Stephan Dion and His "Green Shift"

I just saw Canadian Liberal Opposition Leader Stephan Dion in an interview extol his vision of carbon taxes that would shift the burden from income to those activities that were hurting the environment. He didn’t mention activities like being an MP who would vote for merely a freeze in the expansion of the tar sands developments in Alberta or in his words a plan to make it “green”. Nor did he mention activities like being an MP who would vote for a 38% increase in the number of immigrants who would enter this country and thereby dump more than 2 million extra metric tonnes of green house gasses into the atmosphere than Harper’s immigration totals have done. It is a dirty secret in Canadian discourse that each of us, on average, emits 23 metric tonnes of GHG, and that more of us that there are, the bigger problem we have. The environment doesn’t care about per capitas. Only totals.By all means let’s become more technologically efficient. But it doesn’t mean a damn thing if we keep growing. And those who boast the loudest about carbon taxes or scream murder the most about the tar sands are like the barkers at a carnival. They have a shell game going and they are trying to take our attention away from the fact that the immigration “pea” is not even on the table The catastrophic impact of immigration on climate change, biodiversity loss, the loss of prime farmland is not even on Mr. Dion’s radar screen, or indeed that of any Canadian politician. And the well documented negative economic consequences haven’t even dented their consciousness either. If the Economic Council of Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Grubel report of 2002, and the former Director General of the Canadian Immigration Service, James Bissett, couldn’t make an impression, no one can. No one can argue with $24 billion of Albertan tar sands oil money or the money that demands a pool of cheap labour in this country. Money that has increased the labour pool by 13% from 1990 to 2006 while succeeding in driving the wages of educated workers down by 7% , according to Stats Can (May 07). Mission accomplished. As Samuel Gompers said almost a century ago, immigration is, fundamentally a labour issue. Unfortunately, its consequences are environmental and global in scope. Each immigrant to North America on his arrival, not counting his children, quadruples his greenhouse emissions. Opening our “heart” to him, is not only closing our heart to the workers whose wages he suppresses, but to the entire global population, which suffers an accelerated pace of global warming from our population increase. A “Carbon Tax” is a trivial fig leaf to disguise an open borders immigration policy that serves a globalist corporate agenda that will kill this planet or more accurately, 25% to 50% of the species that currently dwell in it. Including the one that is engineering it--us. It looks very much like, upon closer scrutiny, that Mr. Dion’s “GREEN SHIFT” is in reality at best a shift into neutral. Footnotes: 1. The Conservative Government accepted about 251,000 immigrants in 2007, but only 240,000 actually entered the country. The three opposition parties have all pledged to aim for a “1%” immigration target. That is, one percent of Canada’s current population. Currently that would be 330,000. Thus the Liberals would aim for 90,000 more than came last year, and even more if their Immigration critic is to be believed. Actually 429,000 residents settled in the country last year, when temporary visa entrants are counted. Most never leave. The gap between the parties is substantial. Each resident of Canada emits 23 metric tonnes of GHG on average (Stats Can). Therefore the opposition’s Greenhouse Hypocrisy Total is more 2 million metric tonnes of GHG above the Harper governments. Immigration has ecological consequences. 2. The Grubel Report can be found in the archive of the Fraser Institue. Dr. Herbert Grubel’s 12 year study of 1990-2002 concluded that immigration cost Canadian taxpayers $18.3 billion more in taxes than it recovered in tax revenue. 3. Estimates of the number of species who will succumb to global warming in the next four decades range between 25% to 50%, with more casualties occurring closer to the equator.