and cynical NDP and Liberal politicians should win the gold medal for agit-prop for their skill in turning the 2010 Olympics into a publicity magnet for their agenda.

There’s no doubt that homelessness is a huge and tragic problem in our rainy little slice of paradise. There is a very real lack of affordable housing in this city. Coupled with easy access to cheap and addictive hard drugs, a lot of people are falling through the cracks.

But those who criticize the Olympics for taking public funds away from social assistance programs like subsidized housing and treatment centres must at least have an inkling of the illogic of their official rhetoric. Funding for Olympic infrastructure projects can’t really be said to directly take money out of the hands of our most vulnerable any more than budgeting for doctors and nurses hurts students in our cash-starved schools and universities.

Governments have to balance a menu of priorities. Implying that our national and community leadership has launched a war on the poor because we’re putting tax dollars into city-wide improvements instead of more soup kitchens and government-regulated hotel rooms is just cynical.

300 is an unrelenting Hollywood blockbuster gore-fest, but is it war-mongering political propaganda?

The film depicts a heroic coalition of Spartans and Greeks fighting against an army of Persians led by a tyrant. Based loosely on historical events, the subject matter of the film has Iran’s cultural adviser, Javad Shamqadri, ranting that it is a salvo in “a cultural war against the people of Iran“.

The blogosphere is flowing with opinions about how this or that scene in the film glorifies war in general or in particular against foreign barbarians. But in the film, there’s more than just a suggestion that the Spartans are at least as guilty of barbarism as their enemies (killing messengers, practicing infanticide, raising their own children into savagery). The film is overwhelmingly a celebration of violence, not a political tract gushing over Western superiority.

Even if the Spartans’ declaration that freedom must be fought for are to be taken at face value, there’s nothing so terrible about that, either. It’s quite true – though in our day and age, one should certainly be as skeptical as the Spartan senate in the film about the real motives for war.

Canada’s seal hunt is once again generating some bad press for our otherwise inspiring nation. Animal activists and environmentalists will go head to head with Inuit hunters demanding their traditional hunting rights and residents of a depressed province trying to earn an honest buck.

If seals weren’t so darn cute, this wouldn’t be such an issue. We cull about 300,000 of the critters a year. Newfoundland’s fisheries minister notes that Germany hunts 1.2 million deer and over 500,000 wild boars a year, without any international condemnation. Hundreds of millions of fish are harvested from our oceans every year.

PETA’s protestations notwithstanding, much of the human species depends on readily available animal protein and products to live. Besides, we have international laws to protect endangered species.

The seal isn’t actually designated as endangered. Until such a time as that designation is given, seals are fair game.

Canada’s a great country to live in, if you can get here.

Some recent high profile cases have highlighted the difficulties immigrants are facing on their long and dangerous journeys to the New World.

There’s the case of Zahra Kamalfar and her two children, forced to live at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow since May 2006. Tom Hanks starred in the Terminal in 2004, but this family had to endure a reality (no TV) version of the insanity of a bureaucratic snafu that left them without a country – or showers, beds, or a steady supply of the necessities of life – for ten months.

Then there’s the case of Iranian refugee Amir Kazemian. He actually made it into Canada, but placed himself under virtual house arrest in a church for nearly three years while his refugee claim was appealed. The Canadian government gave him a last minute reprieve when he was arrested and let him stay. Still, some violent criminals get shorter sentences than this guy had.

You’d think that 500 years after the first European landings on this continent, we’d have a more streamlined method of taking in legitimate immigrants who come here for a better life.