New Media

Canada needs to outlaw the Parti Quebecois.

Yes, that would be bad for political freedom in Quebec and Canada. But the status quo is an even worse infringement on political freedom in that province.

Instead of arguing over health care, housing or the environment – issues that matter to Canadians from coast to coast – Quebecers are invariably forced in provincial elections to vote on the issue of whether they want to stay in the country. It’s going to happen again on March 26.

It’s not that Quebecers don’t get to discuss the issues, but that all of them are ultimately subordinated to national unity/breakup when election time comes around. As such, one never really knows whether their elected officials got reelected (or booted) over financial management or social priorities, or if it was because of their efforts to keep the province in the federation (or vise versa). This is bad for democracy.

Canadian unity politicians who haven’t done anything to change this situation know this, and they must also know that it’s a huge gamble to keep doing nothing. The Liberals may very well with this election, or the next one… but what about the one after, or the one after that? Quebec sovereignty has been an issue for over three centuries, and a serious threat to Canada for over three decades. It’s not going to go away.

Canada’s House of Commons has voted to force the Conservative minority government to create a plan over the next 60 days for Canada to meet it’s commitments to Kyoto.

This isn’t a bad thing. The Conservatives have been reluctant to embrace the new environmental dogma of Kyoto for fear of putting Canadians out of work with Soviet-style economic management.

But now they can – and should.

The Conservatives ought to include in the plan draconian measures like shutting down the Albertan oil sand projects without delay and closing any factories in Ontario that don’t meet newly-drafted environmental standards.

Such a plan will of course have no chance of actually being made into legislation. But it will force Canadians and our elected representatives to think about what kinds of sacrifices they truly are prepared to make. When Conservatives force Liberals and NDP partisans on to the defensive, it might just swing public policy back into realism.

It’s time to get past the rhetoric and partisanship. Per capita, Canadians are the worst offenders to Mother Nature on the planet. It’s time to turn ideas into action.

All the Conservatives, neocons and shills for the oil companies who are denying global warming can go suck on an exhaust pipe.

Frankly, I’m embarassed so many Conservatives in Canada are still shouting from the rooftops (or slightly less noisily on the Blogging Tories forum) that global warming is all just propaganda and junk science. The funny thing is that our Conservative Prime Minister has belatedly signed on to the cause, but far too many of the party membership seems stuck in a 2002-era time warp.

Get with the program, people. We’ve got a planet to save.

When the biggest issue facing the ruling party in Canada is the environment, things must be going pretty well.

Conservative Party candidates will be attending an election training school in March (where they’ll be learning what, exactly? How to avoid gaining weight from all the pancake breakfasts and fundraising dinners?). It remains to be seen whether they’ll need any refresher course.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion says balancing the budget will be a big priority. News flash: we’ve had billion dollar budget surpluses for about a decade now and that has continued under the Tories.

Meanwhile, Dion’s party is once again raising the spectre of Canada not meeting it’s Kyoto commitments with Stephen Harper in power, conveniently forgetting that Canada’s carbon emmissions went up 30 per cent under Martin’s Liberals – to the point that meeting our targets this year would involve completely shutting down Ontario for the foreseeable future.

Dion’s environmental agenda also ignores Harper’s new promise to unveil plans obliging companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2015. Dion calls it opportunism, which it assuredly is, but no social benefit ever got passed by our parliament that didn’t meet the criteria of political expediency.

The economy is humming and life in Canada is pretty uneventful aside from our freak weather. If Kyoto is the only stick Dion has to wield against the Harperites, he’s likely to get smoked.

An article in today’s Georgia Straight coughs up some pretty toxic drivel about carbon credits as a solution to Canada’s environmental problems.

The Georgia Straight article actually admits that carbon trading has a lot of drawbacks criticized by leading environmentalists – not least of which is the lack of accountability for carbon-traded projects that are supposed to make up for polluters’ ongoing operations. Unfortunately, it leaves such critical information until the final couple of paragraphs, after about 1,000 words of gut-check anti-Conservative, pro-Kyoto propaganda.

Canada is a major polluter, worse in some respects than the American gas-guzzling empire that many self-righteous Canadians are the first to criticize. There seems to be no real debate left regarding humanity’s carbon-producing societies being behind a potentially catastrophic (well, for us, maybe not cockroaches) climate change. Something needs to be done.

But carbon trading isn’t it. Buying carbon credits on the international market doesn’t actually reduce global warming – it just makes countries billions of dollars poorer.

Instead of sending our currency abroad into a black (green?) hole, why not invest those billions in Canada on renewable energy research, or the production of tried and tested renewable energy sources: wind, solar, and yes, nuclear power?