Stephen Harper has vowed to make national security a central plank is his election platform. But, Chris Wood writes, if we want to ensure our national security, we should be -- first and foremost -- concentrating on our environmental security. Unfortunately, over the last twenty-five years, governments of all stripes have not been focused on the environment:
In 1989, Canada was a leader in global climate discussions. But in 1993—the last year of the Progressive Conservative mandate – the Auditor-General pointed out that Canada had no “federal framework of desirable water quality objectives for the major ecosystems across Canada.” We still don’t.
Reporting a decade later in 2003, the Environment Commissioner found the by-then Liberal government’s progress toward reviewing the safety of thousands of chemical products brought to market before modern testing, “slow.” He warned that it was “likely that some of them do not meet today’s standards.” A dozen years later, the work is still unfinished, with no completion date in this decade either.
In this decade, blue-green algae toxic to neural and liver systems are spreading in Canada’s lakes and even oceans. Endocrine system defects and cancers are on the rise, while scores of semi-metabolized pharmaceuticals linked to endocrine disruption – from anti-depressants to byproducts of cocaine – are found in every major southern river from the St. Lawrence to the Saskatchewan to the Fraser. In 2014, the Conservative Party of Canada government withdrew federal protection from several thousand of those waterways.
Mr. Harper has vowed to add $150 million to the RCMP's anti-terrorism budget. But, it's our environment which provides terrorists with all kinds of soft targets. But, instead of protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink, the prime minister believes we are protecting ourselves by pursuing ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Protecting the homeland means protecting the environment in our own backyard.
9 comments:
What are we doing bombing foreign countries we are not officially at war with at $90,000 K per bomb? Could that money help Canadians instead of creating enemy's?
I believe Harper has lost his mind and sees an enemy on every corner and under his own bed. He is not fit to run the country let alone a car. He never drives he is show-furred by the RCMP because sources tell me he is to drunk to drive...
I doubt that's why he doesn't drive himself, Anon. I suspect he loves the pomp and circumstance. It come with power.
It's an "old" government, Owen, devoid of fresh ideas pursuing a truncated agenda that largely comes down to pipelines and surveillance. Big challenges are not entertained. This prime minister has no appetite for such things. As his old time BFF, Tom Flanagan, told an audience on Saltspring Island a few years back, Harper recoils from the notion of vision. He's a technocrat, an administrator, a petit fonctionnaire. He's a master of the dark art of incrementalism, a legislative sneak thief.
Even if Harper was forced to implement environmental reforms, he hasn't got the aptitude or the cabinet to pull it off. He and his are beholden to special interests who would not abide that sort of thing. They would turn on him like a pack of feral dogs.
It's no secret that Harper has subverted or even corrupted most of the apparatus of government from the public service to the state police. Having lobotomized the public service, how could he energize it again to take on the big challenges? There's been lasting damage done and the next prime minister will find it very hard work to restore our institutions to the service of the nation and the people instead of the partisan political fortunes of the ruler.
I'm reminded of what Hannah Arendt wrote of Adolph Eichmann -- the technocrat par excellence -- Mound.
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported (p. 55).
He really is a clown. But, like Eichmann, he has done incredible damage.
Mound said " There's been lasting damage done and the next prime minister will find it very hard work to restore our institutions to the service of the nation and the people instead of the partisan political fortunes of the ruler"
And therein lays the problem, no matter where the public place their faith in the election the damage has been done, and it will take decades to undo it no matter how dedicated the next government is to restoring our democracy. Not that such seems very high on any of their agendas at this point, except perhaps the Greens!
And the sad part is, Rural, that even a 100% increase in their number of seats would only give them four MP's.
people with evil thoughts half a world away are a threat. Companies killing us daily with their waste and wont are national treausures.
people a half a world away with evil thoughts are going to kill us all, people right here at home destroying the habitat are economic heros right at home.
That's the upside down logic which drives this government, Steve.
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