“Canada: A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing”
The Polemicist
by Michael House
LONDON, England—(Weekly Hubris)—3/8/10—Canada is to the United States as New Zealand is to Australia: a beautiful, gentle, peaceful country with all the virtues of its mighty neighbor, but none of its faults. That is the perception. How many travelling Americans in the last decade have told people that they were Canadian?
But cuddly Canada has a dark secret. Over the last four years, it has been a major, if not the major, saboteur of agreements on climate change. In 2006, the incoming government reneged on agreements made under the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It abandoned its target of cutting emissions by 6 percent between 1990 and 2012. Up to 2007, emissions over the relevant period have risen by 26.2 percent. Canada is the only ratifying country to have ratted on its obligations. Kyoto was a purely voluntary process, with no sanctions against failures or renegades. Any country that feels like it can now point to a precedent for tearing up environmental agreements entered into voluntarily.
Next, Canada sabotaged a Commonwealth resolution in support of binding targets for industrialized nations. This was at the end of 2007. Further climate talks in Poland in December 2008 resulted in Canada winning a remarkable accolade: environmental groups awarded it the Fossil of the Year award as the country that had done the most to disrupt the talks. In the same month, the climate change performance index was published, which ranks the efforts of the world’s 60 richest states. Canada came in 59th, just ahead of Saudi Arabia. Fast forward to October 2009 when, during a speech by the Canadian delegate at a meeting in Bangkok, all the delegations of the developing world walked out in protest at his hectoring tone.
Startling, isn’t it? It certainly shocked me when I researched Canada’s recent track record on climate change. One of the richest countries on earth has the worst environmental record in the G8.
During the recent Copenhagen summit, David Miller, the Mayor of Toronto, lambasted the Harper regime. He said, “. . .like most Canadians, I’m embarrassed that our government continues to be one of the biggest obstacles to reaching agreement.” Canada picked up two more Fossil Awards at the summit.
So why has kindly Dr. Jekyll turned into evil Mr. Hyde? In a word, oil. The stuff that has done such damage to world peace in the last decade strikes again. Canada is now developing its oil reserves, the second largest deposits on the planet. But it is not oil as we know it. It is, instead, “tar sands,” a mixture of sand with heavy metals, toxic chemicals and bitumen.
Greenpeace has described tar sands as “the dirtiest and most damaging way of getting oil out of the ground ever devised.” In Alberta, an area the size of England is being strip-mined in the biggest open-cast mining operation on earth. Pristine forest and marshland is being destroyed. The oil is then extracted from the hell-brew by heating and washing—three barrels of water to one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in unlined reservoirs, leaching mercury and arsenic into the water table. The tar companies have to employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface of these witches’ cauldrons. It is reported that indigenous peoples living downstream have developed cancers and auto-immune diseases.
The refining process requires far more energy use than for crude oil. The process is estimated to burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. It is said to be the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon gases. Even at this relatively early stage of the process, Canada is close to the top of the table for per capita emissions. The major companies involved are Shell and BP.
The sabotaging of climate change conferences and protocols by Canada’s Neanderthal government and the irresponsible exploitation of natural resources are clearly linked. This is not the first time that this cultivated nation has been hi-jacked by get-rich-quick bandits. Logging companies have destroyed ancient forests. Fishing companies have bled fishing grounds dry. But this is different: it affects the whole planet.
The last word should go to Mr. Kriton Arsenis, a Greek Member of the European Parliament. “The environmental and health impacts of tar-sand extraction are huge. In addition to being two to three times more carbon-intensive than the production of conventional oil, the process causes severe air and water pollution, destroys livelihoods of indigenous communities and produces toxic waste.”
Canadians must wake up to what is being done in their name and kick out the scoundrels in Ottawa who are allowing it to happen.
It is reported that a co-operative agreement has been signed between MacDonald’s and New Zealand Weight Watchers. MacDonald’s is to put the Weight Watchers logo on its menu boards, and Weight Watchers will promote MacDonald’s to dieters.
I understand that similar co-operative ventures are in the pipeline between the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan; the Roman Catholic Church and Hell, Inc.; the Tea Party movement and the National Abortion Rights Action League; and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (sic) with the Aryan Brotherhood.
President Obama appears to have taken my advice (Polemicist 3/1/10). He is going for the (Republican-named) “nuclear option” on health reform, via a legislative maneuver known as “reconciliation,” which means that a simple majority in the US Senate gets the bill through. No more trying to appease the unappeasable.
The Republicans scream that it is undemocratic to override their filibuster. But how is it democratic when 59 percent lose and 41 percent win?
Michael House
Michael House, FRGS was born, of rural, peasant stock, in Somerset, England. He read law at Exeter College, Oxford and was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1974, along with five colleagues, House started up a set of barristers' chambers in three little rooms in Lincoln's Inn, London, specializing in human rights and in representing the poor and dispossessed. The set now comprises 170 members and occupies a 17th-century building that was home to the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated (Spencer Perceval, 1812). In 1987, depressed by Mrs. Thatcher's third election victory, House fled to Greece for three years, where he was published in The Athenian and The Southeastern Review. He also there met his archaeologist wife, Diane. The pair returned to England in 1990 after a half-year, round-the-world trip, and settled in London and Northamptonshire. Since then, by way of escape from humdrum criminality, House has traveled in Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, Ladakh, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Mongolia, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, where only the stout walls of Galle Fort saved him and his spouse from being swept away by the tsunami. House returns to Greece, his second home, almost every year. He has written for, inter alia, History Today, the Universities Quarterly, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Rough Guide to Greece. House practices criminal defense law from Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in London, and hopes that if he keeps on practicing, he may eventually get the hang of it. His yet unachieved ambitions are: to farm alpacas; see Tibet liberated from the Chinese jackboot; and live to see Britain a socialist republic. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)