Let’s Be Honest for Once

George Washington is remembered to have said, “I cannot tell a lie.” Since then no politician has been able to make the same claim without being guilty of telling one.

These days truth itself should be placed on an endangered species list.

It’s gotten to the point where the truth is coming under a constant attack from all sides.

Today its truth, not lies, that have become something to be avoided at all costs and it’s no longer just politicians who have a monopoly on the practice, we’ve all gotten into the act.

With that in mind Web Talk is proud, well at least mildly pleased, to present a hastily compiled:

Top 10 list of (politically incorrect) Comments You Won’t Find in the National Papers

Or

10 Rants For the Price of One

10 – I feel for Ontarians who are losing their jobs. Being from Newfoundland and Labrador I can sympathize with their plight and wish them the best. Having said that, I wouldn’t be human if some small part of me, deep in the back of my mind, didn’t feel like shouting the following from the roof tops:

“If Ontarians are really suffering from rising unemployment why don’t they stop their incessant whining about wanting more EI and do what they’ve been telling Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to do for decades, suck it up and move someplace where they can find a job. The rest of us can’t be expected to keep Ontarians living in a place where there’s no work so pack up and move on. By the way Ontario, your unemployment rate is still only about half of what it is in Newfoundland and Labrador so slag off.”

But I won’t say it. I really do care about the individuals being hurt in this recession, including in Ontario and I hope they work their way through this.

9 – North Atlantic Harp seals are not endangered. North Atlantic Harp seals are highly efficient and effective carnivores with big sharp ugly teeth. They are not cuddly little “ice bunnies”.

Activists say seals are not hunted for food so they shouldn’t be hunted at all. In reality it was anti-sealing activists who lobbied to destroy a once profitable market for seal meat and are now using the lack of one as an excuse to ban the hunt.

The seal herd is thriving, the meat tastes great (yes it’s still eaten across Newfoundland and Labrador) and the furs are warmer, softer and more beautiful than anything else you’ll ever wear.

Thanks to their screwed up view of the world animal rights activists will cause far more damage to the seals, the fish stocks those seals depend upon and the entire ecosystem in the region than the annual seal hunt ever did.

By the way, for anyone interested I’ve got a great seal flipper pie recipe I can send you, just let me know and I’ll get it right out to you.

8 – Yes the Alberta oil sands are without any shadow of a doubt a messy and destructive environmental catastrophe.

They are destroying the air, land and water, but droning on and on in a vain attempt to force oil companies into cutting emissions in an effort to meet Kyoto targets is the environmental equivalent of the misguided anti-sealing movement.

Those companies cannot and will not meet those targets without running themselves out of business and that isn’t going to happen. It would take a shutdown or at least a major scale down of most oil sands activity in order to meet those targets and simply put, neither Canada nor the U.S. can afford to do that no matter what it might mean for the environment.

Enough is enough. It’s time to tell the Kyoto zealots to go to hell (as should have been done with the seal protestors), find a sensible way to manage the problem, cut the grandstanding on all sides of the political arena and reach a compromise on this issue that will do the least harm to everyone and everything involved. If not then forget about it and move on.

7 – The future of Canada means absolutely nothing to Stephen Harper who is a right wing, egomaniacal, hillbilly, educated beyond his intelligence level. He is a man who would gladly sell his soul and those of his children, if he hasn’t done so already, for the one thing he craves above all else, absolute power and control.

Canada’s future also means nothing to Michael Ignatieff, who is a thinly veiled American decked out in Canadian clothing. A man who wants nothing more than to add the title “Canadian Prime Minister” to his scholarly C.V. so he can demand more for his book sales in the future.

Jack Layton, well, enough said about Jack. No point in kicking a dead horse, especially with so many animal rights activists around these days. It’s getting so you can’t swing a dead cat (or a live one) without hitting one of them.

6 – Stephen Harper claims to be defending Canada’s territory, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador interests, by not accepting a French claim for extended offshore territory. His position is pure and unadulterated crap.

All St. Pierre – Miquelon is looking for is a means to survive its economic challenges by extending its existing 200 mile corridor (away from Canada) to the edge of the Continental Shelf. This is no more or less than Canada itself plans to do under the U.N. Law of the Sea.

The small French islands should have a right to an extension of that little strip of territory and France is correct to demand it. Otherwise the islands will effectively be trapped inside Canadian waters with no free access to the open ocean once Canada makes its claim to an extended economic zone.

No matter what the Prime Minister says, this has nothing to do with protecting Canadian sovereignty or NL’s interests. It has everything to do with lucrative oil potential in the region.

5 – The Quebecois culture is no more distinct than that of Newfoundlanders & Labradorians. Period.

4 – Contrary to popular belief, Quebec is not benefiting from a one sided contract to purchase Churchill Falls power.

Neither Quebec nor Newfoundland and Labrador ever actually signed a legal contract.

Quebec committed fraud by using insider information and blackmail to get the signatures it wanted. Quebec has committed a criminal act and has been stealing billions of dollars from the people of Newfoundland and Labrador for decades. What’s more they’ve been doing it with the tacit acceptance of successive Federal and Newfoundland & Labrador governments, both of which refuse to take any decisive or clear action.

Personally I’d love to see the Province throw the damn switch at the generating station and turn off the lights right across the so called “Quebec Nation”.

3 – Canada is not a Country. It’s a group of individual provinces financially controlled, oppressed and blackmailed into subservience by a corrupt central regime.

Thanks to the lopsided political power wielded by Ontario and Quebec, Canada is nothing more than an excuse for ensuring the advancement of those two jurisdictions (upper and lower Canada) regardless of what that might mean for the rest of the population.

Calling Canada a real Country is an insult to honesty and intelligence on an epic scale.

2 – Brian Mulroney is corrupt and he is without a doubt guilty of all sorts of immoral if not illegal acts. Everybody knows it but nobody really gives a crap so let’s enjoy the death of his legacy, not to mention his squirming on the hot seat, and then move on.

1 - We are told that we have freedom of speech but that’s one of the most widely accepted lies out there.

Show me someone who has expressed their frustration at the political system by simply “saying” they would “like to see” something blown up and I’ll show you a person either under federal surveillance or actually in custody.

In fact, even this article has been self edited. Just try making a public statement about Brian Mulroney, as I did in the previous section, without qualifying it with a phrase like “if not illegal acts” and see how quickly you end up being sued.

Even if you forget the legal or civil methods of stifling our freedom of speech, the docile acceptance of so called political correctness we all subscribe to has done more to quiet the masses than any law ever could. Everyone is so afraid of being ostracized by their friends, neighbors and co-workers for being politically incorrect that nobody really says what’s on their mind anymore.

This top-ten list may not be as funny as some others but the truth seldom is.

In an effort to help fight censorship and political correctness Web Talk will, on occasion, tackle this subject just as it has today. Feel free to add your two cents but please remember, as much as it sucks, for our own protection even Web Talk must adhere to the same anti-free speech edicts as everyone else, so act accordingly (but don’t hesitate to push the envelope).

The Seal Hunt - An Environmentalists Perspective

In no way would I ever try to equate the current seal hunt ban to the terrors of the Holocaust but in some ways the words of a well known poem by Martin Niemoeller seem appropriate in the current context.

With a pending ban on seal products in the EU, can it be long before the industry is on death's door? Then, who will be next? What industry will serve as the next target for activist groups once the revenue generated from anti-seal hunt supporters has dried up and the cause itself is no longer a factor?

In the immortal words of Mr. Niemoeller:

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

Any politician who is concerned about the future of the cattle, pork, poultry or fishing industries had better take note of what has happened and any who represent districts or regions where logging, mining or oil and gas developments exist had better be careful where they stand on the sealing issue.

Once the animal rights activists have effectively destroyed the sealing industry they will have lost their prime source of revenue and reason for existence. Do you think they'll just stop being activists?

More likely they will, coming off this triumph, begin searching for the next cause to fight for. Your region's industry and your people's way of life may be next.

With the recently approved EU ban on Canadian seal products capturing headlines across the Country and with anti-Newfoundland and Labrador columnists like the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente callously recommending that displaced sealers simply move on and buy themselves some laptops, I thought it timely to re-publish an article from two years ago that speaks to this very subject.

The article was written by a member of the environmental and animal welfare community (note I refer to him as being involved with "animal welfare" not "animal rights", there is a big difference).

I believe this article cuts through lot of the myths and misperceptions that those living outside of Atlantic Canada often accept far too readily. It also highlights the sad reality that the anti-sealing movement is itself far more harmful to the protection of our planet than any sealer could ever be.

Cuter than cod
By Terry Glavin
March 7, 2007
Re-published on Web Talk with the kind permission of the author

I saw something the other day that made me sick to my stomach. It was in the February edition of The Grocer, a British retail-food magazine.

There was an article about a campaign that a group called Respect for Animals is waging to convince consumers to boycott Canadian seafood products. The magazine also carried two huge advertisements from the same outfit.

One of the ads consisted of a photograph of a masked man on an ice floe, and a seal lying prone at his feet. The man was brandishing a club with a spike on the end of it. The words "You Can Stop This" were superimposed upon the picture. The other advertisement proclaimed, "Boycott Canadian Seafood and Save the Seals," with a picture of a can of Canadian salmon.

The Canadian fishing industry exports more than $100 million worth of products into Britain every year. The point of the campaign is to squeeze those sales until the industry begs our government to end the seal hunt.

Here's what makes me sick.

The Newfoundland seal hunt is transparently and demonstrably sustainable and humane.

There are roughly half a million people in Newfoundland and Labrador, and nearly six million harp seals, which is almost three times as many seals as when I was a kid.

Free range seals

Roughly 6,000 fishermen, mostly Newfoundlanders, but some are from Quebec and the Maritimes, take slightly more than 300,000 harp seals annually. The fishermen share more than $16 million from the hunt at a critical time of year when there's little in the way of fishing income to be had.

The seals are harvested for their pelts and their fat, for a range of products, mostly for clothing and for Omega-3 vitamins. The killing is as about as clean as anything you're likely to find in an abattoir.

Seals don't spend their lives cooped up in paddocks or feedlots. They live free, and in all but the rarest cases, the ones that die at the hands of a swiler (a sealer) die instantly.

The hakapik (a spiked club) is an effective instrument. Even so, most seals are first shot with rifles.

The killing of nursing whitecoats was banned 20 years ago.

Exploiting empathy

Here's one of those obligatory disclosures: over the years, several environmental organizations -- the Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace, etc. -- have subsidized my preoccupation with things that move in the water by having me do research projects for them and so on.

With that out of the way, I can now say, if it isn't obvious already, that it's the seal hunt's opponents who turn my stomach.

It's not just that anti-hunt crusades like this are especially foul in the way they dishonestly misrepresent facts. It's also that they dishonestly manipulate one of the most redeeming traits the human species has inherited from hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection and cultural evolution -- our capacity to expand the embrace of our empathy to include other forms of life.

But far worse than all that, boycott campaigns like this muddy the important distinction between sustainability and sentiment, and between broadly co-ordinated acts of social responsibility and mere lifestyle choices.

When we fail to make these distinctions we undermine everything worthwhile that environmentalism has accomplished since it emerged in the early 1970s.

As citizens and consumers in free societies, we are burdened with the duty to make important decisions at the ballot box, in the work we do, and also in the marketplace. Boycotting Canadian seafood to try and stop the seal hunt is the consumer-choice equivalent of deciding to buy a tie-died shirt, move into a Volkswagen van and subsist solely on lentils and tofu.

Serious stakes

Just as the excesses of postmodernist relativism have enfeebled the left over the past quarter-century or so, a corrosive strain of fact-distorting, science-hating, Gaia-bothering obscurantism has enfeebled environmentalism.

It was there from the beginning, and it persists most noticeably in animal-rights crusades.

It is the environmentalist equivalent of anti-evolution, rapture-seeking Christian zealotry. It has to be attacked wherever it rears its head. There's too much at stake to pretend we can be innocent bystanders here.

This is a fight we all have to join. Here's why

The last time the planet was in the throes of an extinction spasm this cataclysmic was when the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. One in every four mammal species, one in eight bird species, one in nine plants, a third of all amphibians and half of all the surveyed fish species on earth are threatened with extinction.

When Greenpeace was born in Vancouver in 1971, the single greatest cause of species extinction was understood to be habitat loss. Now, the greatest threat to biological diversity is global warming.

The last time the atmosphere was accumulating greenhouse gases this fast was 650,000 years ago. The prospects look exceedingly grim -- broad-scale ecological disruption, crop failure and famine, desertification and the mass dislocation of some of the most heavily-populated regions of the world.

A key reason environmentalists found themselves so ill-prepared to convince the world to take global warming seriously was that their movement had been corrupted by precisely the same trippy sentiment-mongering that has animated the holy war against the Newfoundland seal hunt, which now turns its sights on Canadian fisheries products.

Where was Greenpeace?

When the founders of Greenpeace were being born, back in the 1950s, the world's fishing fleets were taking roughly 40 million tonnes of marine biomass from the world's oceans every year. By the 1980s, it was 80 million tonnes. Then the seas just stopped giving. Fully 90 per cent of all the big fish in the sea -- the tunas, the marlins, the sharks, the swordfish -- are now gone.

Of the many fisheries collapses that have occurred around the world in recent years, it is sadly ironic that the greatest single collapse occurred in the seas around Newfoundland, where the bulk of Canada's Atlantic seal hunt takes place.

The Grand Banks cod fishery was the largest and oldest pelagic fishery in the history of the human experience. The cod were mined from the sea by the same big-boat offshore fleets that had caused such devastation everywhere else. A way of life disappeared, and by the early 1990s, tens of thousands of workers were reduced to welfare.

While all this was happening, what were environmentalists doing on the Newfoundland coast, in the country where Greenpeace was born, at a time when Greenpeace was at the height of its powers? They were out cavorting with rich hippies and snuggling up to harp seal pups on the ice floes. They were meditating cross-legged in the snow and posing for the television cameras and demonizing the good people of Newfoundland, while the seas around them were being emptied of cod.

Rational agreements

When you go looking for the good that environmentalism has accomplished, you'll find it in such covenants as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, and the Kyoto Accord.

It's in the sustainability provisions of elaborately negotiated efforts such as the Brundtland Commission on the Environment and Development, and the UN Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing.

The toughest global instrument to protect biodiversity is the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Fuzzy eco-drivel has already severely damaged CITES by forcing non-threatened species, such as North Atlantic minke whale, onto the CITES appendices. Now, in Germany and Belgium, animal-rights activists and their friends in the European Parliament are attempting to override CITES, and the European Union's own rules, with an outright ban on products from Canada's perfectly abundant harp seal population(Web Talk note: This article before the ban passed its vote in the EU Parliament this week).

Similarly, seal-hunt opponents are dangerously undermining the historic victory that flowed from the Brundtland Commission.

The commission established a commitment to sustainability as the key universal value to guide natural-resource harvesting policies for all the peoples of the world, regardless of their distinct cultural practices and sensibilities. The whole point of sustainability is to ensure that people can exercise the rights and accept the responsibilities that come with sustainably harvesting the natural resources of the ecosystems within which they live.

The harp seal hunt is a living embodiment of that principle. That's why environmentalists should not just give the boycott a pass, or stay neutral, but should actively support and defend the seal hunt.

The one consolation we can take from the recent hullabaloo is that it's faltering.

Last year, when animal-rights activists in the United States boasted that they'd convinced more than 200 restaurants and seafood retailers to boycott Canadian products to protest the hunt, it turned out that only a small minority were doing so. Most of them didn't even know they'd been listed as boycott-compliant.

Also, the European Commission, citing the absence of evidence to support contentions that the hunt is inhumane, has refused, for now, to enforce the European Parliament's proposed ban on seal products. (Web Talk note: the EU later reconsidered and voted for the ban.)

Contested Council

But the consumer boycott campaign that's just begun in Britain is particularly insidious. Its aim is all Canadian fisheries products, and its targets are Tesco, Sainsbury's, Somerfield and other major retail chains that have already made a commitment to eventually carrying only those seafood products that have been certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

The MSC standard remains hotly contested by responsible environmentalists, but its coveted "eco-label" holds out the hope of forcing improvements to fisheries-management policies around the world.

In Canada, those improvements are increasingly driven by the fishermen themselves, because they want the MSC label on their product.

British Columbia's halibut fishery was turned down once, and has since re-applied, because groundfish management has significantly improved -- thanks in no small part to halibut fishermen.

Other fishermen are now lobbying federal fisheries officials to improve stock-assessment research to give B.C.'s dogfish fishery a shot at the MSC label. British Columbia's sockeye salmon fisheries have just undergone an arduous certification examination, and a decision is imminent.

If the cuddliness of a particular species harvested in a particular country is allowed to become the factor that determines whether that country's products are considered environmentally acceptable, then everything we won at CITES and in the Brundtland Commission is lost.

If those are the kinds of choices we present to everyone from major retailers down to ordinary seafood consumers, then we'll have wasted all our efforts to marshal consumer power to force the sustainable use of the oceans.

It's long past time for conservationists to make a clean, clear, open and unequivocal break with crystal-gazing animal-rights eccentrics and all their camp followers. For them, the conservation of wild resources was always just a flag of convenience. They're dead ballast, so over the side with them.

On the question of the Atlantic harp seal harvest, there's only one defensible and honest position for a conservation-minded citizen to take.

Support the swilers!!!

Once again Terry - Thank-you for your very enlightening article.

With the EU ban now well on the way toward implementation I believe it's only right to remind those political figures who made the decision, and those who secretly support them within Canada, that the road we are now following is a slippery one indeed.

Throne Speech a Triumph of Political Double Speak

It never ceases to amaze me how easily political leaders can talk from both sides of their mouth at the same time. It must be genetic or something.

During last week’s throne speech the Harper government made a point of telling the nation how important it was that Ottawa find innovative ways of securing Canada’s energy future, tackling climate change and building the economy.

That’s what the speech said but what it really meant was: “The Harper government will find innovative ways to secure our political future, pretend we are tackling climate change and build voter support.”

In that speech the government of Canada specifically said it would accomplish it’s publicly stated objectives by supporting nuclear energy projects and by developing the natural gas potential of the North, including the building a natural gas pipeline.

According to the Prime Minister, “Energy is vitally important to our country…The development of our rich energy resources is an important source of wealth and Canadian jobs…Our Government has committed to reducing Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020.”

Sounds great doesn’t it?

Sure it does but anyone living on the East Coast of Canada (the REAL East Coast of Canada) can tell you Harper's motives are not what the Prime Minister says they are.

The people of the Atlantic Provinces have suspected for decades that somewhere in Ottawa there is a map that depicts the Country as Ottawa truly sees it, with the border ending at Quebec.

Atlantic Canadians have been unwavering in their disgust each time they have been forced to bend to the will of Ontario, Quebec and more recently, oil rich Alberta.

It’s gotten to a point where the average citizen in Newfoundland and Labrador simply shakes their head and walks away knowingly when a politician announces anything that’s supposedly good for “Canada”.

The most recent throne speech and government actions have done nothing to change this reality.
A few years ago Stephen Harper, upon catching a glimpse of the attitude adopted by long time Atlantic residents, referred to the region as having a “culture of defeat”.

Personally I don’t see it that way at all. What I see is a people that have come to understand that in Canada the cards are forever stacked against them.

When Ontario, Quebec or Alberta strives to accomplish their objectives in Canada they usually win.

When Atlantic Canada strives to accomplish its objectives in Canada, Ontario, Quebec and increasingly Alberta, usually win.

In fact, with successive minority governments constantly on election watch the task of pandering to the big three has become an art form.

No matter the political party or the issue of the day, Quebec is still Quebec, Ontario, even as a have not province, is still Ontario and Alberta has become the newest member of Canada’s political elite.

In reality the desire to protect the environment, provide secure energy and create jobs in the North are little more than fluff for public consumption.

The truth is that massive quantities of natural gas are needed to keep one of the most environmentally destructive projects on the planet, the Alberta tar sands, humming along smoothly. Without it they would grind to a stand still.

Score one for Alberta.

On the nuclear front, yes nuclear power is cleaner than coal or oil generation, but there are other options out there, including wind, solar and good old fashioned hydro.

An example of this is the power potential of the Lower Churchill River in Labrador.

For decades Newfoundland and Labrador has been fighting an uphill battle to develop the massive energy potential of the Lower Churchill River. The project is in the planning stages but not one word was mentioned in the speech from the throne about hydro power in general or the Labrador project in particular, a project that has the potential to create thousands of jobs while providing clean dependable and low cost energy.

If at this point you are asking yourself “why wouldn’t the government support this project?” then you might want to go back and read the first few paragraphs over again.

It’s Canadian politics 101.

Forget the fact that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick need and desperately want the clean power this project would supply (I say forget those two provinces because, once again they are in Atlantic Canada and well…I’ve already shown that they just don’t matter to Ottawa).

Putting Atlantic Canada’s concerns aside, politically important Ontario has also expressed an interest in Lower Churchill power so shouldn't that mean it will move forward?

No.

It doesn't matter because another politically important province, Quebec, doesn’t want the project to move forward unless they can profit from it.

Even though the Harper government has the ability to assist with the development of the Lower Churchill, through loan guarantees or other forms of federal assistance, they won’t do it.

The Harper government has also walked away from its plans for the “East/West power grid” we all heard so much about a couple of years ago. A project once touted as “a nation building exercise to rival the building of the continental railway”.

What was hailed as critical to Canada’s energy future such a short time ago has now been abandoned.

Why?

You see developing the East/West Energy Grid or supporting the Lower Churchill hydro project would:

A) Require a part of the grid to pass through Quebec which might upset some seperatists; and
B) Mean Newfoundland and Labrador could reach waiting markets with their clean energy without having to hand over most of the profits to, you guessed it, Quebec.

Score 1 for Quebec.

But hold on you might say “doesn’t that mean Ontario won’t get the clean power it needs”?

“Doesn’t it mean that by pandering to Quebec and denying Ontario this power Mr. Harper has hurt himself politically?”

Not so.

I don’t know anyone who has ever said Stephen Harper was politically stupid and I’m not about to be the first.

In a brilliant move intended to head off any political fallout (while perhaps trading it for the nuclear kind) the Harper government will appease the voters of Ontario by assisting that province in moving forward with building more nuclear capacity.

Yes, the public may have a lower opinion of nuclear, it may be more dangerous and it may even be more expensive for consumers than hydro, but in political circles it has two far more important things going for it.

Unlike the Lower Churchill development, which would create thousands of well paying jobs in the region of Canada with the highest unemployment rate, nuclear will create jobs in vote rich Ontario and it doesn’t tick off vote rich Quebec.

Score one each for Ontario and for Quebec on that one.

So, to recap, the Harper government plans to improve Canada’s energy supply, create jobs and protect the environment how?

By:

Constructing an environmentally risky and potentially insecure gas pipeline across Canada’s North;

Using somewhat clean natural gas to extract extremely dirty and highly polluting tar sands oil in Alberta;

Building nuclear reactors in Ontario (no word yet on where the waste will end up but somebody is probably scouting locations down East); and

They’ll do it all while ignoring Newfoundland and Labrador’s efforts to develop the largest untapped hydro electric reserve in North America. A clean energy project capable of lighting well over a million homes across Canada and creating thousands of well paid jobs in Canada’s highest unemployment region.

Score 0 for Atlantic Canada.

Harper vs Dion With No Plan in Sight

With a federal election in the offing let’s put all the rhetoric and political spin about greenhouse gasses aside for a moment and do a reality check. Let’s try to put this issue into perspective for once.

We've all heard the vague numbers coming out of Ottawa and being thrown around like confetti on the wind. “1990 levels”, “2008 levels”, “reduction percentage by 2050”, but what does it all mean, how do the numbers really break down and is there a real solution?

In a nutshell, the Kyoto Protocol, which was abandoned by the Harper government after being ignored by his predecessor, called for Canada to reduce emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. It may only be 2008 but that ship has already sailed.

In 1990 Canada had emissions of 569 metric tonnes. A reduction of 6% means Canada, within the next 4 years, would need to reach a level of just under 535 metric tonnes. Instead of reducing to meet those targets, by 2005, Canada was producing in excess of 747 metric tonnes, an increase of about 24% above 1990 and 30% above its Kyoto obligations. That number is still rising.

It’s numbers like these that prove just how ineffectual Canada’s federal government, no matter the stripe, has been when it comes to addressing this global concern.

Instead of truly tackling the problem, as emissions climb, Ottawa’s power brokers and politicians have been scrambling to find ways to use the situation as a means of :

A: meeting their political objective of winning votes in larger centers;
B: lining the pockets of their cronies in big business;
C: filling government coffers; and
D: redistributing wealth from Canada’s fringes to its ever hungry middle.

The best solution Stephen Harper has come up with to date is a watered down version of a cap and trade system. The Harper system would set targets on industry and then charge them a set amount if they exceed those targets. They would also be able to buy and sell those targets with other companies much in the same way as stocks are traded on the stock exchange today.

Can’t you just smell the money trading hands now boys and girls?

Can’t you just feel the wealth growing in brokerage houses across the Country (or at least parts of it) while the skies grow ever greyer and chewier?

What about Stephan Dion? He’s had some time waiting in the wings. Surely he must have a plan. After all it was Dion who helped broker the Kyoto Protocol while serving as Environment Minister.

Enter the Liberal Green Shift.

Dion claims his Green Shift would be a revenue neutral tax. In other words the federal government would not profit from it (the truth of that remains to be seen) but instead would offer tax breaks and fund programs for Joe Taxpayer that would offset “much” of the cost.

According to Dion, by simply cutting back on our use of fossil fuels we can reap the benefits of this new windfall. However if we choose to squander our hard earned money on evil emission producing activities, such as heating our homes in winter, then we will lose any benefit we might have gained and possibly more.

Ah if only the world were just that simple…

First of all, doesn’t the fact that some of the tax collected will be used to fund things such as university tuitions, mass transit or other programs strike anyone as a little odd? Aren’t those programs exactly the sorts of things government tax revenues are used for anyway? Doesn’t that mean the new carbon tax wouldn’t be revenue neutral but simply another form of tax?

Secondly, what the plan fails to take into account, or more likely ignores, is that everyone, in addition to paying the added taxes, will see the cost of goods go up. This is especially true for anyone not living near a major manufacturing area such as Ontario, Quebec or the U.S. border. Those people will see the price of everything they consume rise dramatically as already high shipping costs increase and those costs are passed along to consumers in more remote areas.

The Green plan also glosses over the realities of people in rural areas who do not have the luxury of switching to mass transit to get to work or do their shopping. It forgets about places like the island of Newfoundland and the remote areas of Labrador, areas that have to import most goods by ship or truck. These areas and others like them will see massive increases passed along to consumers in areas that are already economically depressed and suffering from higher than average unemployment.

The benefits of getting a few tax breaks will not be as easily seen by rural Canadians as it will to someone in the say greater Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa area where mass transit is available and goods are more easily transported. Then again, that’s the plan isn’t it?

Here’s a novel idea for both parties to consider. Instead of simply moving wealth around under the guise of protecting the environment and pandering to densely populated areas for votes, why not spend some time actually coming up with real solutions to a real problem?

I’ll give you one free of charge if you want it.

I’m no expert so this idea may be as useless as anything the brain trust in Ottawa has delivered so far but at least I’m willing to toss it out there. I’ll leave it to greater minds (or lesser ones) than my own to figure out if it’s worth the virtual paper it’s written on.

The chart below shows Canada’s emissions by Province in 1990 and in 2005 (the most recent year I could find). Clearly the biggest polluters are Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, in that order. In fact, not only are they the biggest polluters but they, with the exception of Quebec, have also seen their emissions rise sharply, rather than fall, by a staggering amount since 1990.

Here’s a question that comes to mind: Why should the people of all the provinces and territories be tarred with the same brush as the ones that have allowed such big environmental offenders to prosper inside their borders?

Consider Newfoundland and Labrador for example. As the chart indicates, its emissions have remained virtually unchanged over the period in question. In 1990 Newfoundland and Labrador’s emissions accounted for only about 2% of Canada’s total emissions, a number within reason when you consider that it also had between 1.6% and 2% of Canada’s population during the same time period.

Instead of simply setting up a mechanism for the big boys to profit by trading away our future, instead of making everyone pay equally for what is clearly a bigger problem in certain parts of the Country and instead of simply shifting hard earned cash into Central Canada by way of tax breaks, why not think outside the box.

What about a plan that incorporates some parts of each party's plan with a Provincial element. Sort of a Cap and Tax Provincial Targeting Plan (catchy name huh?)

Here goes...

When it comes to most forms of federal funding or federal programs in general: equalization, health care transfers, etc. calculations are generally done on a per capita basis.

In addition, politicians are always happy to remind us that there is a value to be placed on emissions, so why aren’t per capita calculations good enough when it comes to those?

Taking Canada’s overall emissions and dividing them up by each provincial or territorial share (on a per capita basis) one can quickly see where the problems are. All Ottawa has to do is simply charge each provincial government (not individuals or business) their fair share of “carbon costs” that exceed their provincial limit.

Under this plan provincial governments that have allowed industry to develop unchecked and without concern for the environment, would be left to make things right by collecting additional taxes, fining industrial polluters or paying Ottawa out of their own general revenues for that development. In other words they would pay their fair share for the “cost of carbon” they produce.

Remember that carbon emissions are the result of industrial development, manufacturing and population density (autos, homes, etc.). The reason why some provinces have such high carbon emissions is because they have more industry and more people. In other words they are benefiting from the industries and people that produce them.

High emitting provinces are gaining by having high employment rates, more corporate taxes, a large personal income tax base to draw from and all of this is thanks to the industries that have setup there and the people who work in them. Shouldn’t the provinces benefiting the most by destroying the atmosphere shoulder most of the burden?

Canada is not a one size fits all Country and not all provinces are producing the same amount of emissions. By making the provincial government responsible for paying its share of the cost it it puts the individual provinces in control of their own carbon destiny while ensuring that national targets are addressed. This approach would allow each region to look at its own unique options for how to address those federal costs in a way that works best for their constituents and the business interests in their area rather than placing a blanket tax on every individual in the Country.

Yes, the cost of goods would still go higher but at least those in more economically depressed areas and those who are not responsible for the lions share of the problem would not be forced to pay additional taxes as well. Provinces above their share of the target would pay. Those below it would not. It’s that simple.

To follow through on this, the newly generated federal revenues could then be used to lower Canada’s carbon footprint Nationwide through investment in new technologies, funding projects like CO 2 sequestration, the east/west power grid, the Lower Churchill hydro development, wind power, mass transit and R&D.

In the end this type of approach might go a lot further toward solving the problem than either of the existing federal plans and it would allow some flexibility in various regions that could have positive economic impacts.

Not only would those who benefit most (the worst emitters and those who condone their actions), pay the cost but federal investments in renewable power and green technology would allow some parts of the Country to almost immediately reduce their footprint to below their provincial target.

One place that comes to mind is Newfoundland and Labrador with projects like the Lower Churchill. By opening up the east/west grid and developing the Lower Churchill hydro project Newfoundland and Labrador could shut down its major oil fired generating plant and immediately fall below its target. It could then sell some of its excess power to other jurisdictions like Nova Scotia or Ontario and in doing so help them reduce their carbon footprint in a major way.

In addition, instead of trading away the benefit of this carbon under capacity through some sort of corporate trading system, as touted by Stephen Harper, provinces that move below their targets would then have the advantage of being able to attract new industry and jobs by virtue of offering less expensive tax regimes than overly developed areas with high carbon taxes.

I’m no expert but it would seem that such a plan might actually result a cleaner environment, lower unemployment in economically depressed areas, create a more geographically dispersed economy and allow the federal government to commit to a stable and shared power infrastructure and R&D program across Canada.

I can’t promise you this sort of thing would actually work, but at least it’s an idea and one that is offered without any sort of political gain as a motive. Unfortunately the fact that it isn’t politically motivated is why I can almost guarantee you that no federal politician will ever consider it.

An Environmentalist's Position on the Seal Harvest

Web Talk originally published the following article a year ago around this time but since the Seal Harvest is once again upon us (as well as the anti-sealing activist contingent), and with global climate change an issue we can all agree on, it seems more than appropriate that it should be re-published for anyone who might have missed it the first time around.

Enjoy and (for those who are used to anti-sealing propaganda) I hope you learn a thing or two.

Cuter than cod
By Terry Glavin
Originally Published: March 7, 2007
Re-published with the permission of the author.

I saw something the other day that made me sick to my stomach. It was in the February edition of The Grocer, a British retail-food magazine.

There was an article about a campaign that a group called Respect for Animals is waging to convince consumers to boycott Canadian seafood products. The magazine also carried two huge advertisements from the same outfit. One of the ads consisted of a photograph of a masked man on an ice floe, and a seal lying prone at his feet. The man was brandishing a club with a spike on the end of it. The words You Can Stop This were superimposed upon the picture. The other advertisement proclaimed, "Boycott Canadian Seafood & Save the Seals," with a picture of a can of Canadian salmon.

The Canadian fishing industry exports more than $100 million worth of products into Britain every year. The point of the campaign is to squeeze those sales until the industry begs our government to end the seal hunt.

Here's what makes me sick.

The Newfoundland seal hunt is transparently and demonstrably sustainable and humane. There are roughly half a million people in Newfoundland and Labrador, and nearly six million harp seals, which is almost three times as many seals as when I was a kid.

Free range seals

Roughly 6,000 fishermen, mostly Newfoundlanders, but some are from Quebec and the Maritimes, take slightly more than 300,000 harp seals annually. The fishermen share more than $16 million from the hunt at a critical time of year when there's little in the way of fishing income to be had.

The seals are harvested for their pelts and their fat, for a range of products, mostly for clothing and for Omega-3 vitamins. The killing is as about as clean as anything you're likely to find in an abattoir.

Seals don't spend their lives cooped up in paddocks or feedlots. They live free, and in all but the rarest cases, the ones that die at the hands of a swiler (a sealer) die instantly. The hakapik (a spiked club) is an effective instrument.Even so, most seals are first shot with rifles.

The killing of nursing whitecoats was banned 20 years ago.

Exploiting empathy

Here's one of those obligatory disclosures: over the years, several environmental organizations -- the Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace, etc. -- have subsidized my preoccupation with things that move in the water by having me do research projects for them and so on. With that out of the way, I can now say, if it isn't obvious already, that it's the seal hunt's opponents who turn my stomach.

It's not just that anti-hunt crusades like this are especially foul in the way they dishonestly misrepresent facts. It's also that they dishonestly manipulate one of the most redeeming traits the human species has inherited from hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection and cultural evolution -- our capacity to expand the embrace of our empathy to include other forms of life. But far worse than all that, boycott campaigns like this muddy the important distinction between sustainability and sentiment, and between broadly co-ordinated acts of social responsibility and mere lifestyle choices. When we fail to make these distinctions we undermine everything worthwhile that environmentalism has accomplished since it emerged in the early 1970s.

As citizens and consumers in free societies, we are burdened with the duty to make important decisions at the ballot box, in the work we do, and also in the marketplace. Boycotting Canadian seafood to try and stop the seal hunt is the consumer-choice equivalent of deciding to buy a tie-died shirt, move into a Volkswagen van and subsist solely on lentils and tofu.

Serious stakes

Just as the excesses of postmodernist relativism have enfeebled the left over the past quarter-century or so, a corrosive strain of fact-distorting, science-hating, Gaia-bothering obscurantism has enfeebled environmentalism.

It was there from the beginning, and it persists most noticeably in animal-rights crusades. It is the environmentalist equivalent of anti-evolution, rapture-seeking Christian zealotry. It has to be attacked wherever it rears its head. There's too much at stake to pretend we can be innocent bystanders here.

This is a fight we all have to join.

Here's why

The last time the planet was in the throes of an extinction spasm this cataclysmic was when the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago.

One in every four mammal species, one in eight bird species, one in nine plants, a third of all amphibians and half of all the surveyed fish species on earth are threatened with extinction.

When Greenpeace was born in Vancouver in 1971, the single greatest cause of species extinction was understood to be habitat loss. Now, the greatest threat to biological diversity is global warming.

The last time the atmosphere was accumulating greenhouse gases this fast was 650,000 years ago. The prospects look exceedingly grim -- broad-scale ecological disruption, crop failure and famine, desertification and the mass dislocation of some of the most heavily-populated regions of the world.

A key reason environmentalists found themselves so ill-prepared to convince the world to take global warming seriously was that their movement had been corrupted by precisely the same trippy sentiment-mongering that has animated the holy war against the Newfoundland seal hunt, which now turns its sights on Canadian fisheries products.

Where was Greenpeace?

When the founders of Greenpeace were being born, back in the 1950s, the world's fishing fleets were taking roughly 40 million tonnes of marine biomass from the world's oceans every year. By the 1980s, it was 80 million tonnes. Then the seas just stopped giving. Fully 90 per cent of all the big fish in the sea -- the tunas, the marlins, the sharks, the swordfish -- are now gone.

Of the many fisheries collapses that have occurred around the world in recent years, it is sadly ironic that the greatest single collapse occurred in the seas around Newfoundland, where the bulk of Canada's Atlantic seal hunt takes place.

The Grand Banks cod fishery was the largest and oldest pelagic fishery in the history of the human experience.

The cod were mined from the sea by the same big-boat offshore fleets that had caused such devastation everywhere else. A way of life disappeared, and by the early 1990s, tens of thousands of workers were reduced to welfare. While all this was happening, what were environmentalists doing on the Newfoundland coast, in the country where Greenpeace was born, at a time when Greenpeace was at the height of its powers? They were out cavorting with rich hippies and snuggling up to harp seal pups on the ice floes. They were meditating cross-legged in the snow and posing for the television cameras and demonizing the good people of Newfoundland, while the seas around them were being emptied of cod.

Rational agreements

When you go looking for the good that environmentalism has accomplished, you'll find it in such covenants as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, and the Kyoto Accord.

It's in the sustainability provisions of elaborately negotiated efforts such as the Brundtland Commission on the Environment and Development, and the UN Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing. The toughest global instrument to protect biodiversity is the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species.

Fuzzy eco-drivel has already severely damaged CITES by forcing non-threatened species, such as North Atlantic minke whale, onto the CITES appendices. Now, in Germany and Belgium, animal-rights activists and their friends in the European Parliament are attempting to override CITES, and the European Union's own rules, with an outright ban on products from Canada's perfectly abundant harp seal population(Web Talk note: This article was written a year ago, since then a ban has been put in place and now the EU is considering doing the same). Similarly, seal-hunt opponents are dangerously undermining the historic victory that flowed from the Brundtland Commission.

The commission established a commitment to sustainability as the key universal value to guide natural-resource harvesting policies for all the peoples of the world, regardless of their distinct cultural practices and sensibilities. The whole point of sustainability is to ensure that people can exercise the rights and accept the responsibilities that come with sustainably harvesting the natural resources of the ecosystems within which they live. The harp seal hunt is a living embodiment of that principle. That's why environmentalists should not just give the boycott a pass, or stay neutral, but should actively support and defend the seal hunt.

The one consolation we can take from the recent hullabaloo is that it's faltering.

Last year, when animal-rightists in the United States boasted that they'd convinced more than 200 restaurants and seafood retailers to boycott Canadian products to protest the hunt, it turned out that only a small minority were doing so. Most of them didn't even know they'd been listed as boycott-compliant. Also, the European Commission, citing the absence of evidence to support contentions that the hunt is inhumane, has refused, for now, to enforce the European Parliament's proposed ban on seal products. (Web Talk note: the EU is now reconsidering that decision and is likely to bring down a final decison within a few months.)

Contested Council

But the consumer boycott campaign that's just begun in Britain is particularly insidious.

Its aim is all Canadian fisheries products, and its targets are Tesco, Sainsbury's, Somerfield and other major retail chains that have already made a commitment to eventually carrying only those seafood products that have been certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

The MSC standard remains hotly contested by responsible environmentalists, but its coveted "eco-label" holds out the hope of forcing improvements to fisheries-management policies around the world.

In Canada, those improvements are increasingly driven by the fishermen themselves, because they want the MSC label on their product. British Columbia's halibut fishery was turned down once, and has since re-applied, because groundfish management has significantly improved -- thanks in no small part to halibut fishermen.

Other fishermen are now lobbying federal fisheries officials to improve stock-assessment research to give B.C.'s dogfish fishery a shot at the MSC label.

British Columbia's sockeye salmon fisheries have just undergone an arduous certification examination, and a decision is imminent.

If the cuddliness of a particular species harvested in a particular country is allowed to become the factor that determines whether that country's products are considered environmentally acceptable, then everything we won at CITES and in the Brundtland Commission is lost.

If those are the kinds of choices we present to everyone from major retailers down to ordinary seafood consumers, then we'll have wasted all our efforts to marshal consumer power to force the sustainable use of the oceans.

It's long past time for conservationists to make a clean, clear, open and unequivocal break with crystal-gazing animal-rights eccentrics and all their camp followers.

For them, the conservation of wild resources was always just a flag of convenience. They're dead ballast, so over the side with them.On the question of the Atlantic harp seal harvest, there's only one defensible and honest position for a conservation-minded citizen to take.

Support the swilers.