Why Environment Canada Doesn't Report on Environment Since 2007

Harper body language when abroad

I've been looking for up to date statistics from Statistics Canada and can't get anything recent.  Here's why Canada Cuts Environment Spending

spending more than 60 billion dollars on new military jets and warships
slashing more than 200 million dollars in funding for research and monitoring of the environment.
crippled is Canada's internationally renowned ozone monitoring network, which was instrumental in the discovery of the first-ever ozone hole over Canada last spring.

Canada was the pioneer in ozone monitoring, developing the first accurate ozone measuring tool that led to the discovery that the world's ozone layer was dangerously thinning in the 1970s, which in turn led to the successful Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances.
Canada has about one-third of the ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic region. It also hosts the world archive of ozone data, which is heavily relied on by scientists around the world.
"There's only one guy running the entire archive, and he's received a lay-off notice letter," Duck told IPS.
 Environment Canada, charged with protecting the environment, conservation and providing weather and meteorological information.


A similar gutting of science and research is underway at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the department responsible for protecting and managing Canada's ocean and inland waterways including the Great Lakes.
In addition, the main source of public funding for environmental science for Canadian universities has run out of money, and is expected to close early next year. Not surprisingly, scientists are leaving Canada in droves.
Government scientists are under a "gag order" to not to speak to media under any circumstances without permission from Prime Minister Harper's office. 

Non-government scientists working at universities declined to be interviewed, fearing loss of funding or other forms of reprisal."There will be fallout for anyone talking to you," Duck told IPS. "My prospects for doing any work for Environment Canada are now zero."
Canadian civil society organisations know all about the Harper government's reprisals. Many that once received funding but questioned government policy have lost their funding.
For 34 years, the non-partisan Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN) successfully walked the line between the needs of government and the needs of its more than 650 civil society members. But on Oct. 13, after waiting more than six months for its expected 536,000 dollars in annual funding, the group was informed by letter it would not be coming. Ever.
The network had been Canada's best two-way communication channel between the public and the federal government on all matters environmental. Now the government says this can be done more cost- effectively online.
Just six days after the pressing need to save 536,000 dollars, the Harper government awarded contracts totaling 32 billion dollars to build ships for the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard. It has also committed to spending another 29 billion dollars for 65 fighter jets.
"Among the first acts of the Harper government was to cut our funding to zero," said Hannah McKinnon of the Climate Action Network Canada (CAN Canada), an environmental NGO that used to get some government funding prior to the 2006 election.
CAN Canada has obtained some funding from its more than 80 member civil society organisations. It acts as the coordinator on climate issues, and once worked with government to improve programmes and policies for the benefit of all Canadians. Now has become the de facto watchdog on government promises and actions to tackle climate change.

"If there is a need to reduce the federal budget deficit, why is Canada continuing to give the oil and gas industry 1.4 billion dollars (1.3 billion U.S.) in subsidies every year?" she asked.
Harper promised to end these government subsidies in 2009. The International Monetary Fund, the International Energy Agency, the United Nations and many others have called for an end to such subsidies to the world's most profitable industry.
"Canada can't afford to pay scientists but we can line the pockets of big oil? That is totally backwards," McKinnon said.

Blogs are being blocked in Canada

 It's getting tougher to get real news on the environment from the internet because of censorship like the above.

Lorne Gunter Cheers on Israeli Terrorism

A justified killing

Lorne Gunter

PC supports hits of Iranian scientist civilians

I cannot remember in my lifetime reading about the cheering of killing in a national newspaper.  But here we have it in the National Post, a reporter speaking of such a thing.  Condoning it.  Praising it for being masterfully executed.  This is the new militaristic Canada which scares the hell out of me.

Thwarting Iran's nuclear ambitions has to be the Western world's No. 1 security priority. And since a direct military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities has been all but ruled out for now, Israel and other western nations are left with targeted killings, sabotage and computer hacking to disrupt progress as much as possible.

The Roshan hit was masterful. During rush hour in Tehran on Wednesday, two men on a motorcycle drove up next to Dr. Roshan's car and attached a magnetic bomb. Then they detonated the explosive without killing anyone other than Dr. Roshan and his bodyguard/driver.

Imagine the intelligence and planning needed to pull off such an operation - the months of covert surveillance inside Iran to identify Dr. Roshan and learn his habits; the need for safe houses, explosives and electronics, and communications, all without being discovered by Iranian officials.

And, of course, this was not the Israelis' (or whomever's) only ongoing operation in Iran. In November, an "accidental" explosion at a military base outside Tehran killed the general who headed up the Revolutionary Guard's nuclear missile program. Last summer, perhaps the most sophisticated software virus ever infected the computers that run the centrifuges that refine Iran's uranium, causing them to spin wildly out of control. And in the past 18 months, remote-controlled bombs have killed at least two other senior Iranian nuclear physicists.

If these operations were the Israelis' doing, Israel would be perfectly justified in each case. (Gunter)

I agree with one of the posters on the comment forum who says that Gunter's piece is an abuse of the media as a platform for hate speech.

Comments from Concerned Canadians are here

CBC Provides Excellent Programming According to Reader's Comments

Canadians are definitely not cooling towards the CBC if one reads the comments on the NCC site.  Andrew Coyne's article in Maclean's shows he hasn't read the research well enough to make his points valid, has left out evidence.  Here goes the deconstruction of lousy reportage.



The argument that the CBC is not performing its mandate:

And they’re right in their more general proposition: that it is long past time for fundamental reform of the corporation’s mandate and structure. Put simply, the case for a publicly funded television network has collapsed. It has done so under the weight of three inescapable realities.

 The first is the CBC’s own woeful performance, at least when it comes to English TV.

M Reid says:

Very wrong-headed petition
first- the undisputed fact is that the CBC is one of the lowest costing public broadcasters in the world… about 34$ per person..only New Zealand and the US-PBS recieves less public money.
staff at the CBC are not paid exhorbitant salaires..and there are fewer and fewer full time “permanent” staff.
the CBC provides Canadian content, Canadian stories. which would not be the case in a privatized situation which is already inundated with crappy US shows, even on the Canadian “private” networks.
the CBC provides plenty of work to outside contractors..set design, actors, writers etc etc etc etc etc. thus the money is well spread out within Cdn society.
Sorry, I dont like govt waste and heavy taxes any more than anyone else, but the CBC is my taxmoney very well spent…and no I dont work at the CBC..but I do love the intelligent thought provoking and informative radio and many of their TV shows.

submitted on October 6th, 2011 at 7:05 pm

The corporation has always been unable to decide whether its mandate was to be an elite/niche broadcaster serving audiences the private networks would not, or whether it was to be a mass-audience, nation-uniting broadcaster. Trying to do both, it has succeeded in neither: its programming is not, on the whole, particularly good or particularly popular.

• George Tonight, Doc Zone, The Nature of Things, Republic of Doyle, Dragon's Den,  Rick Mercer Report, The Fifth Estate,  Arctic Air, The National, Homicide File, with the faces of a cross section of Canadian peoples of all ages.  Q reviewed the actor from Arctic Air.  Well spoken and sincere, he has turned to television to encourage native peoples to see themselves as heroic.  Those images are not going to be there from Hollywood, are they?

Bev Christensen says:

Don’t you dare! If there is one thing that unites this country it is the fact that you can listen to CBC from coast to coast. I have lived in northern parts of this country where the only reliable news source was CBC. Commercial stations cannot - or is it will not - ever be able to provide coast to coast coverage - we would be deluged with eastern news and the west would disappear from the air waves.

submitted on October 6th, 2011 at 1:52 pm

The second is that the conditions that once justified public funding are no longer present. In television’s technological infancy, the combination of “spectrum scarcity” (only three or four channels) and the total reliance, given the impossibility of charging viewers directly, on advertising as a source of revenue, made for monotonous viewing: lots and lots of the same types of shows, all aimed at the broadest possible audience. Advertisers had no interest in how much people wanted to watch a given show, only that they were watching it. The case for public broadcasting, then, was not so much to supplant the market as to recreate it: to mimic the diversity of choices on offer in most normal markets.
But there are hundreds of channels now, and viewers can pay directly, not only for each channel, but each show. There is no longer any appreciable divide in the range and quality of offerings on public and private television: the real divide now is between subscription channels, like HBO, and the “free” advertising-financed models. And yet this world, too, is fast becoming obsolete.

martin eastman says:

CBC radio in our area gives us more news and better news and different points of view than other local radio stations. I have talked to CBC radio to put on some paid advertising and have been told they do not take paid advertising. If CBC radio is reigned in will the other sources of information give unbiased news and reports - I think not! All sources of news and information comes from right wing sources and only give one point of view and that is of the rich and powerful corporations as does your group. There is no other source of infor other than “thetyee.ca or the common sense Canadian. I feel my tax dollars are well spent on the CBC and we get good value for tax payer dollars.

submitted on October 3rd, 2011 at 9:57 pm

This is the third point: network television, of any kind, is doomed. Recent years have already witnessed a sharp decline in the amount of time spent watching television, while the dwindling television audience is further fragmented between more and more networks.

Fast-forward five years from now, and it’s quite clear that television will no longer be delivered in the form of separate channels, each streaming a series of programs one after the other. Turn on your TV, rather, and you’ll see a screen full of icons representing the shows you subscribe to: the iTunes model. Indeed, that’s how many people watch TV now.

Put it all together, and there is simply no case for continuing to aim hundreds of millions of dollars every year at a single point on the dial. It’s not good for taxpayers. It’s not good for viewers. And it’s not good for the CBC itself, and the people who work there. The best television, as on HBO, emerges from a partnership between creative producers and a passionate, demanding, discerning audience.

Put the CBC on pay, then, and watch it soar. It could still be a public broadcaster, and some of its services could still be subsidized. But the main English network would be a subscription channel, rather like the CBC News Network, or perhaps a constellation of them, each charging a separate fee.

So Coyne wants UBB- user based billing.  We can listen to podcasts free.  

Longer term, as I say, the whole network model will have to be rethought. Even if public funding were still considered necessary, the better model may well be Telefilm: i.e., just fund programs, wherever they appear, rather than the network and all its expensive infrastructure.

........

Fox News is supported by interests groups.  Bloomberg gives away free content, so does the Economist.  Premium content, one pays for.  That's what's coming for the Globe and Mail and most newspapers.  But without knowing who your readers are and what they're thinking, from a broad spectrum of the populace, the articles will lack life.

Perhaps the present controversy will clinch the case. So long as the CBC is dependent on the public purse, it will always be vulnerable to political pressure and the vagaries of budget cuts. Freed from that dependence, it would be free to chart its own course, accountable neither to advertisers nor to backbenchers, but to those best and wisest of judges, its viewers.

Allan MacDonald says:

I will NOT be signing this petition. While I consider myself a fiscal conservative (how else would I have ever received an e-mail from the NCC?), I also believe there is a need for public radio, not just in Canada, but in every country. I agree that if you tracked all news and programming on the CBC, or any public broadcaster, that it would lean towards the left. However, that doesn’t mean it is all left wing, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t have an opportunity to get on there to voice our opinions, unless you are saying we fiscal conservatives are oppressed by CBC mucky mucks? I rarely, if ever, hear of this.
So while I believe in smaller government and encourage private business, I also see a problem with 100% private broadcasting. I understand that this petition is an “opt-out”, and not a demand to obolish the CBC, but in Canada we cannot support a model like NPR in the United States because NPR relies on donations and fundraising, and we simply don’t have the critical mass to support a model like that. I would be in favor of changing some CBC arrangements to allow for greater revenue generation (ie: more advertising, etc.).

submitted on October 6th, 2011 at 2:40 pm

In closing, the CBC gives people good jobs.  Coyne would have journalists become bloggers, lost in the sea of non supported facts.  Oooops!  Maybe Coyne should not be a blogger.  I don't see from this half baked piece that he merits the spot on Macleans.

US Firm Wins R&D Contract for Seaspan Ships

Harper's Big Photo Op Doesn't Stand Up to Smell Test

Touted as a big job creator with long term, well paying jobs, the Seaspan contract for B.C. and Halifax is really a poor attempt to spin perception beyond reality. Firstly, Harper praised himself for being transparent and offering a hands off bidding process to prove that the government works above board and doesn't play favorites. Not quite. Quebec was shunned because only two locations were in the running.

In real terms, there are huge issues about the lack of planning in the whole deal.

Fiction: Canadian jobs
Alion engineering (a US engineering design company) won the contract for R&D of the Seaspan ships....so again Canada loses out!

Fiction: Skilled Jobs
People forget that shipbuilding is going to require the same sort of SKILLED workers that are already in short supply from coast to coast:

- Qualified welders
- Plate fitters & CNC machine operators
- Manufacturing Engineers & Welding Technologists
- Marine Engineers (designers)
- Riggers and Operators
- Machinists and Millwrights
- QA & QC people
- Industrial electricians

Where's the plan for training and encouraging young people into these trades and occupations?

A client in Western Canada who just received the permission needed to import ~100 welder-fitters from the Philippines. They've basically given up trying to find and train reliable Canadians for this work.

Fiction: Skilled Designers Needed

Korea and China produce thousands of marine engineers a year....so Canada will always be at a competitive disadvantage in this industry. Besides if memory serves me, Marine Naval Architectural engineers are one of if not the smallest group of PEngs in the country and many are older....so where are we getting the skilled designers?

Fiction: Long Term, Well Paying Jobs

Robotic welding machines can operate faster, more accurately, can simultaneously measure penetration and quality of welds and weld in different orientations. These machines require a minimum of highly skilled technicians to operate and maintain and can keep working 24hrs a day. Modern pipe bending machines can pre-bend pipe in 3D in a continuous manner, such that far fewer connections and welds are required and fewer pipe fitters. Proper engineering design coupled with modular building and technologies means ships can be built faster, larger, and require a much smaller highly skilled labour force. The reality is that IF Irving and Seaspan wish to remain competitive they will have to introduce these new technologies, and as such, fewer workers will be required.

So for all the pomp and grandstanding about jobs, it is likely that the NSBP will not result in the intended number of long term stable well paying jobs; rather fewer skilled jobs with many part time and indirect lower paying jobs!

Thanks @tempsperdu

Proviso: Cost Overruns and Federal Oversight

This week’s agreement “addressed things that both [government] ministers and concerned citizens of Canada have asked,” Mr. Whitworth said. “‘If we are going to put our support into these shipyards, what guarantees that the shipyards will perform?’”

To answer that question, the agreement also grants Ottawa unfettered access to shipyard accounting books for the life of the construction projects, a feature intended to head off cost overruns. (Globe and Mail)

The infrastructure is coming first. Watch for Canadian content on these jobs. And if the cost overruns occur? Legislation is at the ready to procure from less costly sources. S.Korea?

Transformative Liberal Policies

Transformative Liberal Platform

Journalists are presenting the Liberals as lacking in ideas, leadership, charisma. Isn't that the nature of Canadian politics? Maybe they're expecting the dog and pony show that is the GOP convention, or they'd rather just booze it up as they say during the coming gathering in Ottawa this weekend. Whichever way one sees it, the Liberals have the experience, the NDP's have a solid support amongst the unionized sector and the Greens' strength is growing amongst those who have jobs or who rely on the environmental well being for their livelihood.

Here are the issues as I see them.

Environmental Assessments are Mangled and Botched by Canadian Government

Environmental Law Site

It is commonly held that too much legislation is being rammed through Parliament without adequate consultation and the proper approval of members of the House of Commons who are left out of the back room machinations.  Ceres, an American organization  has very thorough podcasts about environmental actions and businesses wishing to work within an ecologically sound framework.

Ceres Mission Statement: 

Integrating sustainability into day-to-day business practices for the health of the planet and its people.

Reputable businesses know the parameters required by governments when setting up a business plan.  

Here is one particularly pointed podcast speaking to the issue of the importance of having a sound business partnership between industry and environmental law.

 
Re-Energizing America: How Passing Climate and Energy Legislation Can Keep the U.S. Competitive in the Global Race for Energy

Posted on May 25, 2010

In this episode, we speak with Kevin Parker, Global Head of Deutsche Asset Management, about the need for a strong regulatory environment that will spur energy investment here in the U.S. instead of sending investment dollars outside our borders.

Listen to this podcast

What went wrong with the Conservative government approach is very clearly outlined here:  WCEL
Too fast, too haphazard, delays due to not enough information provided by the company.  Sloppy.  Unprofessional all round. The amount of influence from large corporations to get access to oil, gas, land rights is not being adequately scrutinized with any criticism of resultant fallout on environment.

Done correctly, EA is more than a bureaucratic process. EA can be an effective long term planning tool to assist the government in making decisions that recognize environmental and societal values, identify alternatives for human uses of and development of resources, prioritize how resources are used within ecological limits and advance the kind of Canada in which we believe the majority of Canadians want to live.

It is safe to say that none of these processes or safeguards are being implemented in the planning stages for the tar sands.  The auditors report, the EA have recommendations, none of which have been met.  Evasion, postponement of accountability, and more legislation rushed and unfairly done is the strategy of this government.

Email your MLA or MP

Email your MLA or MP

Alphabetical List of MLAs with E-mail Addresses

Find your MP here.