Environment and sustainability

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Canada’s oil patch is booming. The Alberta tar sands have become the number one foreign oil source for the United States, replacing Saudi Arabia. Within the next 15 years, Canada will be pumping four to five times more crude than today from the tar pits of northern Alberta into the US market. The tar sands are key to the claim that Canada is the new “energy superpower”.
With an alarmed public increasingly holding government and industry to account for a multitude of environmental and social outrages, the powers that be are scrambling to find ways to keep the status quo while appearing to respond. One of their favourite gimmicks is “consultation” – engaging a critical public in supposedly open, unbiased information exchange and trust-building, leading to “mitigation and accommodation” of any concerns that can’t be covered up or spun away.
There’s deformed pickerel in Lake Athabasca... Pushed-in faces, bulging eyes, humped back, crooked tails... never used to see that. Great big lumps on them... you poke that, it sprays water... A friend caught a jackfish recently with two lower jaws... He had seen deformed jackfish before, but never one with two jaws. -- Ray Ladouceur, Elder of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.
OTTAWA—Today the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released The Harper Record, the most comprehensive analysis of the Conservative minority government’s record to date. “Scheduled for broad release in early October, we are releasing the electronic version of this book today, to help Canadians make informed choices about the future of their country,” says CCPA Executive Director Bruce Campbell.
This book is one in a series of CCPA publications that have examined the records of Canadian federal governments during the duration of their tenure.
Inside this issue: Harvest of Shame: Cultivating Farmworker Rights Living on Welfare Denying Income Inequality Won’t Make It Go Away Perspectives on BC’s Carbon Tax Selling Out the Public Interest on Vancouver Island Forestlands
Since the heady days of the Clayoquot Sound logging blockades, few issues on Vancouver Island have triggered such public outrage as the proposed sale of thousands of hectares of forestland on Victoria’s doorstep. That outrage has only intensified in recent days after BC Auditor General John Doyle issued a blistering report criticizing the provincial government for failing to consider the public interest when granting Western Forest Products (WFP) the right to sell these lands.
The authors of this paper review current science, from the most credible sources, to help provide an understanding of the basis for, and the scale of, the global warming problem and the kind of contribution BC might make to its solution. They hope that with this information British Columbians can engage in serious discussions about the tools — both policy and technological — needed to prevent dangerous global warming. The authors recognize global warming as the present and credible threat of climate change.