Category: Norm Reynolds

If I were asked to choose two words that most comprehensively describe Canada’s role in global politics these days they would have to be hypocrisy and absurdity. Take, for instance, the idea that Prime Minister Trudeau is trying to find an opportune time to announce that Canada will ban the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies from developing 5G networks in Canada because China might (some day) use some aspect of that to spy on Canadians.

Eheee! The sky is falling!—or, more exactly, the Liberal government is now imposing a carbon tax on provinces that don’t already have a greenhouse gas reducing carbon tax in place.

Andrew Nikiforuk, one of the leading environmental thinkers/columnists in Canada who often speaks to environmental themes in the Comox Valley has recently posted an article on The Tyee titled, Against ‘Sustainability’ and Other Plastic Words, in which he argues that “The word sustainability, were it up to me, would be extinct, wiped out, kaput.”

Immediately after the tabling of the BC budget in February, Tom Fletcher, who Black Press calls a columnist but is–in reality–little more than a Liberal Party propagandist, came out swinging under the headline “NDP moving to massive expansion of nanny state.”

You’d think that the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world would be a most compelling motivator, but the weak kneed response by governments more concerned with economic growth than collapsing civilizations left the conference with much unresolved and little reason to believe current governments will rise to the challenge of keeping our Earth from rising another devastating 1.5 C.