Liberals and Green Energy Initiative

Wind Farms are the norm in all of Europe.  Why not here?

Dalton McGuinty ran on a platform of renewable energy, among many other initiatives.  But it cost him a majority by some very strident opposition towards the end of his campaign.  I'm looking again at the issue, because of all the options to power we might have in our neighborhoods, fracking, gas power plants, oil pipelines, I for one, am back the clean and renewables.  So let's have a second look at the issue.  Just today, there is a challenge to Wind Concerns Ontario for improper spending on negative attack ads that impacted negatively on the McGuinty campaign.

Green Energy Act Introduction Testimonials - February 2009 Read what's being said about the tabling of the Green Energy Act by the Government of Ontario.

Hermann Scheer "The Green Energy Act proposed by the Ontario Green Energy Act Alliance will put Ontario in a leadership position on par with Germany. The proposed tariff system will no doubt result in 25,000 MW of renewable energy installed in Ontario by 2025. Ontario, indeed Canada as a whole, has huge potential for renewables and conservation, equal to or better than Germany's; all you need is a Green Energy Act like we have in Germany to make Ontario the leading jurisdiction in North America."

A prominent anti-wind-power group is under fire amid accusations it broke election financing by running a negative advertising campaign against Liberal candidates last fall.
Toronto resident Jude MacDonald and her lawyer Clayton Ruby have made a formal complaint to Elections Ontario, the non-partisan agency that runs and polices provincial elections.
They say Wind Concerns Ontario failed to comply with the Election Finance Act by allegedly spending over the $500 threshold on political advertising during the provincial campaign without registering as a third party.

Why would people oppose wind power?  Well, there was an outcry over the amount of money paid to have a Samsung contract.

Conservatives Are Climate Deniers

There's nothing conservative in the Harper (Greek) government.  Ok, may conservation of power for themselves.  Wasting resources on photo ops, that sort of thing.

Here's a thoroughly researched article on Climate Change from the Guardian.  Read it thoroughly to be informed and ready to inoculate yourself against propaganda that global warming and our destruction of the environment is attributable to anything other than fools like the above.  For update Twitter info, see @RTCCnewswire

Statscan is Out of Date and Why I Can't Find Energy or Environment

Here's what the Statscan website looked like using the Wayback Machine, an internet screen capture tool.

Just a screencapture

 If I wanted to get the latest indicators of water usage, environmental CO2 levels or to compare from year to year the variations in our country's usage of resources, I'd look to the tables as above and they'd be updated regularly.  The Wayback machine shows how often they were accessed and when. 

useful graph last dated 2006.

I'd really like to see how much the dark green section has changed by 2012.  Or, maybe even have a special graph just for the province of Alberta, showing a similar breakdown of tar sands and forested area.

water yields.  Quickly dropping.

Nothing here about tar sands.  Looks to me as though only people who use appliances or drive cars are driving the emissions up.  There are not other graphs to show CO2 per energy sector.  Don't you think there should be?  Write Peter Kent immediately and ask him where these graphs are.

Whitewashing from Conference Board of Canada

The only way to get unfiltered information on how Canada is doing economically and environmentally is to go directly to primary sources like the Conference Board of Canada.  The documents are free but you'll have to fill out a form with minimal private information necessary.  At any rate, I was looking to get the facts about which sectors were profitable, what were the job losses in regions and what our environmental situation was like based upon CO2  emissions and water consumption.

Is Canada making progress in its environmental performance? Canada’s environmental performance has improved in some areas and deteriorated in others. Some progress has been achieved in the areas of air quality, natural resources management, and energy efficiency. But Canada must do more to lower greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), to use its freshwater resources more wisely, and to reduce waste—all in an economically feasible way.

Total annual GHG emissions in Canada rose 24 per cent between 1990 and 2008. Although total annual GHG emissions have stabilized in the last few years, emissions continue to rise in some key sectors, including road transportation, mining, and oil and gas extraction.

Notice how the tar sands aren't even mentioned.

Water consumption is also a key environmental issue. Sustainable water management helps maintain adequate water supplies for people and ecosystems. Canada’s water use per capita is over eight times higher than that of Denmark, the top performer for this indicator. Why?
Two major reasons for Canada’s excessive use of water are inadequate water conservation practices and prices that are too low to encourage efficiency.

 A good portion of water is used by agriculture, and fortunately for Denmark, their land formation and water resources are quite advantageous.  So, Ontario produces 40% of our food and we need to reserve as much arable land and clean water close to urban areas.  All the more reason not to add to water misuse by granting permits for mining where watersheds are quite immense.  The MacKenzie River, The Athabasca River both will be soon compromised by the massive bitumen push to the west and the Arctic.

No mention is made of the realities in Canada.  Soft peddling again.  Looking for examples to Sweden and Denmark, blaming our recycling on the home front, our cheap water and plenty of it being the excuse not to take the water crime seriously.

How much free water is used by the tar sands industry?  If you know, please comment below as I can't seem to find that report.

Fact:  The increase in income inequality has been more rapid in Canada than in the U.S. since the mid-1990s.  For more see here.  Even Mexico and Japan are amongst the countries in which income inequality is growing less.  These statistics are evident but what we make of them is open for discussion.  Some may argue that immigration is costing people the opportunity to find jobs when they have to compete against an even more educated and fully skills ready influx of workers that can locate to Alberta's tar sands or B.C.'s shipbuilding.  I wonder how it feels to be robbed of a living and put on the welfare.  Sure the skills initiative is out there as a plan.  From the reality, why is the government outsourcing jobs instead of training Canadians here?  This is from the Irish Independent:

Canada is seeking tens of thousands of Irish worker to fill a wide range of jobs, the Canadian Ambassador to Ireland announced last week.

The country is seeking to fill a labor shortage caused by a strong economy, massive infrastructure projects and booming fisheries, mining, oil and natural gas industries.

"I'm hearing numbers like between 30,000 and 40,000 in construction alone," Ambassador Loyola Hearn told the Irish Independent.

Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Canada-seeks-thousands-of-Irish-immigrants-urgently-134201468.html#ixzz1jks6EiM0

I know personally of an Irish couple who were here temporarily but due to a post error had to leave and re-apply.  They may never get back in.  They were well settled, both working, their paperwork got lost in the Alberta Immigration office and no one was going to help them out. The only option would be to pay 18K to some third party immigration specialist (aka robber).  Welcome to the world of sloppy.  Flows from the top.

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.