It was no great surprise to read that “Our Government™” recently rejected an economic analysis from the Stockholm Environmental Institute in Seattle, Washington. The study showed that the Keystone XL project could produce four times the amount of greenhouse gases previously calculated by the U.S. State Department.

Naturally, anything that contradicts the federal Conservative’s position on tar sands extraction, production, and transportation must be based on “false assumptions”, as a Natural Resources Canada spokesperson stated. The U.S. State Department at least had the good grace not to respond to a valid study.

First, to be absolutely clear, as politicians like to state, there is a profound difference between the science of climate change and the social science of economics. One is the systematic and testable study of the long-term weather patterns of our world; the other is the study of humanity and its management of resources within that world.

For our current government, the social science of economics trumps all other forms of information gathering. In fact, if scientific climate studies disagree with the government’s sociological economic position, the reports are edited, buried, or discredited. It was no surprise that Kinder Morgan, its pipeline development rubber stamped by Harper’s National Energy Board, defeated the Town Of Burnaby in court. It can now continue its destruction of B.C.s conservation lands unimpeded by red tape or environmental science.

One of my most respected sources for science information was a senior climatologist at Environment Canada. Whenever I had a question from students or teachers, and I couldn’t find legitimate data, I went to him. He published his last report for climate change for the government in 2005, and then quit because they were editing out any scientific data that conflicted with the government’s ideological economic position.

He and the One Tonne Challenge were among the first casualties of a new government that regarded Climate Change as a socialist plot. The United Nations CoP11 and Kyoto agreements fell shortly after. Carbon taxes! Carbon credits! Conservation! Heresy! The economy will collapse bringing down our hard working, taxpaying, and law-abiding Canadian way of life!

The clarion call went out to censure those foreign funded eco-terrorists, those grant-seeking scientists, and those threats to the global economy. With our taxpayer money, television ads were purchased for the Economic Action Plan, the promotion of Keystone and Northern Gateway, and the joys of drilling and fracking to get more oil and natural gas out of that pesky bitumen and shale.

And the contaminants, the greenhouse gases, the true cost of very dirty energy? All necessary to sustain our way of life and our corporate profits. After all, most of the collateral damage lives downstream and downwind.

Not a single ad was purchased with our taxpayer money to do a public service commercial on a scientific analysis of the real cost of extracting oil from the tar sands or fracking for shale gas. Not a single ad was purchased with our taxpayer money to do a public service announcement from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report on science, impacts, and mitigation.

I would expect the petrochemical industry to lobby government for the approval of its projects, to seduce politicians to their point of view, and to attempt to subvert scientific reports contrary to its interests. I do not expect my government to do that lobbying for them. When our politicians become polluted, it is time for environmentally literate citizens to find a cleaner source of democracy.

*****

Skid Crease, Caledon

So, the Prime Minister delivers another promise on "Arctic Sopvereignty", one of several unfullfulled promises over the last few years. I would love to see a summary of the promises made, financial amounts promised, and declarations proclaimed over the last several years of the PMs Arctic promo trips.

If you can read with any sense of environmenal literacy, no single Arctic promise has ever been fulfilled, but if you are a fan of media hyperbole, the PM is alive and well in Putin's playground. In a video game, Stephen looks really good. In the Arctic, as they say in Inuktituk, "Tainna angut akiliiniqtuyuq". With our tax money.

*****

Skid Crease, Caledon

Ah, the street creds that come with being on the "Enemies List" of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Unfortunately, it comes with a price, like relentless CRA audits. So, just in case you were considering Charitable Status, be advised: here are the CRA's rules for being judged as taking part in "political activities":

Definition of a Political Activity: “a political activity is considered to be any activity that tries to change, retain, or oppose a law, decision, or policy of any government”; further, “when a charity puts forward its views publicly on a policy, law, or issue, it can’t connect those views to a particular political party or candidate.” According to Harper's CRA, that is.

So for the majority of Canadians that did not vote for "Our Government ^TM" who may feel slightly under the iron glove of Orwellian censorship, not to worry. It has been reported that the PMO, designated as a charitable organization ever since Nigel Wright dontated $90,000 to the Mike Duffy fund, that the PMO has lost its charitable status.

Unfortunately, that may also affect the status of several other fundraising organizations in Canada who have been advocating political change against certain elected governments, like Hamas in Gaza. Now, to this point, those organizations have not come under CRA scrutiny. So, if the Blind Bitch Goddess of Justice is applied equally, we should see some major scrambling among "charitable" fundraising organizations in Canada that violate the CRA's rules.  Otherwise, it is all re-election hypocrisy.

As to the PMO, it lost charitable status long ago.

*****

Skid Crease, Caledon

I was reminded this week of a scene in the movie Erin Brockovich, the story of how a feisty legal clerk from a small law firm helps to secure one of the biggest class action settlements in legal history. The wells in Hinkley, California had been contaminated with hexavalent chromium by the Pacific Gas and Electric company. Their lawyer, Ms. Sanchez, had been downplaying the severity of the community’s medical concerns. As their meeting progressed, she was about to drink a glass of water when Brockovich told her, “By the way, we had that water brought in specially for you folks. Came from a well in Hinkley.” Ms. Sanchez declined.

I kept wishing that Erin Brockovich had been there at the table with Brian Kynoch, president of Imperial Metals, as he proclaimed that the water downstream of the Mount Polley tailings pond spill “already almost meets drinking water standards.” I wish that same water could be served up at a roundtable of all the industrial CEO’s who are extracting and profiting from Canada’s natural resources. To all of the Ministers of the Environment. To our municipal leaders as they meet with developers. And especially to the Federal Caucus and the PMO.

I’d like to tell them: “It’s almost drinking water quality. We had it specially brought in for you folks from Hazeltine Creek.” Ah, perchance to dream.

We could just as easily have brought in water for those folks from Lake Erie where 400,000 people in the City of Toledo were held hostage by blue-green algae blooming in the effluent of agricultural fertilizer and manure run-off into a warming Great Lake. Or anywhere downstream from the industrial tar sands development along the Athabasca River watershed. Or the Kalamazoo River where the Enbridge pipeline burst. The list goes on.

It usually takes that perfect storm of circumstances to wake us up. Whether it is a record salmon run threatened by a toxic spill, or the drinking water of the city of Toledo, we suddenly sit up and take notice for a few days, at least until some celebrity’s death takes it off the front pages.

Sometimes people are just greedy stupid. Others would argue that our Canadian environmental regulations have been so severely gutted by “Our Government™” over the last nine years that something similar could easily occur with Keystone XL or Northern Gateway or Enbridge Pipeline 9. The people whose watersheds are adjacent to those projects know it all too well. And they don’t usually make up the 1% of the population who approves and profits from those projects.

In the twenty-first century, we have suddenly realized that we are all downwind and downstream of everything that happens on this planet. These disasters remind us daily that the environment is everything that surrounds us, everything with which we interact, everything that we are. To paraphrase a former political campaign manager, “It’s the environment, stupid.”

It is time to wake up, to get the full attention of our elected representatives and industrial leaders, and to demand that the quality of our water, air, and land is protected before a major ecosystem collapse changes the happy ending we are promising our children.

There was no fairy tell ending for the town of Hinkley, currently a ghost town in the making, and I doubt there will be a Hollywood ending for the salmon heading to Hazeltine Creek.

In the end, we are all swimming upstream just hoping to get home safely.