Canada

In the TV debate of April 12, 2011, the leaders of Canada's four parties with parliamentary seats demonstrated that beneath the phony left-right dichotomies, parliament is ideologically monolithic in the most important sense. All of them believe in the necessity, desirability and possibility of continuing economic growth, and that immigration-driven population growth is its necessary concomitant and driver. But how could it be otherwise? Politicians do not effect change, they respond to it. And the environmental movement---and its political arm in the NDP and the Green Party, has done nothing to create a constituency of awareness that population growth in Canada is unsustainable, an awareness that if widely shared, would compel political parties and their leaders to address it. Most culpable is David Suzuki, who could move mountains if he would publicly say what he has said of Australia: that in relation to our resources, we are in serious population overshoot.

Protecting Nature While Ignoring Immigration?

Take a look at Nature Canada's website http://www.naturecanada.ca/election2011.asp, and their "questions to ask " politicians in this federal election, and then you will understand what is wrong with Canada's environmental and conservation movement. They have taken the "P"( for population) out of the IPAT equation, the foundational formula of the environmental movement in the 1970s, essentially, environmental impact is a function of population levels and average consumption of each individual. Nature Canada, Nature Conservancy, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Sierra Club, the Green Party of Canada and the fake greens in the NDP all would have you believe that we can add 350,000 consumers to our population every year, year after year--- one metro Toronto every decade----without negative ecological impacts! And if challenged, they will tell you that we can shoe-horn tens of millions more into this country by strict land use planning (aka "smart growth"), preserve greenfield acreage and minimize their energy use. Aside from the fallacy of this contention, it is intellectually dishonest. Land use planning is in the hands of local government, and as Professor Robert MacDirmid of York University has documented in "Funding City Politics", local governments are controlled by developers.

Here are some questions to ask Nature Canada and their politically correct green clones:

1. Why won't you, Canada's green NGOs?make public your corporate funding sources? Why do you hide your corporate benefactors from your own members?
2. Why do you accept money from corporations like RBC, the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Walton Group, Encana, Atco etc etc? What do they want from you? What have you not said or advocated in return for their patronage? What is the going rate for your silence?
3. Can you explain the 'coincidence' that you have not taken on immigration-driven population growth in Canada when that is a major goal of corporations like RBC who fund you?
4. Can you seriously argue that we can "decouple" population growth in Canada from environmental degradation, from farmland and habitat loss and carbon emissions?
5. Why have you not pushed for an environmental assessment process for the government's immigration and pro-natalist policies? Do you honestly believe that renewable energy can be "scaled up" to meet the demands of a Canadian population that grows at over 1.08% per annum? Do you understand what exponential growth is? If you think a population level of 34 million for Canada is sustainable, at point would you concede that it isn't? 44 million? 54 million? 84 million? At what point along the road to ruin would you be prepared to call for a Population Plan for this country, as did Dr. Michael Healy and his UBC research team in their federally commissioned report, “Prospects for Sustainability”. As the Science Council of Canada warned in 1976, Canada must limit and stabilize its population.

Population Myopia Is An Outrageous Omission

The population-myopia of Canada's environmental movement is an outrageous omission that smacks of political correctness and outright corruption. Species loss is not something that only happens in some distant wilderness. The real killing fields are right here on the perimeters of Canada's growing urban centres. That is why Walton International, a land banking corporation, finds that it makes good business sense to give donations to Nature Conservancy for high profile land acquisitions far away from the farmland that Walton likes to purchase at the edge of cities like Calgary. When that land is rezoned to 'urban' use and housing development, Nature Conservancy stays mute, as it has when other patrons like RBC underwrite urban sprawl or bankroll the tar sands. Then, when Nature Conservancy "saves" a wetland or valley 500 miles away, these corporate donors can share the bragging rights. The new parkland is then declared parkland "forever". Forever, that is, until oil hits $250/barrel or minerals critical to our economy are in desperate shortfall. Until then, however RBC, the TD bank and Shell Canada can show off their credentials as good green citizens and paragons of corporate social "responsibility".

Where can nature be found on the ballot? Why won't Suzuki speak out against Canadian population growth?

Nature Canada implores us to "vote for nature" in this election. But where, on any federal election ballot in any constituency, can "nature" be found? The counterfeit "Greens", along with the NDP and the Liberals, actually want to hike Canada's immigration quota from its current 285,000 to 340,000!!!! Canada already vies with Australia for the dishonour of having the highest per capita immigration intake in the world, and has the highest population growth rate in the G8 group! Privately, according to some sources, David Suzuki has called this process of converting third world immigrants to "hyper consumers" in Canada as "madness", but will not say soon a major media outlet. He has, however, bravely gone on ABC radio in Australia to tell Australians that Australia is overpopulated. But Australia already has Tim Flannery and the Australian Conservation Foundation to tell them that. Will we have to invite an iconic Australian environmentalist here to say the same thing about Canada? In what way has Canada not overshot its carrying capacity to the same degree as Australia? Why the silence, Dr. Suzuki? Why be frank 'down under' but be seized with demographic lockjaw in your own country? Does the David Suzuki Foundation customize its policies to suit its benefactor, RBC, whose Chairman Gordon Nixon has lobbied for an immigration intake of 450,000?

Nature Canada is right in one important respect. In their words, "we cannot afford to allow nature and the environment to be ignored." So why are they ignoring population growth?

Tim Murray

Nature Canada Asks Us To Ask the Candidates

:

What will you do to make sure Canada does a better job of enforcing our laws to protect wildlife like caribou, whales, and migratory birds?

How will you make sure nature is really protected in all federal parks and protected areas?

What will you do to protect more lands, waters, and oceans for nature and future generations?

How will you do a better job of using federal regulations and environmental assessments to prevent environmental disasters?

My hard-earned tax dollars are going to subsidize big oil and gas companies and our Canadian lakes are being handed over to mining companies to dump their waste. What will you do to end these dirty subsidies?

What is your party’s plan to really move Canada to a green economy powered by renewable energy?
Canada urgently needs an ambitious national plan to protect nature for wildlife, for us to enjoy, and for future generations. What will you do to show national leadership and give Canada an ambitious vision and a plan to protect nature for all?

Tell Canada’s leaders where you stand – vote for nature in 2011!

Suzuki says Australia is overpopulated:

David Suzuki - Interview with radio station 6PR, 22 Sept 2006:

Suzuki: You know I was shocked to find that you have got a Minister in the Federal Cabinet here (Treasurer Peter Costello) who is encouraging Australians to have more and more children. Why? Because everybody thinks that in order to keep the economy growing forever you have got to have a growing population to keep that economy growing.

And so no one ever asks what is the cost of adding more people to Australia, a country as far as I am concerned that is already overpopulated because the demand of each Australian is so great?

Journalist: So you are saying Australia is overpopulated?

Suzuki: You bet.

Postscript: The National Leaders Debate of April 12, 2011

Last night a TV debate was held between the leaders of Canada's 4 main parties. All of them proceeded on these assumptions:

1. Continual economic growth is necessary, desirable and possible.
2. A growing population is necessary to fuel economic growth.
3. Continued high levels of immigration are necessary to replace and increase our existing population level.

The only difference between them was whether a higher or lower proportion of those immigrants should be drawn from the "family class" category. And even here, Prime Minister Harper argued that his government had remained faithful to the concept of "family reunification". Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe joined the chorus in favour of more and more immigration, but stated that multiculturalism "does not fit Quebec", which has a duty to ensure that immigrants be fully integrated into a francophone society that represents only 2% of North America's population.

Needless to say, none of the leaders questioned the justice or the sense of pro-natalist policies and child-benefits packages, or the lunacy of the Quebec government subsidizing couples' IVF treatments to the tune of $7,000 a piece.

And it should be added, that Green Party leader Elizabeth May would have been in emphatic agreement with these leaders had she participated in the debate.

We are passengers on the HMCS Ecological Titanic led by a captain and aspiring captains who believe that we should pick up more passengers, and remain ignorant about the perils ahead. Has anyone one of them read James Howard Kunstler, or Richard Heinberg, or Michael Ruppert, or even one article in the vast archive of material that is available on overshoot?

Tim Murray
April 13/ 2011

Unstoppable waves of migrants, overcrowding, displaced workers

uncontrollable crime, an alienated youth culture without hope and "one of the most divided and unequal ... countries in Europe", ---is this portrait of contemporary Britain a picture of our own future?

Let the British Poor Eat Cake

Wendy Kellett has a vision of what is to come. And it is a nightmare.

Speaking of her native land, the United Kingdom, she writes that:

“This is now one of the most divided and unequal-and overcrowded-countries in Europe. Unemployment amongst the young is rising; poverty amongst childless adults of working age is rising; immigration continues unabated-driving down wages at the bottom. The real value of incomes has fallen steadily in the past couple of decades, primarily affecting those with the least. Property values have soared, driven by speculation, a deregulated financial sector and increasing pressure on land from development and population growth.

The ‘toffs’ have no idea, or no concern, for what the less fortunate are experiencing. (They will find out, sooner or later.) Their attitude was typified by the chief executive of the Barclay group, Bob (deep-pockets-my-bonus-is-bigger-than-yours) Diamond when he defended the remuneration culture of the UK financial sector before the Commons Treasury Select Committee on bank bonuses. Diamond declared that ‘There was a period of remorse and apology; that period needs to be over.’ I must have missed the remorse and the apology. Diamond rejected the demands of MPs that he forgo his 2010 bonus, which could amount to $8 million.

So it’s business as usual for the greedsters, able to continue unabashed-- courtesy of the publicly funded rescue package---all gain, no pain. The pain is borne by the young, the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, the impoverished, the homeless and the millions of workers who are seeing the value of their wages plummet.”

An Archipelago Of Rich Enclaves In A Sea Of Crime And Poverty

The UK has become what John Kenneth Galbraith said of America, a nation where “private affluence co-exists with public squalor”. By 2015, she predicts, we will see a UK where

“Rising inequality, matched by population growth, will exacerbate the divide between rich and poor and a demoralised and resentful public will be increasingly numbed by diversions like sporting events, celebrity television and political messages which skilfully demonise the poor and needy. Entrepreneurial types will no doubt turn in ever greater numbers to drug dealing, people smuggling and black market supply of now-unaffordable goods beyond the reach of many. Mass migration from Africa and the Middle East will continue , driven by climate change, poverty and population growth. The rich will continue to move into gated enclaves and religious groups will fill the gaps left by vapourised public services : I suspect that ,increasingly, we shall see whole areas dominated by different faith groups.”

Canadian Youth Alienated And Embittered

I replied that this unfolding tragedy sounds very much like what is occurring in North America.

“Sounds a lot like Canada. The United States is even worse. The gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically since the 80s. Now Canadian cities are being to resemble American cities as they were 20 years ago. We have a social safety net that they don't, but the level of services are dropping like a stone. What Galbraith said of America is now true of Canada. The working class has been pauperized, caught in a squeeze play between the outsourcing of good-paying manufacturing jobs and the "in-sourcing" of cheap imported labour which has driven down the wages of displaced blue collar workers and their children, who must compete for the McJobs of a growing low-wage service sector.

Many of these kids have degrees and are trying to work off student debts in the five figures flipping burgers or selling cars for chump change while politicians bemoan the plight of immigrants with degrees who can’t find employment relevant to their field of study. No wonder that so many young people are still living with their parents. The more removed the wealthy become from the masses, the less empathy they have. But incivility, hostility, rudeness, and hostility are bubbling up among the young. In the 60s our fault was our naive idealism. Theirs is their unapologetic cynicism. On the CBC today, I heard the testimony of a bus driver who saw five black female teens on his bus threaten an elderly white lady because she was "looking at them". This kind of incident was unknown in Canada in my time. But it is common now. People are alienated and angry and they are lashing out at the wrong targets.”

The Lost Generation

Wendy also observes the same youth alienation in the United Kingdom.

“I see blank ,sullen incivility on the faces of many of the young : disturbing but explainable. They are fed a diet of, to quote REM : 'shiny, happy people' on the telly, who are famous for being famous, and whose fatuous remarks beggar belief. I suspect that the young know, perhaps subliminally, that they have no stake in the present and no expectations of the future : nihilism; anomie and disengagement are the result.”

It is clear that what we are witnessing--- in the so-called affluent societies---- is the emergence of a Lost Generation----alienated, hostile and withdrawn---immersed in a digital technology that has become both their defining trademark and their sanctuary from a world beyond their control. We are witnessing a systems collapse and the unravelling of Euro-American civilization. As Yeats said in his epic poem, “The Second Coming”, the centre cannot hold.

Tim Murray
January 26, 2011

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B.Yeats 1919

In Growth We Prosper

There is an unrelenting media campaign to tell Canadians that we must grow our population. We need more babies and more immigrants or very bad things will happen. But there are voices that question this assumption. They are heard on the streets, in the pubs and at the dining room table. But they are seldom heard in the media. Especially not on the airways of the CBC, that vehicle of growthist PC propaganda which all taxpayers are forced to endow.

It has been quite the year.

First the host of CBC radio's "The Sunday Edition", Michael Enright, declared on his June 7th program that Canada needs immigration-driven population growth in order to "prosper". Many of us, like Brishen Hoff, wanted to know what Enright meant by "prosper". As Hoff then asked, "Does Enright think that prospering means converting hundreds of thousands of hectares of Canadian land from biodiverse ecosystems into new roads, subdivisions, clearcuts, malls, parking lots, and open-pit mines to accommodate about 250,000 additional immigrants every year? Does that make life better for the average Canadian? Has real wealth per Canadian increased?"

Then a week later the print media gave the University of Toronto's Irvin Studin, editor-in-chief of "Global Brief" a platform to promote his vision of a Canada of 100 million people-- the Superpower of the century. No submissions for op-eds of equivalent space that would contest his arguments were permitted. Not one. Not in any major media outlet. Nor were any one of several known letters-to-the editor critical of his stance published.

How the CBC Manages To Talk About Demography Without Questioning Population Growth

Then in September, CBC Radio announced that the flagship morning show, "The Current" would be featuring a series of programs about the "seismic" demographic shifts that are occuring in Canada that will "change our work, our health, our families and our politics". The series would not ask if we could resist these changes, or how we might do so. And most conspicuously, not once would they interview a guest who challenged the assumed need to grow our population.

Demographer David Foot set the tone on the September 7th program by arguing that we seek the counsel of demographers so that we may "plan" for a future, which as we are constantly told about growth, is inevitable. Population growth and change is not something we can do anything about. We just have to make the right adjustments. On September 8th, the next day, the CBC then declared that the growing ranks of centenarians was something "worth celebrating"---something re-affirmed on the September 21st segment of the series about "super-centenarians", when listeners were told of the "exciting' , albeit costly research that will help us live beyond 110 years of age. On the 16th, The Current informed CBC listeners that the government of Quebec had spent some $25million this year to cover the cost of several fertility treatments in an effort to hike the province's birth rate, which they said---without challenge--is "crucial" to the province's future. The Quebec College of Physicians made the argument that money would be better spent on fixing what is already an overburdened system---but that was an argument about priorities and not about the underlying assumption that Quebec needed to boost its population. The October 4th show dealt with the old ogre of an aging population, and two days later the burdens of caregiving to elders was discussed. On October 7th, crocodile tears were shed about how changes to the Citizenship Act were impeding the ability of overseas Canadians to pass on their citizenship to children they had outside the country. Another program was devoted to the issue of when--- not if--- couples should have their children. No one spoke of the alternative of adopting one of the 36,000 Canadian children still without a permanent home. The "Shift"---as the series was called---was all about promoting more births, extending the lives of very old people and encouraging immigration. The phrase "carrying capacity" was never heard.

Resistance is Futile. We are the CBC

Meanwhile, "The Sunday Edition", hosted by Michael Enright---remember, the host who asserted that immigration was necessary for Canada's "prosperity"--- gave Irvin Studin 23 minutes of air time to re-iterate what he said in the print media four months before. Only this time Studin was congratulated for doing his bit to grow the population after proudly announcing the birth of his child. I then twice challenged the executive producer of Sunday Edition, Marjorie Nichol, in the interests of balance--to offer equivalent time to a contrarian view, even supplying her with the contact numbers, biographies and posted arguments of three capable and articulate people in the population stabilization movement. But even that was not enough to spark their interest or wake up a journalistic conscience for fair play. But then, what should one expect. I was dealing with CBC Pravda, after all. I might as well talk to my plants.

Now, if this five-month propaganda barrage was not enought, Global TV is announced that beginning Monday evening, November 9th, they will be running a two-part segment about "Making Babies"---designed to offer help and advice to couples who want to produce more unnecessary Canadians by artificial means.

At What Point Will The Media Question Growth?

The obvious question is, "At what point in history will the mainstream Canadian media consider the possibility that Canada already has enough people on its hands?" That there is no law nor reason why any country should feel obligated to "replace" its unsustainable population level?That a 'youth quake' of immigrants or newborns will not arrest the aging of our population nor pay for their pension or medical benefits? That the infrastructure costs of servicing a growing population exceeds their economic contributions? That great majority of immigrants will lack the skills to pay the kind of taxes it takes to subsidize the provision of the government services they demand? That a country without a population plan that is not properly debated with all options on the table is like a blindfolded man walking toward a cliff?

At what point will the CBC honour its mandate to offer a microphone to all strands of Canadian public opinion, a public that pays taxes to this "peoples'" broadcasting corporation for that right? Will that point be when oil is at $200/barrel and we are at 44 million, or when it is at $300/barrel and we are at 54 million? What is your bid----64 million? 64 million, is there anyone who will say 74 million? 64 once, 64 two times, 64---wait, Mr. Gordon Nixon of the Royal Bank says 74 million. Do I hear 84? Yes, Elizabeth May of the Green Party raises her hand for 84 million consumers whose ecological impact can be "de-coupled" from the environment. Its 84 million now--- Ms. May has raised the bar so that Canada can persist with what she calls its "Great Multicultural Project". It doesn't matter if we trash the environment and reduce Canadians' per capita share of resources as long as we are more diverse in our poverty! Wait--- Mr. Studin says 94 million! Now Mr. Gordon Nixon of the Royal Bank counters with 99 million potential bank clients! Now Irvin Studin shouts "100 million"! Whoppee, the sky is the limit! We are going to the mountain top! Mr. Studin may not get their with you kids but, you'll get there! Its 100 million, going once, going twice---- SOLD!"

Studin's Mad Dream Prevails

Congratulations Mr. Studin, your mad vision of a Canada in ridiculous overshoot wins the day! As you argued on CBC radio, at 100 million we will have the political leverage to promote our progressive environmental policies to the rest of the world! We can show the rest of the world how its done! Just look how we are doing that now! We've covered 20% of our Class One farmland with subdivisions and put 500 species at risk in the process! Thanks to post-1990 hyper-immigration we have developed more square kilometres in farmland than the Alberta Tar Sands project has despoiled boreal forest! This is only the beginning---think now of our potential! Not only will we live like Ghandi, as Elizabeth May prescribes, we'll do better than that! We'll live like cavemen! Consume less and less, squeeze tighter and tighter and move over for more and more migrants! By tripling our population by century's end, we can absorb 46% of the number of people the planet adds to its burden in just one year! It all makes so much sense----no wonder the media doesn't want anyone to challenge Irvin's dream.

Tim Murray
November 6/2010

Check out: http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.htm

Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada has happened upon the John Howard confidence trick. In the shell game of electoral politics, it is important to get the audience to focus on the pea marked "bogus refugees" rather than the one marked "unsustainable immigration". That way corporations get the policy they paid for. The growth of the cheap labour pool and legions of new consumers. We clap our hands at the crackdown, and are none the wiser for it.

I seem to recall that Australia's one-man wrecking crew (lest we forget) John Howard, successfully exploited public anger over incoming boat-loads of refugees by making a show of his hardline crackdown, then using that stance as a screen to jack up immigration levels to stratospheric heights. Right? Well it seems that the Stephen Harper government is taking the same tack. Use the refugee issue as a decoy and a lightening rod so that an even higher number of migrants can be waived through the airport. This is not about curbing immigration to more sustainable levels, levels that would permit cultural integration and ecological recuperation from the two-decade demographic assault Canada has suffered since 1990. It is about quelling growing public anger so that it does not threaten the great unquestioned project of unsustainable economic growth, which all major parties wrongly believe is dependent on population growth.

It is not just Canada's refugee system that is out of control. Immigration is out of control. Making scapegoats out of phoney refugees and the slime who smuggle them takes the heat off an immigration policy based on economic folly and cynical political empire-building. And the Prime Minister knows it. He wants more immigration, not less. And if the opposition parties, who share his mad dream, were smart, they would accede to his inadequate bill, because it appeases misplaced public wrath. Canadians could then be given the false assurance that everything is now "under control", when in fact immigrant-driven population growth will be more out-of-control than ever. While I support the government's half-measures---as far as they go---- I wonder if by applying a band-aid we might forget that we need major surgery. We need to stabilize and reduce our population, and to accomplish that, we could double or triple the intake of legitimate refugees while slashing the immigration quota to modest and reasonable totals. Cleaning up the refugee mess is not sufficient.

Harper's comments, recorded in this news report, "Human smuggling threatens Canada support for immigration: PM"
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/101020/canada/canada_srilanka_politics_refugee_immigration, makes his motives clear.

"A failure to act and act strongly (against human smugglers) will inevitably lead to a massive collapse in public support for our immigration system.... Not only do we have relatively speaking the largest immigration program in the world; not only do we have the most generous system of sanctuary for refugees in the world -- we also have a level of public support for immigration that is unparalleled elsewhere in the world," Harper said. "And that must continue, because our economy will need even more immigrants." The strong new laws will provide incentives for would-be immigrants to enter the country through "legitmate channels".

Tim Murray
October 22/ 2010

Background stories: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Tories+take+refugee+fraudsters+smugglers/3706309/story.html
http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Laws+turn+tide+refugees/3709436/story.html

by James Bisset

The effect of immigration on the employment of Canadians became a bit clearer this week. On the Tuesday, Sept 14 edition of CBC Radio's The Current, Economics Professor Eric Howe stated that 1 in 7 Aboriginal Canadians in Saskatchewan lost their jobs in 2009. Mr. Howe is a specialist in Aboriginal issues and teaches at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He described the job loss as "an utter disaster" for Aboriginals. He said a number of factors had caused this to happen. One was that the Saskatchewan job market slowed in 2009. Another was that the Saskatchewan provincial government was at that time "pushing the hiring of immigrants at the cost of hiring people already here".

The fact that 1 in 7 aboriginal residents of Saskatchewan lost their jobs is very significant. According to the Government of Saskatchewan's web site, Saskatchewan's population is now just over 1 million. In 2001, people of aboriginal descent comprised 13.6% of the province's population. Aboriginals are a rapidly growing group in Saskatchewan and are projected to comprise 32.5% of that province's population in 2045._#main-fn1">1

It is probably safe to say that they comprise close to 18% of Saskatchewan's population today. Mr. Howe did not provide raw numbers for the job losses, but they were probably not low.

In response, Rob Norris, Saskatchewan's Minister of Immigration (as well as of Advanced Education and Employment) has stated that "immigration to Saskatchewan is driven by employer demand for workers already trained for a particular skill". He also said that the province does not "push" employers to hire immigrants, but that it helps employers to find workers. Furthermore, he has declared that the success of Saskatchewan's future is linked to Aboriginals. The government, he says, is doing what it can to help Aboriginals and its Metis population to find opportunities in education and in employment.

The key issue that Mr. Norris should be dealing with is whether the employers' demands are legitimate and whether the provincial government has unintentionally helped some employers to act against the employment interests of its own citizens.

Regarding the conflict between the statements of Mr. Howe and Mr. Norris : Professor Howe has spent a large part of his long teaching career specializing in aboriginal issues. His experience lends a considerable amount of weight to his statements. Saskatchewan Immigration Minister Rob Norris does not have the same amount of experience with the issue. "Hire An Immigrant" initiatives have been well promoted by Canada's immigration industry during the recent recession. Few, if any, Canadian politicians at any level have expressed disapproval about the corrupt motives and obvious dangers of these immigration industry initiatives.

According to Statistics Canada, Canada allowed over 282,000 Temporary Foreign Workers to work here in 2009. That number has doubled since 2005. In 9 of 10 provinces, the number of Temporary Foreign Workers has increased since 2005. In 2009, Ontario took 94,762, B.C. took 69, 038, Alberta took 65,038 , Quebec took 30,552 and Saskatchewan took 5971. Several provinces have experienced dramatic increases. Alberta took 4 times as many TFW's in 2009 as it did in 2005. B.C.'s numbers have more than doubled since 2005.

Here are the questions Mr. Norris, the government of Saskatchewan, and all provincial governments (particularly the provinces with such high numbers) have to answer:

1. Undoubtedly, "utter disasters" have occurred in other parts of Canada, particularly in provinces like Ontario, B.C., and Alberta which have absorbed the majority of Canada's 5 million immigrants since 1990. Why have academics like Professor Howe (as well as governments) not investigated and corrected the "utter disasters" ? Regarding academics, do we have examples here similar to those in Australia where most of the research funds available are for research that portrays immigration in a favourable light?
2. Since most of the 282,000 Temporary Foreign Workers who enter Canada are requested by employers, how closely have Saskatchewan and other provinces monitored employer applications for Temporary Foreign Workers? For example, the jobs that employers are filling are supposed to be advertised in Canada. Only if employers cannot find Canadians for those jobs are they allowed to bring in foreign workers. Mr. Norris says that employers were looking for workers with particular skills. So, what were the "skills" that Saskatchewan's 5971 TFW's had? Were they food service skills such as those used by workers at Tim Horton's, McDonald's, Wendy's, and the like? If so, were Saskatchewan Aboriginals and mainstream Saskatchewan residents just as "qualified" for those jobs, particularly if they had just lost their own jobs? The governments of all other provinces have to answer the same questions.
3. The 282,000 Temporary Foreign Workers that worked in Canada in 2009 is an enormous number. It is very hard to believe that Canada needed that large a number. This is especially true for the last 2 years when Canada was in the most severe of the three economic downturns it has experienced since 1990. The question is probably not "Have employers abused the programme?", but "How many have abused the programme and to what extent?" For example, some people have pretended that they are employers, advertised "jobs" that do not exist and, in effect, used the TFW programme as an alternate immigration programme. To what extent has this occurred with TFW's?
4. Some Canadians like to say that Canada needs Temporary Foreign Workers because Canada does not have enough people to do agricultural work. However, Canada already has a programme (Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme) to take care of agricultural worker shortages. Regarding actual numbers of foreign agricultural workers : in a June commentary on the SAWP programme, the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union stated that Canada allows about 15,000 foreign agricultural workers to be employed here each year. The key fact is that the number of foreigners who come here as agricultural workers is tiny, about 5% of all those who come here as TFW's. Compared to the number of all agricultural workers in Canada, the number of foreigners who work in Canadian agriculture is still quite small. According to one source, Canada has over 100,000 agriculture workers, but about 80% of them are Canadians. They enter under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme (SAWP) and leave at the end of their work term (usually several months).

A big question is this : If Canada is to bring in any Temporary Foreign Workers at all, why has it not used the cautionary devices in the SAWP programme as a model in order to avoid the "utter disasters" that have occurred in the past 2 years?

And of course, the biggest question of all is this : In a recession in particular, but even in good times, why is Canada bringing in so many permanent immigrants?

James Bissett, the former executive director of Canada's entire immigration service, helped set up the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Programme (SAWP). It originated in 1965 for Caribbean Commonwealth countries and was later expanded to include Mexico. It was called a "Premium" programme because farmers paid the transportation costs of workers from and back to their country of origin. They also paid the prevailing wage for Canadian workers. A consular official accompanied the workers to handle worker complaints. The lodging that farmers provided was inspected by officials from the Canadian government and the home countries of the workers. Farmers could recommend good workers be permitted to return the next year. As a testimony to the good will that existed between workers and employers, on days off, the farmers took workers to events in their communities. In the winter, the workers invited the farmers to attend festivals in the Caribbean. While the workers were in Canada, farmers provided the workers with spending money. However, a key part of the programme was that a large percentage of the workers' wages was held back. This was done to ensure that the workers left Canada. When the workers returned to their countries, their wages were deposited into their bank accounts in their home countries.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">[back] Editorial comment: Whilst we appreciate that the expected growth in Saskatchewan's Aboriginal population may be the only way that they currently have to prevent themselves from becoming an even smaller minority, we at candobetter, nevertheless, hold that all population growth is unsustainable, whether caused by immigration or increases in the existing population.

Multiculturalism is more an effect than a cause In " How Immigration is Leading Us Down The Road To Sarajevo", Frank Hilliard writes: "Supporters of mass immigration often point to the past success Canada had in assimilating newcomers into Canadian society. They say by the third generation most immigrants are thoroughly Canadian in thought and action. To these proponents, there is no need to change our open-door immigration policy because it’s been, in their view, a roaring success. Unfortunately, what was true in the past is often not true now and may not be true at all in the future. Some newer immigrant groups don’t want to assimilate and prefer to remain distinct." http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_u... I would question the last statement. The self-appointed advocates and ethnic power-brokers of newer immigrant groups don't want them to assimilate, nor do the politicians who find it convenient to bus in ethnic voting blocs into nomination meetings or manipulate them for electoral purposes. In my experience, however, immigrants themselves very much want to participate in mainstream society, but are unable to do so. Why? Most of them are too damn exhausted trying to put food on the table. They have the will, but neither the time nor the energy to participate in much of the public activity around them. Even the 20% who have skills often do not find jobs to employ those skills---just like many educated native-born Canadians. Consequently they must work longer hours on lower incomes to keep their heads above water. It usually takes a decade before the average immigrant achieves the average Canadian income. As has been the case for more than a century, too often it is their children who act as interpreters for what is occurring in Canadian society at large. As I wrote before (http://candobetter.org/node/2007) , ethnic enclaves should be seen more as life rafts than defiant fortresses against assimilation. Case in point. My great grandparents came to Canada with every intention of learning English and following local customs and laws. But seeking the support and job opportunities offered by those from their homeland was a necessary stepping stone to eventual integration into Canadian society. Then once on their feet, and finally fluent in English, they were able to move out of the Scandinavian area of town to a bigger city with a dearth of people of their former nationality. Now, as then, I would submit, the pace of assimilation is governed by economic considerations---not by any stubborn or recalcitrant refusal to embrace the dominant culture. We have imported a slave labour caste to provide services which we want on the cheap, and for which employers in a competitive market, either will not or cannot reward with a living wage. Thus most immigrants cannot earn the $25,000 in annual income that government requires before tax revenues offset the costs of services provided to them. Mass immigration is essentially a corporate welfare scam, and multiculturalism a de-facto apartheid strategy to build walls between people who might otherwise unite to challenge the system. Mr. Hilliard argues that the high volume of immigration, drawn as it is from “non-traditional” sources, grows cultural ghettoes and in tandem with the prevailing ethic of cultural relativism---the philosophical underpinning of Official Multiculturalism---makes it possible for immigrant groups to more effectively lobby for the acceptance of practices like genital mutilation, the stoning of adulterers, polygamy, child marriage and the like--- practices that are lawful in their homelands. But against this centrifugal force to bind with what is traditional is a very real countervailing impulse, particularly among the younger generation, to join mainstream society. There is both a “push” and a “pull factor” at work. While ethnic power-brokers are attempting to pull their flock closer to their orbit, most immigrants feel pushed outward by a desire to grasp the wider opportunities that await them beyond their cultural cocoon. After all, immigrants, almost by definition, are people who are willing to leave their comfort zone to grasp for opportunities. Leaving one’s homeland is the ambition of risk-takers. The growth of an ethnic enclave in itself is not decisive in impeding assimilation. What is critical is the ability or inability of an immigrant population to join in on the cultural and political life of the nation as a whole. A sixty-hour work earning inadequate wages is a greater stumbling block to this possibility than an ideology which counsels minorities to maintain a separate cultural identity. Cultural relativism is a rationale for what corporate capitalism most wishes. It only attempts to legitimize the plurality of manufactured solitudes. As Bob Birrell, Robert Putnam and other academics have documented, the mutual isolation of contending sub-cultures erodes trust and volunteerism, two vital ingredients of civil society, thereby helping to create a society of consumers from what was formerly a society of citizens. Consumers behave as the atomized agents of the economic system, but citizens see an obligation to deliberate and decide the course of society. Corporate capitalism is fettered by the active participation of citizens, but left foot-loose by politically inert and self-absorbed consumers. Diversity may impede cross-cultural communication and solidarity, but it never inhibits cross-cultural congregation at the local shopping mall. Multiculturalism, seen in this light, is merely useful to the power elite. A means to an end, but not an end in itself. A moratorium on immigration, higher minimum wages and union-friendly laws to bring this class under collective bargaining protection would go a long way to undercut the opportunity and incentive to displace more expensive indigenous labour with that of foreign-born workers. Multiculturalism is not the root cause of cultural fragmentation, but a cloak for a more sinister economic agenda which celebrates cultural diversity as it rings the cash register and counts the profits. Let's not confuse cause with effect, or needlessly alienate those who are even more a victim of growth-madness and balkanization-by-design than we are. Let's not make immigrants the easy recruits for the growth lobby who use their fake enthusiasm for “cultural diversity” as a political battering ram against sustainable population strategies. Most who emigrate do so to create more opportunities for their children, and therefore have the potential to understand that is their children who will suffer most from an inflated labour pool and an unsustainable population level that will diminish their share of available resources. Tim Murray July 26, 2010

Canadians respond to Australian Mischaracterization of Canada

LTE editor, Sydney Morning Herald

Re: "Canadians have successfully managed a similar swelling in population numbers", by Josephine Tovey (SMH June 29/2010)

It would come as a surprise to most Canadians that we have coped well with the addition of 13 million consumers since 1970. Yet with trans-oceanic vision, Professor Peter MacDonald, sounding less like a demographer and more like a growth-obsessive economist with rose-coloured glasses, confidently asserts that to be the case. In fact it is not.

At least three government-funded studies---Report number 25 from the Science Council of Canada, a 1990 report from the Privy Council and the damning Healey report of 1997----all documented the devastation wrought by population growth on our arable land and ecosystems. Our largest cities are bursting at the seams with congestion, smog, overloaded infrastructure and unaffordable real estate. Built-up development pressures have overwhelmed urban boundaries and claimed 20% of our best farmland for housing to accommodate a largely foreign-born demand. According to Ontario Farmlands Trust, Ontario alone lost some 600,000 acres of prime farmland in the decade following 1996.

Strict land use planning is typically touted as the panacea for this runaway population growth, but smart growth strategies have been a proven failure. The reality is, as York University Professor Robert MacDermid established in his report on municipal campaign financing in 2009, civic election campaigns are essentially bankrolled by corporate money, most of it from the same developers responsible for the cascading sprawl. The local planning department is, for all intents and purposes, a branch plant of the real estate industry. No wonder that the folks who underwrite home purchases, like the CEO of our goliath Royal Bank of Canada, Gordon Nixon, have lobbied for an immigration quota 50% higher than its current stratospheric level. More homebuyers, more profits. And the ecological costs can be expiated by discreet donations to high profile environmental NGOs like Nature Conservancy Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation, which naturally, have nothing to say about the negative environmental impact of mass immigration nor about the morality of accepting corporate donations.

Tovey and MacDonald have it dead wrong. In Canada we have not managed growth. Growth has managed us.

Tim Murray
VP Biodiversity First
Quathiaski Cove, BC
Canada V0P 1N0

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re "Canada's Experience" dated June 29, 2010:

Josephine Tovey claims that Canada is some kind of success story for having gone from a population of 21 million in 1970 to 35 million today. She is roughly correct in saying that Canada's population has grown, but she and demographer Peter McDonald should be very careful about saying that any country's population increase (Canada's or Australia's in particular) should be characterized as a "sucess story".

Canada and Australia are similar in some respects: both are large areas of land, but Nature has imposed severe limitations on them. Both have huge desert areas : Canada's is in its north ; Australia's is in its Interior. In addition to desert, remember that almost 40% of Canada is north of the 60th Parallel and has to deal with extreme cold and 8 to 10 month long winters. Remember also that Canada, in contrast to Australia, has a river system in its Interior and that that system, in part, has enabled Canada to support its population increase.

The question Ms. Tovey should ask is this : Why should any country have a larger population? Canadians who have lived in southern British Columbia and Southern Ontario, the areas of Canada that have experienced high population growth, will tell you that those places have not been "improved" by bringing in more people. In fact, they are "full". In support of that claim, Ontario's Environment Commissioner has stated that Southern Ontario does not have the water to support the planned population increase there and that its river systems cannot handle the wastes from that population.

Ms. Tovey should note that in 1976, Canada's federal government asked The Science Council of Canada, Canada's most eminent scientists, to make recommendations about an optimum population for Canada and how Canada could best use its land base and its resources for itself and for its role in the world. That group stated that Canada had to discard two myths about itself One was that its large land base meant that it could take unlimited numbers of people. To help end that misconception, it recommended that Canada restrict immigration and stabilize its population at roughly what it is now. The other myth was that Canada had infinite resources. To assist in ending that myth, it produced rsearch to show that Canada had a finite resource supply and that it should take measures to protect those resources, particularly its farm land. It recommended that since there were few food-exporting countries in a world with an increasing population, Canada should concentrate on becoming a major food exporter.

Since then, Canada's real estate and immigration industries have convinced our federal government to ignore much of what The Science Council recommended. As a result, Canada has lost huge amounts of the country's best farmland in southern Ontario to immigration-driven housing development.

One event precipitated that loss. Canada's Progressive Conservative Party began an immigration intake policy of 240,000 in 1990, contrary to the advice they had been given that immigration produced alomost no economic benefits and that it would not solve aging population issues. As senseless and incredible as it may sound, Canada's Immigration Minister in 1990 stated she was raising immigration levels (which were around 85,000 when her gov't took office) in order that the Progressive Conservative Party could compete with its rival, the Liberal Party, for the immigrant vote. Even more incredibly, that policy has been virtually institutionalized and all of Canada's federal political parties now support it. Over 5 million immigrants have entered Canada since then. They are responsible for around 70% of Canada's population increase.

In other words, Canada has regularized population insanity. Contrary to what demographer Peter McDonald says, Canada is falling into "a big heap". Canada's immigrant visible minority has become the proverbial tail that wags the dog. Immigrant advocacy groups and their converts parade around the country evangelizing for the Religion of Diversity. The reality is that according to one academic, immigration has become a huge economic drag of over $20 Billion a year. According to many others, immigration-driven population growth is transforming many areas of Canada into a virtual social and environmental disaster-in-progress.

If Australia thinks Canada is a "success story" to imitate, then go ahead. See you in the asylum !!

Dan Murray
Immigration Watch Canada
www.immigrationwatchcanada.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Josephine Tovey's June 29th article leaves readers with the impression that
Canada has successfully "managed" the addition of 14 million people during
the last 40 years, the implication being that Australians need not worry
about their own population ballooning out to 36 million if, per Peter
MacDonald, they manage it properly. Ms. Tovey does not seem to have
consulted anyone about the cost of this rampant population growth.

A report released in March by the Toronto Board of Trade said that the
estimated round-trip commutes in that city now average 80 minutes, longer
than commutes in London, New York, and Los Angeles, and cost Canada more
than $5 billion a year. Gridlock also afflicts Canada's other large cities,
many of which are unable to maintain the infrastructure to keep up with
growth and suffer a decreasing environmental quality. The Ontario Medical
Association estimates that there are close to 6000 premature deaths and
17,000 hospital admissions in Ontario each year caused by smog. Canada's
growing cities are devouring not only the greenspace that makes them
liveable but the agricultural land that feeds them. According to a 2005
Statistics Canada publication, about one-half of Canada's urbanized land
sits on dependable agricultural land, and some 14,300 square kilometres of
dependable agricultural land have been converted to urban uses.

What about water? A 1991 advisory document to the Privy Council of Canada
says: "Canada is endowed with vast water resources, but with 90 percent of
its population concentrated within a band up to 100 miles of the USA border,
water resources in these areas are already being utilized to their fullest.
Polluted water has become an everyday concern." Most newcomers to Canada
come from countries with much lower per capita energy consumption levels and
consequently substantially increase their greenhouse gas production in their
new country (not to mention their consumption of other resources). Canada's
rapidly growing population has prevented it from meeting any of its targets
for greenhouse gas reduction. Population growth and development has also
taken a tremendous toll on Canada's ecosystems. The number of endangered
species in Canada, as elsewhere in the world, goes up each year. Of the 428
species of birds that regularly breed in Canada, 60 are in danger of
extinction. As the collapse of its cod fishery has shown, Canada's resources
are not inexhaustible.

And what of the much vaunted economic benefits that population growth has
allegedly brought Canada? Economist Herb Grubel calculated that recent
immigrants cost the Canadian government about $18 billion (Canadian dollars)
more in services than they pay in taxes each year. According to Statistics
Canada census data from 2006, the median earnings of Canadians (in
inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars) increased by a negligible 0.1% between 1980
and 2005, while the earnings of the poorest fifth actually fell by a
sizeable 20%. But the "doors wide open" immigration policy, initiated in
1990, that has ramped up Canada's population growth in recent decades has
brought economic benefits to some. The 2006 StatsCan census data shows that
the real earnings of the richest fifth of Canadians increased by 16%. Among
those, one can be sure, would be developers who profit from building houses
and bankers who profit from the mortgages, some business interests
benefiting from cheap labour, as well as the "immigration industry."
Politicians seek both to please corporate interests and gain the votes of
newcomers by maintaining mass immigration, come boom or recession. Given
that those who benefit from growth also tend to be the ones who own the
media, it is perhaps not surprising that the costs of immigration have
received so little coverage in the Canadian media.

Canada is a land rich in resources, which has enabled it delay paying the
price for its wasteful pursuit of growth. That does not make it a good
manager. Canada should not be seen as a "growth-managing" role model for
Australia. On the contrary, by virtue of the fact that Australia is having a
public discussion about growth, it is a role model for Canada, where the
media still spout the corporate party line that growth is good and more is
better.

Madeline Weld
President, Population Institute of Canada
www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original article:
Sydney Morning Herald
June 29, 2010

Canadians have successfully managed a similar swelling in population numbers. Josephine Tovey explains five things Australia must do to cope with an extra 14 million people.

How does a Western country used to low-density living, with an abundance of space but little arable land, create liveable cities while undergoing a population explosion from about 20 million people to 36 million in 40 years?

That is the conundrum now vexing Australia. But Canada has undergone that change in the last 40 years and it is one that experts in population and urban planning say Australia could handle too, if the growth is well managed.

''Canada didn't fall in a big heap because its population went from 22 to 35 million,'' Professor Peter McDonald, director of the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, said.

Its population has grown from about 21 million people in 1970 to almost 35 million today - roughly the same rate of growth projected by federal Treasury between now and 2050 for Australia.

Coping with such growth comes down to long-term planning and attention to key areas, Professor McDonald said. These include creating mass transit systems for expanding cities, providing housing where it is needed, addressing environmental needs like water, food and energy, and directing infrastructure into smaller towns that can share the population growth.

Canada's population is spread across a lot of medium-sized cities -more than 33 have a population above 100,000, but only one, Toronto, has a population of more than 5 million.

Public transport
''One of the problems people have with higher densities is that it does produce more traffic and parking problems,'' said urban planner Dr Garry Glazebrook. ''It will, unless we shift some of our travel out of cars.''

Housing
Providing affordable housing will require a mix of high- and medium-density infill, as well as new homes on greenfield sites. ''There will be a strong demand for medium- and high-density housing,'' said Professor Peter McDonald, particularly from migrants.

Water
Better water savings measures, such as low water use toilets and showers, are needed, says Grant Leslie, the manager of the Water Services Association of Australia. Desalination plants, new dams and water recycling plants were also part of the solution, he said.

Energy
Homes and businesses will need to become smarter with their energy use. ''Many areas of our economy use much less energy … that's a matter of replacing more of our fossil energy sources with renewable sources,'' said demographer, Professor Graeme Hugo.

Redistribution
Targeting infrastructure at rural and coastal communities that can sustain high employment is important in managing growth around the country, said Professor McDonald. ''The important thing is investing in smaller places you think are going to be successful.''
http://www.smh.com.au/national/canadas-experience-20100628-zf9r.html

Source of illustration.

Grandiose fantasies

Grandiose fantasies about filling up a continent to create a great and powerful nation are not exclusive to Australia. Demographic hubris is alive and well in Canada too, and even now, after the loss of 20% of our best farmland to development, with more than a thousand species at risk and an immigrant population that has, over the last two decades, generated four times as much GHG emissions as the Albert Tar Sands megaproject, there are people who believe in a Big Canada concept. Irving Studin of the University of Toronto is one of them.

Five Canadians Respond to Irvin Studin’s Proposal for a Big Canada

(Sources:) http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/todays-paper/Canada+should+100M+population+essay+says/3147990/story.html and http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Challenges+100M+populace+overwhelming/3163659/story.html

"Challenges of 100M populace overwhelming," The Ottawa Citizen, June 17, 2010

REPLIES:

Re: Canada should aim for 100M in population, June 13.

Irvin Studin's vision of Canada with a population of 100 million stirs the imagination in terms of our increasing our capacity for playing a role of importance on the world stage. Unfortunately, however, what might have been possible in Wilfrid Laurier's time a century ago is no longer realistic today.

For one thing, the ecological footprint of individual Canadians is much larger now and the environmental impact of such a massive increase in population would be overwhelming.

In terms of current immigration policies, it could also be extremely costly for Canadian taxpayers -- particularly because of our generous system of social programs that did not exist 100 years ago. It is estimated that the benefits newcomers now receive already amount to tens of billions of dollars a year more than what they pay in taxes.

A third and particularly challenging problem would be the integration into Canadian society of huge numbers of people from very different cultural backgrounds. With the connections they can now maintain with their former homelands through satellite TV, the Internet, inexpensive overseas travel, etc., assimilation of large concentrations of newcomers is increasingly problematic even today.

Nor would there be significant advantages in terms of economies of scale as a result of domestic population increases since we are now very much part of a global trading community.

Cities such as Toronto and Vancouver are already struggling to cope with rapidly increasing populations due to international migration and will hardly welcome the prospect of dealing with even faster growth.

Martin Collacott,
Vancouver
Collacott is a former Canadian ambassador.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Challenges+100M+populace+overwhelming/3163659/story.html#ixzz0rAvfb7qa
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saucy double entendre

While the saucy double entendre query of whether "size matters" may produce snickers from those in that frame of mind, the proposition that Canada's population should be encouraged through immigration to grow to 100 million is no laughing matter. "Size" does matter. And the consequences are profoundly far-reaching and important.

With a global population of 6.8 billion today and over 9 billion expected by 2050, what the planet - and that includes Canada, Mr Studin - does not need is more people; quite the reverse. Relentlessly expanding human numbers place ever more demands on the earth, leading to deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil exhaustion, vanishing fisheries, and increases in
greenhouse gas emissions. Typically, conflicts that dominate media headlines are caused and/or exacerbated by these and other associated resource scarcities. Today we face unprecedented global challenges including food and water shortages, a looming energy crisis and climate change, all driven by ever-expanding population increases. In Canada environmental degradation is a sad, growing fact of life. Prime farm land is being gobbled up, traffic congestion is worsening as our cities expand, and with urban sprawl air quality is deteriorating.

"Size" does matter, Mr Studin, and what we don't need is more and more people. If anything, we need fewer, since fewer translates into fewer problems, greater social justice, a better standard of living for everyone.

Look at Sweden, envied by many for its quality of life and for its outstanding role on the world stage, whether as peace keepers, aid givers (leagues ahead of Canada) and, with a population much smaller than our own, a voice in international fora that is listened to and respected as Canada's once was. Sweden's environmental record puts ours to shame. It's not
population "size" that gives Sweden its clout, any more than it is Bangladesh's 130 million that accounts for its more modest standing on the world stage. What enables Sweden to "punch above its weight" internationally is explained by factors of quality not quantity. It is those very qualities that Mr Studin and the rest of us should be addressing and not the simplistic, fallacious notion that a larger Canada would somehow automatically become a better, more influential Canada.

Clifford Garrard
VP, Population Institute of Canada
Ottawa

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Letters Editor,

RE: Canada should aim for 100M in population, essay says, June 13

The degree to which Irvin Studin is divorced from environmental realities is breathtaking, even for an economist. If most of Canada’s vast territory were habitable, people would already be living there.
Yet satellite images of the world at night shows that most of Canada is as dark as Antarctica— because much of it is about as habitable as Antarctica. Trying to put large numbers of people into such an environment would require tremendous expenditures of energy (transport of food, heating of homes etc) and result in a concomitant increase in our greenhouse gas production.

Most newcomers to Canada settle in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, and only a handful settle outside the 12 largest urban centres. Our large cities are already bursting at the seams with increasing congestion and smog and ever more stressed infrastructure, and have trouble dealing with their own wastes. Only about 5% of Canada’s land surface is classified as dependable agricultural land. Due to the massive population increases of recent decades, urban uses now cover
14,300 square km of dependable agricultural land. How smart is it to destroy one’s own food security?

There have been at least three reports that specifically looked at population growth in Canada from an environmental perspective (Science Council of Canada Report No. 25 in 1976; a now declassified confidential report to the Privy Council in 1991 called The environment: marriage between earth and mankind; the Healey report of
1997 on the ecosystems of the Fraser River). All documented the stress that population growth is putting on Canada’s agricultural land and ecosystems. The collapse of the cod fishery and the recent spectacularly poor run of salmon in the Fraser River support their conclusions.

In terms of consumption of resources, greenhouse gas production, and stress on agricultural land and ecosystems, Canada is already overpopulated.

Sincerely,

Madeline Weld President, Population Institute of Canada
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Letters Editor,

Re: Ian MacLeod - aim for 100 million

"At 100 million, this is among the most powerful and important countries in the world. And the world will takenotice." Phrased another way, "the sun never sets on the British Empire" or "the beginning of a 1000 yearReich".

Given the environmental and economic issues looming in this century, it is doubtful the world will take positivenotice of Canada's continuing on its current path of being the worst performer in carbon emissions of theKyoto 58 signatories save Saudi Arabia. Nor will our second worst per capita income growth in the developedworld over the past 4 decades draw much applause.

We are already taking ridicule from all sides for our worst-in-the-developed-world environmental performance andwe get singled out regularly on our poverty and productivity levels. Both of these failures are driven primarily byour policy of mass immigration, again, the highest in the world over the past 40 years.

In this century, the world will be looking to countries of whatever size which can deliver solutions notjingoistic slogans and fantasies of empire from a bygone era.

Yours truly, John Meyer

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How to make Canada "Big"

Letters editor, Ottawa Citizen

So Irvin Studin believes that by becoming a nation of 100 million people through immigration, Canada would becomea big player on the world stage. (Citizen June 13/2010)
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/todays-paper/Canada+should+100M+population+essay+says/3147990/story.html

Presently some 80 per cent of New Canadians lack the skills necessary to earn an income high enough to pay enoughtaxes to reimburse government for the services they consume. In fact, Professor Herb Grubel of Simon FraserUniversity estimated that by 2002 the cohort of immigrants who came in 1990 were imposing a staggering netcost of $18 billion a year. No doubt that figure would be much higher today.

Here's a thought. Rather than importing this fiscal burden, we take the 18 plus billion dollars that would havespent on immigration, and deploy it instead to development aid in developing countries made conditional onfamily planning. In that way we could help people where they are helped best---at home where they live, andthereby alleviate the conditions that motivate them to leave----the competition for land, water, food and otherresources made scarce by overpopulation. Imagine what clout and status such a policy would bring to Canada.Not only would we meet the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of our GDP on foreign aid, we over-achieve itby leaps and bounds and set an example for the rest of the world. And by doing so, we would also provide neededrespite to our prime farmland and endangered species habitat that have been bulldozed at an alarming rate tobuild housing for our runaway immigrant-driven population growth--- already the highest of G8 countries. A win-win proposition all around.

Forget the demographic ego-trip, Mr Studin. That is how to make Canada big and influential.

Tim Murray VP Biodiversity First

Vancouver a world in a city

It was a poignant homecoming. It has been over three years since I last visited Vancouver, “the big smoke”, the grand old lady who, despite our half-century-long relationship, still manages to surprise me. She’s had an expensive facelift recently, with multi-billion dollar monorails and Olympic venues complimenting the forest of new high rises which sprout up with astonishing speed. But the makeover only serves to highlight the wrinkles Vancouver can’t hide. The homeless, the addicted, the mentally troubled and the stressed-out masses who run faster and faster just to remain stationary.

…Lower Manhattan and Vancouver’s downtown peninsula share a problem that most North American cities would love to have – too much interest in new downtown housing. [But] it is important to look beyond the current housing bubble to ask whether the wholesale exchange of offices for condos is in the long-term interests of the economic health, even the urbanity and livability of these two cities.”

Vancouver ... doesn’t have another commercial core even while it wipes out the one it had in the name of developing a densely populated urbanist paradise (and we all know “paradise” is just another word for “too much of a good thing”). Source of inset and photos: PolisNYC

There is a reason why Vancouver is called “a world within a city”. Speak to any representative spectrum of people and you feel like you are watching a foreign travelogue. Especially on the gritty east side, where I grew up. I earned my degree in cross-cultural relations at school, at work and in the neighbourhoods I lived in. These were my people, the ones I still feel most comfortable with. The Portugese, the Italians, the Greeks, the East Europeans, the Chinese. Subtract their accent and their cuisine, and they are guys just like me. Their language deficits actually facilitated a deeper communication-- while Anglo-Canadians can find the words to obfuscate and beat around the bush, those with rudimentary English tend to be direct and blunt, employing expressive body language to fill in the gaps and emphasize their points. Our cultural differences were overshadowed by our common class affiliation, and on the picket line, we belonged to the same tribe. When I spend a day in East Vancouver, I feel like a man released from solitary confinement and given a day pass. Finally I get to speak to people with blood in their veins, not the Borg units in my artsy-fartsy soft-green haven who robotically regurgitate CBC-speak and live on the spoon-fed filtered information of Sierra Club newsletters. (God help them if their Mother Ship---CBC Pravda---went down and their umbilical cord was severed----the solitude of independent thought would fatally traumatize them. Imagine them having passed through a gauntlet of PC courses at college or university that screen out original or unorthodox thinking only to be suddenly left to think for themselves. Or worse yet, having to resort to candour.)

The things that immigrants say that ethnic leaders don’t

Each Vancouverite, it seems, is a library, and those from abroad consist of many volumes. I met several who had much to tell. Of the five people at the hotel desk in Richmond, four were of Chinese origin and one South Asian. The fast food outlets in Burnaby were the same, and half the tellers in my old bank branch likewise. I took every opportunity to speak with these individuals, to hear their story. One young man revealed that he had left Hong Kong some six years ago, and found life here marginally less frenetic than the city he left. The bank guard, a gentleman from India, told me how he struggled to provide for his family on the meagre salary his position afforded, and that his efforts to organize a union met with intimidation and threats of dismissal from the Royal Bank, the one that has apparently bought David Suzuki’s silence on immigrant-driven population growth. He told me how Vancouver had become progressively more congested, expensive and crime-ridden in the twenty years that he had lived here. Then I spoke at length with a shopkeeper from Iran, who once lectured in electronics at a prestigious London university, but found the promise of professional employment in Canada hollow. He made a point that most Canadians do not appreciate. While he has made it his mission to impress upon his sons that Canada and only Canada is their home and nation, he maintained that immigrants are too damn exhausted trying to establish themselves to learn much about the politics and culture of this country. Too often it is their children who act the only conduits to mainstream culture. It took him five years to get on his feet, and like most of us, his energy is too consumed fighting to survive debt and dispossession to be spent on any political or community activity. His take on multiculturalism was similar to mine. Exotic cuisines and splendid costumes do not disguise its motive: to provide a fig-leaf for the corporate goal of driving down labour costs by displacing relatively expensive indigenous workers with cheaper imported ones. “That is what immigration has always been about”, he declared in an accent that blended Farsi with a mid-Atlantic hybrid of Canadian and Geordie English.

Indebted consumers too busy and exhausted to jump off the treadmill

Mass immigration has also been about expanding the number of consumers. Especially the consumers of real estate. The shift away from “traditional” European sources was convenient for the big banks, who have set up shop in South Asian to cultivate customer loyalty before the customers emigrated to Canada. Financial institutions see the growing Asian demographic as superior savers and avid clients for hefty mortgages. Moreover, workers recruited from Europe had the bad habit of organizing unions or participating in them with vigour. Workers from undeveloped societies were more compliant. Their focus was on their extended families, not their civic responsibilities, and working at a minimum wage can suffice for someone who pools his income with a large extended family. A tenuous foothold in a fast food outlet or driving a taxi is seen an acceptable stepping stone on the road to eventual prosperity. Trouble is, while it once took five years for an average immigrant to earn the income enjoyed by the average Canadian, it takes ten years now. According to the Centre for Policy Alternatives, 38% of Vancouverites fail to achieve the wage level deemed necessary to eke out a semi-decent living. Coincidentally, 38% of Vancouverites are immigrants. Some are wealthy, but most are not.

Photo: Uknown homeless female Canadian citizen & Vancouver street resident.

Actions have recently been taken by the Vancouver Anti-Poverty Committee against the various levels of Government (provincial:BC Liberals & civic:Vancouver Non-Partisan Association (NPA)).Some media outlets and political pundits have gone so far as calling the APC's protests borderline terrorism.This is somewhat laughable.In fact I laud those people that take a stand against the proverbial 21st century Goliath,that being Government & Bureaucracy.
All that I know about this protest is that certain promises & prerequisites for staging the 2010 Winter Olympics have not been met or acknowledged (ie.low income & affordable housing).It could also be said that Vancouver has become a haven for construction of luxury apartment towers,whereas affordable housing has become non-existent.As of May,2007 these unfulfilled promises have given substantial weight for the protesters cause.
Posted by VancouverBlueEyedGuero at http://vancouverblueeyedguero.blogspot.com/

As labour historian Mark Lehrer of Simon Fraser University recently noted, over the last 35 years Canadians have had to work much longer hours for much less in real wages. The major inflationary factor has been the cost of housing. The cost of rents, mortgages and property taxes consume at least 40% of the average disposable income. The rising cost of living has driven married women into the workforce and put all of us on a treadmill. Feminists call this process "women's liberation", but in fact it has resulted in our collective, gender-neutral enslavement. Immigrants, 80% of whom are unskilled from "non-traditional" sources, and half of whom are functionally illiterate in both English and French, must run on this treadmill at an even faster pace for a longer time. Ironically, it has been immigrant-driven population growth that has inflated the housing costs which have forced them into a lifestyle of chronic workaholics, cloying to the company of other émigrés and relatives for mutual support. For this sin, they often reviled for their failure to “fit in”.

Immigrants want to assimilate, but are denied the time to do so

We have imported a slave labour class and condemned them for their inability or unwillingness to assimilate. But the truth is, the vast majority of these immigrants want to assimilate. They want to become Canadians and fully participate in our society---but their circumstances do not allow them to do so. Ethnic enclaves should be regarded more as life rafts than defiant fortresses for those who would resist acculturation to Canadian values. They are a testimony to economic apartheid, not divided loyalties. Scan the footage of the 2010 Winter Games, and you will notice that a great many of the spectators who waved Maple Leaf flags were New Canadians.

”Calif”, who came from Somalia some two decades ago, is a case in point. He virtually lives in his taxi, fighting Vancouver traffic all day and night in order to support his son, whose passion for our Canadian fixation, ice hockey, formed much of his conversation. His gratitude for my interest was witnessed by his refusal to accept payment for the ride. It would be perverse to regard him as an agent of our cultural marginalization and displacement rather than what he is---a victim of economically imposed isolation. He is a pawn, not a colonist. Meanwhile, ethnic power-brokers, the self-appointed advocates of people like him, suck from the tit of government grants and appointments advancing a cause----cultural sovereignty and fragmentation---which immigrants themselves do not want. Calif is a passenger from an African shipwreck who boarded a Canadian lifeboat that, despite its apparent size, is overloaded. He cannot be made a scapegoat for our misguided policy. Eighty percent of immigrants and most asylum-seekers are unskilled. They do not earn the necessary $25,000 in annual income to pay enough taxes for the government services they receive. As such, they impose a net fiscal burden on the rest of us. So who benefits? Those who must spend their lives on a treadmill to eke out an insufficient living? Or those who employ them? Get it?

Multiculturalism more the effect than the cause of atomization

Multiculturalism has brought us mixed results at best. Harvard's Robert Putnam and Monash University's Bob Birrell, among other academics, are right. Along with delectable food, entertaining music, and interesting people with fresh perspectives, cultural diversity weakens trust, solidarity and civic participation. No wonder Dr. William Rees has called for a more "integrative" model of multiculturalism that would foster the kind of societal consensus we need to face up to the daunting ecological challenges ahead. But whatever its vices or virtues, it must be seen, at least in Canada, as a symptom and not a cause. The cart, not the horse. A useful smokescreen for the corporate agenda. The game plan was always to displace an indigenous work force with a cheaper one, and to design laws that would make them feel more comfortable in the workforce and society at large---even if our legal traditions and rights were compromised in the bargain.

If our culture was that important to us, the way to defend it would have been to establish a tax regime that discourages "flipping" and real estate speculation, and in progressive labour laws, laws which would have robbed employers and their political handmaidens of the incentive to import a slave labour caste. As South African whites found, you can't have it both ways. You can't keep your culture safe behind gated communities but send out for cheap help from the untouchables. If you want local jobs to go local people, then pay more money for your home-delivered pizzas and TV repairs so that local people can make a reasonable living providing them. Otherwise, as they say on the eastside, “Shut--The--Fuck—Up”.

Vancouver left me with one overwhelming impression. That of a gateway city that showcases a sinister, time-honoured Canadian tradition. We have apparently effected a massive cultural transformation, but the diversity we behold is superficial. Beneath the rainbow of faces and the multitude of foreign tongues, there remains the same old culture of greed and exploitation. That is the common thread that runs through our colonial history. As Joel Grey sang in the hit musical “Cabaret”, money makes the world go around. Keep em’ busy competing for it, and the system can keep on runnin’ like the Energizer bunny in that TV battery commercial.

It must have been difficult to establish national solidarity in the Tower of Babel. No doubt tower dwellers wanted to connect with each other, but I guess somebody made too much money keeping them apart. And the rent was so high that at the end of their long day, they were too burned out working for it to attend any tenants’ rights meetings. I think the landlord called their predicament “cultural diversity”, didn’t he?

Tim Murray
May 9, 2010

'For many in this city that prides itself on its social contract, Bergman's horrifying death was the last straw. The government announced the opening of five emergency shelters, 14 new permanent public-housing developments and plans to purchase and revamp 25 inner-city hotels. The British Columbia parliament passed a law giving police more power to get endangered people into shelters.

But with the Olympic Games approaching, there were widespread predictions that the police, as is often the case in host cities, would round up the homeless in a final cosmetic hose-down before the dignitaries swept into town.

"I swear to you on my mother's grave, that is not going to happen," Lemcke pledged to an activist recently. "We will protect the rights of people down there, and the world will see what the world sees on the downtown Eastside. The world needs to know."'

What's interesting to me is that Vancouver's homeless problem is due to reasons similar to the US's:

Vancouver had little or no homelessness problem 15 years ago. But Canada, like the U.S., moved to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill in the 1980s -- and like the U.S., it provided few follow-up assistance programs. At the same time, the federal government got out of the business of building public housing, transferring responsibility to the provinces.

"People are kind of getting used to [homelessness], thinking, well, it's like prostitution or robbery, we're never going to be able to solve it," said Jill Davidson, the city's assistant housing director. "Well, we can solve it. Because we had it solved only 15 years ago."

That's an encouraging message, but it requires that we actually spend some money to make it happen. I've lived in two places where homelessness was an issue — Seoul, which didn't have many but where little was done to help, and Honolulu, where homelessness is pervasive, especially along the beaches and downtown — and it just seems like average citizens don't care about the people involved.' (Source of comments on homelessness and of photo of immigrants sleeping on church pews.)

Canada going Bush on abortion

America may have reversed the ruinous international family planning policy of George Bush, but Canada has re-installed it . Forget the ugly American, think now of the ugly Canadian. With a big fat black eye inflicted by our gung-ho, full-steam ahead development of the Albert tar sands project, we now have another black eye thanks to our refusal to fund abortions abroad. It was once said of Americans that they love democracy so much that they want to keep it all to themselves. American governments habitually supported third world dictators while boasting that their nation was the beacon of liberty.

Now Canada is about to deny women of other nations the same right that Canadian law affords women here---the right to a safe and legal abortion.

The CBC reported the Harper government’s policy position this way:

“The federal government has disclosed for the first time that Canada will not fund abortions in its G8 child and maternal health-care initiative for developing countries. Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced late in 2009 that Canada, as the host of the upcoming G8 meeting in June, would champion maternal and child health in developing countries. But until Monday, no one in the government had disclosed whether abortion would be included in the corresponding programs Canada supports. International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said the government would consider funding family planning measures such as contraception, but not abortion under any circumstances.” http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/04/26/abortion-maternal-health.html

Equation of death by abortion or death by hunger

So not only has the Harper government continued the fine Canadian tradition of dispensing foreign aid to developing countries without making it conditional on family planning, it has gutted family planning of an essential tool. Consider this coincidence. The global population grows by approximately eighty million people each year, and each year there are some 80 million unplanned pregnancies. The implication is clear. We need to get serious about family planning. The ideological and philosophical division over abortion is irrelevant. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that abortion consists of the murder of human life, “the pre-born”, according to the Christian “pro-life” terminology. What then is the death of children from the scourge of over-population to be termed? In a nation that is suffering from critical overshoot, the addition of a child that otherwise would have been aborted if abortion was a safe option would jeopardize the life of an existing child. Those who promote “life” in effect, by their opposition to safe abortions, are promoting death. Death by disease and hunger from over-taxed resources and over-crowding. One could conceivably accept that a foetus is a human life form, and regard abortion as the termination of that life. But in many contexts, killing is not murder, but homicide. And some kinds of homicide are justified. Especially homocide that results in less harm in the long run.

Madeline Weld, the president of the Population Institute of Canada, was moved to write the following letter in response to a story about this issue in the Ottawa Citizen:

Young soldiers sent to wars in overpopulated countries

“Canada is sending its young soldiers to fight and die in distant lands. Now in Afghanistan, and possibly in the (Democratic Republic of) the Congo next. These countries, and many others convulsed by conflict (Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan) can be viewed as failing states. A multitude of factors contribute to the failures, but one prominent factor common to all is rapid population growth. The average Afghan woman has 6.5 children. Afghanistan now has 28 million people and is projected to have 74 million people by 2050. On the first Earth Day in 1970, Afghanistan had 15 million people. In the Congo, each woman has 5.9 children on average, and the current population of 68 million is projected to be 148 million by 2050. In 1970, the population of the Congo was 22 million. The environmental degradation resulting from rapid population growth helps fuel the conflicts in all failing states.

In view of the above, the Conservative government's refusal so far to fund the International Planned Parenthood Federation, one of the most effective agencies in making contraceptives available to millions of women around the world, is counterproductive to our national security. In the same vein, the Harper government refuses to fund abortions in its G8 maternal health initiative and included contraception only after intense public and international pressure. Yet each year, 38% of pregnancies around the world, some 80 million, are unintended. Forty million result in abortions , of which 83% occur in developing countries. Unsafe abortions account for 13% of maternal deaths (70,000 women ) each year.

From any perspective, the Harper government's refusal to acknowledge the vital importance of contraception to women's health and environmental sustainability is destructive.”

Amen.
Tim Murray

According to an article by Brendan O'Neill in The Australian 13th March, animal activists are thought to be generally caring, ethical and "pure" people, but should remain basically maudlin and ineffective. However, if they actually become a political force they are accused of being a big "threat" and guilty of political blackmail and coercion!

Over one and a quarter million seal pups have been clubbed or shot to death over the last four years during Canada's annual seal slaughter.

Last week 30 Canadian senators, MPs and provincial ministers tucked into a meal of seal meat in the parliamentary dining room in Ottawa in protest against European opposition to Canada's annual seal cull. European Parliament made history when it voted overwhelmingly to ban trade in seal products.

Around 6000 Canadians take part in seal hunting each year along the Atlantic coast, and 25 per cent of their sales came from exporting products to Europe. Ottawa authorises the slaughter of 338,000 seals per season and says the survival of the species is not in danger. But it has faced fierce protests from animal rights groups who say the slaughter is barbaric.

Some fishermen believe that the seals preferentially dine on the nutrient-rich livers and bellies of the cod, leaving the rest to go to waste and requiring more fish to be killed to make a meal. Whales Wars' Captain Paul Watson says that's absurd, and has offered $50,000 to anyone who can provide video evidence of the practice. According to a study by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans cod are preyed upon by seals at various stages in their life cycle, and also squid, minke whales, halibut, and other cod.

Still, the presence of large apex predators like seals are typically a sign of a healthy and productive ecosystem, and human fishing activity – whether it targets North Atlantic cod or bluefin tuna – is the reason for the collapse of fish stocks worldwide.

If seals were taken out of the picture, the population of squid might well explode, just like giant jelly fish numbers have exploded due to warmer waters and overfishing, and other human activities that have opened windows of opportunity for them to prosper.

The ban of seal skins may have serious consequences for the living standards of some Canadian communities. However, the means, of killing new-born seal pups in front of their mothers, does not justify the end.

The population growth rate of Canada, largely due to immigration, is higher than most industrial countries, and automatically increases human consumption of natural resources. Their east coast cod fisheries and reduction of salmon fishing in Pacific waters no longer contributes adequately to the well being of 6.8 billion people world wide.  Seals are being made a scapegoats for over-eating fish, when it is humans who are guilty.

According to the article, the EU isn't alone. More nations and international institutions now lecture apparently inferior foreigners through the animal issue. Its aim is to assert its moral and ethical authority over what it clearly considers to be a less enlightened nation, and what better way to do that than through protecting cute seals from spike-wielding madmen?. So protecting seal cubs is more about political power and moral superiority than empathy and compassion? Really!

Seals and their pups do not owe swelling human populations a living, and this atrocity is morally unsustainable and unethical.   If animal activists just remained "pure", silent and innocent, then their cries of cruelty would remain ineffective.

Where did the photograph come from and was this really a bridge built for animals? Update inside. Original teaser: Majestic picture inside. They had to build the animals their own crossing (especially the elk) because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents. Pity Australia's developers and road makers seem to be too mean to do this kind of work for animals, although there are a few, small exceptions. Let's hope that Australia will follow this example. Unfortunately, on population policy, Canada is nearly as bad as Australia.

Elk used railway bridge.

Not a scam, but a reasonable mistake.

Futher update, from the wife of the photographer, Bob Peters.

On May 5, 2011, Mrs Peters wrote (see comment below article) that the photograph of the elks was first published on Picassa in 2006. "We did a little research of our own yesterday and we discovered that the bridge the elk were using is, indeed, a railway overpass. From the lower roadway, we couldn't tell that it isn't one of the animal overpasses Parks Canada has been building."

Scam?

The article was described as a scam by www.snopes.com, but it turns out that it was a simple mistake which illustrates, nonetheless, the principle that animals will use wildlife passes or whatever comes to hand, paw, hoof.
www.snopes.com has a page giving the background, which links to a much more interesting site with photographs of lots of different wildlife passes - here.

Below is an article where the true role of the bridge as a wildlife crossing was mistaken. We have republished the wonderful photo with the name of the photographer, Bob Peters. We are glad to be have the full story and to give due credit to Mr Peters. (Maybe he will send us some more wildlife photos one day!)

The bridge. Nice work, Canada !!

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
If You Build It, THEY Will Come...

This is the actual turn-off From Banff, Alberta, Canada to the #1 highway to Calgary .

Great picture isn't it? They had to build the animals their own crossing (especially the elk) because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents.

It didn't take the animals long to learn that this was their very own bridge!
And then you have some people saying 'Animals are stupid.'
Really....?

Candobetter Editor: This came to candobetter by email, but without the original author and photographer's name.
If you know them, please let us know and we will attribute the article and photos.

This comment, by Canadian Tim Murray, was originally posted to the ABC Background Briefing program, 'Housing for Millions'. In response to statements by a planner which implied that the doubling of Vancouver's population in 15 years had been accomplished without pain, he writes, "Vancouver is a success story only if compared to other major urban failures."

As a victim of the “Vancouver model”, and one of tens of thousands of its refugees, I was chagrined to hear that my growing necropolis of noise, congestion and crime had “doubled its population in 15 years without pain”. To whom, developers?

The people who, according to the 52 page MacDermid report, “Funding City Politics,” finance three-quarters of Canada’s urban election campaigns and buy the zoning they want? Or urban planners, the pimps of the Growth Management Industry who, notwithstanding the universal failure of ‘smart growth’ nostrums to protect Greenfield acreage from sprawl by packing more and more people into urban feedlots where more energy inputs are required to sustain them than rural dwellers?

Vancouver is a success story only if it is compared to other major urban failures, all of which are of a scale unfitted for a post-carbon world. Don’t take my word, ask two educated Vancouverites.

Dr. Michael Healey led a team of 23 researchers from the University of British Columbia in a $2.4 million federally commissioned study of the sustainability of Metro Vancouver and the valley it encroaches upon with relentless greed. They concluded that the area had almost three times too many people to be sustainable, and had an ecological footprint 25 times its size.

Urban streams are threatened with toxic runoffs, valley soils are overloaded with nutrients from intensive agriculture and septic systems leading to the contamination of the acquifer and rural waterways . Ninety per cent of Fraser River fish revealed at least one pathological abnormality.

And this was 12 years ago in a city which has been growing 3% per year. Humans are not fairing too much better either.

According to UBC Professor James White in his study of loneliness, Canadians who live in dense compacted areas—cities---have one third fewer “close” friends than rural residents and almost half of those interviewed declared that other people are not to be trusted. The data says that the last planner interviewed on this ABC radio show is dead wrong. Even the young generation would be happier living with the Brady Bunch than stuffed in an urban rabbit warren with his “Friends” . “Smart” growth? How dense can people be?

Tim Murray
November 24/09

Painting: John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1777)

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man in Courtenay, BC by three young white thugs was predictably amplified by a media eager to sound the siren of politically correct paranoia. There was racism under every bed! White racism that is. The other kind, of “black on white” assaults, which statistically is much the more common event in America, is not the subject of polite conversation. It is, after all, socially outrageous to speak the truth in Canada. Best to ban the publication of ethnic crime data to smother bigotry in its cradle. Then again, statistical profiling may very well do the opposite by revealing that crime is not the trademark of any ethnic community but only of a tiny and troubled minority within it. And that culture, not skin pigmentation, is a relevant factor, among many.

When the Mayor of Courtenay, Greg Phelps, failed to comply with a PC injunction to support a “feel good” anti-discrimination ‘protocol’ he found substantially meaningless, to address a problem too over-blown to warrant panic, an activist of self-righteous disgust raised the specter of rampant subterranean racism. You may not see it, but trust me, it’s here, there and everywhere! Courtenay may project the image of placid tolerance, but scratch the surface, and it’s a town in the Jim Crow South. “The mayor,” he said, was “just the tip of the iceberg. And it’s not about the three young white men either. There’s got to be a large peer group who shares their racist views. And don’t forget racism begins at home. These men obviously have parents. And these parents have peers too…” Implication? Let’s find them and root them out! I wonder if Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is included by the school board in the canon of student texts, along with the slogans of intolerant tolerance that the Ministry of Education mandates.

How inconvenient it was then, when it was later learned that apparently, the three aggressors subsequently attacked a Caucasian man. One wonders would words they applied to taunt him. Was it “fatso”, “gimp”, “four eyes”, “baldy” or “fag”? If so, would it indicate that they were motivated by a hatred of obese, handicapped, bespectacled, hairless or gay people? Or would it reveal that their despicable aggression was more accurately the result of three young punks spoiling for a fight and looking for any handle or epithet to goad their victim and get under his skin?

Media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury

This media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury recalls the outrageous claim made by the then Minister for Multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, that racism had reached such a fever pitch that ‘they were burning crosses in Prince George (BC).” That too was a ridiculous hyperbole and a blatant lie. Prince George was no more a racist hotbed than Courtenay is today. Nevertheless, these kind of charges serve a purpose. And what purpose do they serve? They stoke up a hyper-sensitivity not only about racism, but issues about that are peripheral to it, but not necessarily connected.

The bogeyman of rampant white racism creates an atmosphere of social intimidation that already greets anyone who dares to criticize the state policies of mass immigration and official multiculturalism. And as we have seen here and elsewhere, racial vilification laws and the revision of history are the logical complement to it. The need to suppress and punish odious views is thought necessary to smother any nascent challenge to the corporate agenda of growing the economy by growing the population. Hysteria inflates the constituency for more restrictions on contrarian speech and the ethnic cleansing of textbooks. Since Canada’s immigration selection criteria, in tandem with the second highest per capita immigration intake in the world, ensures that the country will evolve as Courtenay is evolving, into “a growing community increasing in diversity”, ethnic harmony must come at any cost.

Given that imperative, free speech can no longer be regarded as the very condition and pre-requisite of all other rights, but in the classic Canadian light, of merely one right to be weighed against others in determining the public interest.

"Cultural diversity" a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed

“Cultural diversity” is the clarion call of the liberal-left, but it is also the mask of the corporate elite, a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed---and the environmental degradation that comes with it. Big banks, developers and cheap labour employers fly its banner as a smokescreen to obscure their efforts to widen the labour pool and recruit more homebuyers. Immigration is openly promoted as a life-preserver for the shipwrecked home mortgage and home building industry by the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank and other credit institutions. Cultural diversity is the flavour of the month for an agenda that has no sincere interest in ethnic folk dances and exotic cuisines, but only in the making of money, and the fragmentation of a once cohesive society so that united opposition to its aims become less and less likely as the process unfolds. It is a kind of diversity that comes at the cost of both biological diversity---the staggering loss of species from human population growth in Canada----and intellectual diversity. A nation where people of different origins and hues can co-exist only if they sing the same tune, and the old slogans of “white” nationalism are supplanted by the cant of fake “diversity”. It is the ideology of current convenience, like the “Manifest Destiny” or “White Australia” of times past, to camouflage and disguise the continuing quest to dispossess whom ever happens to be the native population of its share of the economic pie.

For good measure, school textbooks, and history itself, has been revised to advance the new state religion of “Multiculturalism”—Canada’s Ingsoc. The falsehoods of the past have been replaced with politically correct falsehoods of the present. The Chinese head tax and the Exclusion Act, together with the Komagata Maru incident, now form the centerpiece of White Guilt 101, which never looks at the historical context of these events, but assigns retroactive blame on working people and politicians whose main objective was simply to defend wages and living standards from cheap imported labour. No mention is made, for example, that “Chinese exclusion” did not apply to students, diplomats or Chinese business men and their families. Some kind of ‘racism’ that.

Don't play into the PC game-plan

But making the foregoing case plays right into the PC game-plan. That is, draw us into a verbal maelstrom on race, away from the critical issue of sustainability. Away from what should be our primary concern, which is not about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon. The relationship between humans is secondary to the relationship of humans to nature and the resources it provides. HMCS Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier. It is not a vast and boundless land begging for more people to unlock a treasure trove of limitless resources, but a big “little’ land in ecological terms. A nation of frozen tundra, short growing seasons, mined out and marginal soil where 20% of its best farmland is paved over and the rest is under threat from continuing sprawl and the impending loss of oil-based fertilizers. A ship hurtling toward the iceberg of overshoot with politicians on the bridge who want to stop to pick up more passengers and encourage those already on board to have more children.

It is in this context that the crusade of “anti-racism” must be seen. It is the sand that is thrown in our face to get us off our game----stopping growth. And growth is no bogeyman. It is here and it is killing us.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 14/09

In Canada, as well as in Australia, the Government has kept open the immigration floodgate in the midst of the recession. One supposed justification is that this is all necessary so that their economy can be ready to take off when the recession ends. In reality, this is a self-serving lie to allow the profits that the Canadian growth lobby gains at the expense of their fellow Canadians, the environment, and the Third World, to continue.

Original article by Dan Murray published on Immigration Watch Canada on 11 Apr 09.

As hundreds of thousands of Canadians lose their jobs, immigration advocates have desperately grasped to find new arguments to make for maintaining high immigration. The latest is that Canada should continue its high levels so that our economy can be ready to take off when the recession ends. Of all the absurd immigration statements that have ever been made, this one has to take top prize.

To explain why, let's ask one basic question: If we continue to allow around 250,000 immigrants to enter Canada every year, what are these 250,000 new arrivals going to do when they get here?

Since October, 2008, around 400,000 Canadians have lost their jobs. Canada now has around 1.5 million unemployed. The outlook is not good for many others.

If, as most would expect, the new immigrants try to find jobs, but the number of jobs continues to decrease, it is inevitable that these new people are going to compete with our own unemployed for the few jobs that exist. And, incredible as it may sound, some employers will be required by federal Employment Equity law to hire them, particularly if they are visible minorities. That means that Canadian-born will not even be considered for many jobs.

But what about the new arrivals who can't find any employment? Well, the obvious answer is that these people will have to be supported by social assistance. What sense does this make? Is this the Brave New World (otherwise known in the Metro Toronto area as "DIVERCITY") that many Metro Toronto politicians think of as an achievement?

What happens if the recession goes on for a few years? Does that mean Canadian-born face even greater competition for employment? How long will it take to pay off the bills accumulated by subsidizing people Canada never needed in the first place? Furthermore, instead of making Canada prepared for the recovery, won't the bills really slow down the arrival of any recovery? And what will happen to our unemployed when the recovery comes? Will they be further ignored so that attention can be paid to satisfying the needs and recognizing the credentials of a new immigration tsunami?

It seems that Canada has come to a crossroads. It is time to start a series of cross-country town hall meetings. Let's arrange to have all the politicians and immigration advocates, who want to maintain high immigration, meet our unemployed in those halls. Let's close the doors. The immigration advocates, who have insulated themselves from the unemployed, can have a brief time to tell the unemployed why high immigration must continue.

Then, the unemployed can tell them what they think. Most Canadians would say that the result won't be pretty for the high immigration advocates. But most would say that this kind of a result is long overdue.

Original article by Dan Murray published on Immigration Watch Canada on 11 Apr 09.

The article below come from the Population Institute of Canada (www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca) although it has not yet been published on their website which is undergoing an upgrade. It has also been republished, with additional comments and introductions on the Ecological Crash blog (ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com). Footnotes, which may seem out of sequence in relation to the original source citations, and headings have been added - JS.

Canada's Policy of Mass Immigration: Hoary Myths and Unasked Questions

by Madeline Weld

Contents: #ImmigrationIntake">Canada's record high immigration intake, #CharacterLynching">The character lynching of Ontario's environment commisioner, #PoliticalParties">Mass immigration supported by all national Canadian political parties, #MythAndReality">Population growth and immigration: myth and reality, #PopulationAndEnvironment">1. Human population growth and the environment: globally and in Canada, #Pro-ImmigrationArguments">2. Arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy, #AssessmentOfArguments">3. Assessment of the arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy, #Conclusion">Conclusion.

#ImmigrationIntake" id="ImmigrationIntake">Canada's record high immigration intake

Per capita, Canada takes in more immigrants than any other Western country._#main-fn7">7 In 1990, Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government began to take in about 250,000 immigrants each year, regardless of economic conditions. This policy was continued by his successors, both Liberals and Conservatives. Canada has taken in over 4 million newcomers since it was initiated. It has had major impacts on our cities, on our society, and on our environment.

But try finding a good discussion about immigration. An actual discussion that is, where people assess immigration policies from different perspectives. The vast majority of media coverage treats our current policy of "mass immigration" as morally unassailable or as something we just have to accept, like the Earth orbiting the sun. No national leader has ever questioned the policy. At the time of writing, with an election in the offing, the leaders of 3 of the 4 national political parties(Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats) are calling for an increase in levels of immigration. The Green Party essentially ignores the issue; its leader says the Alberta Tar Sands are a much more serious problem, and has previously said that immigration produces economic benefits and promotes diversity.

Let's crunch a few numbers. While our intake of immigrants and refugees has been a bit less than 1% of the population (now 33 million), that figure is often cited as a target. In fact, Liberal immigration critic Maurizio Bevilacqua is proposing to immediately increase intake to 330,000 a year. An intake of 1% of the population leads to a doubling time of 70 years. That means that Canada's population would be about 66 million in 2078 and 132 million in 2148. How would the infrastructure of our cities cope with such a population and what would be the environmental impact?

#CharacterLynching" id="CharacterLynching">The character lynching of Ontario's environment commisioner

In our free and open society that prides itself on free speech, one shouldn't ask such questions. In his 2004-2005 annual report (released November 2005) and at a news conference relating to it, Ontario commissioner for the environment Gord Miller addressed the impact of 4 or 5 million more people in southern Ontario a few decades hence. "This is a vast number of people settling in an already stressed landscape. Will the resulting demands for water, sewer systems and roads leave our natural heritage areas intact? Will there be enough natural lands left over to support biodiversity?" his report asks. Miller was immediately accused of being anti-immigrant. He was asked by reporters whether he was calling for a curtailment of immigration. When the answer was no, he was asked whether he was saying that immigrants should move to northern Ontario (no), whether the era of the single family home is over and whether immigrants shouldn't dream of having their own house (no). Though he'd said earlier that it wasn't his job to dictate where people should go, after some hounding he told one reporter that immigrants could move to northern Ontario as a solution to the Greater Toronto Area's overcrowding. This clip was played multiple times on all local news channels. The CBC aired a response by city councillor Maria Augimeri calling for Miller's resignation. Said Miller, "If people actually read the report, [they'll find that] the only thing in it about immigration is that it's another element of population growth and that it's under federal control. That's it." _#main-fn1">1

The character lynching endured by Miller for daring to address the issue of rampant population growth in southern Ontario is revealing of the state of public discourse (if we can dignify it with that name) on immigration in Canada. First his accusers felt no obligation to offer a single fact-based refutation to the concerns he expressed. Second, he himself did not dare to suggest a reduction in immigration, although that would have been totally reasonable based on the environmental impacts of population growth described in his report. Third, if people from northern Ontario are leaving for economic reasons, does it make sense to send immigrants there? And fourth, if high population density has already caused extensive environmental damage in southern Ontario, is it a good idea to go down that route in northern Ontario which, based on climate and agricultural potential, is less able to support a large population?

#PoliticalParties" id="PoliticalParties">Mass immigration supported by all national Canadian political parties

The subject of immigration to Canada is addressed from an almost completely ideological and emotional perspective with no serious analysis of the real benefits versus costs to Canadians. It is based on the paradigm of perpetual economic growth and all tied up with our official embrace of multiculturalism and diversity as well as our feelings of guilt for real and perceived wrongs toward immigrants in the past.

Because the policy of mass immigration to Canada, pursued or endorsed by all national parties, supports a veritable industry and because this misguided policy has insinuated itself into our concept of ourselves as a tolerant society such that those who challenge it do so at their own peril, dots whose relationship to one another should be blindingly obvious remain unconnected in the media, in public discourse, and in government policies.

It is not only political parties who can't connect the dot of bringing in over one million newcomers every four years to the dot of trying to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas production. The silence of environmental organizations on the relationship between population growth in Canada and greenhouse gas production and other environmental effects has been deafening. In their mail-out literature soliciting donations, environmental organizations either completely ignore population growth as the driver of urban sprawl, habitat loss, species extinction, water shortages, gridlock, and other problems they are allegedly concerned with, or treat it as something inevitable. I have never received a letter from any organization questioning the government policy of relentlessly promoting the growth of Canada's population through immigration.

Evidence for this cognitive dissonance is provided by the fact that environmental organizations nominated Mulroney as Canada's greenest prime minister for his efforts to reduce acid rain and greenhouse gases, and ignored the fact that he initiated the "tap wide open" immigration policy that has been pursued to this day and has put the rate of Canada's population growth on the fast track _#main-fn2">2. Because we live in what I call an age of hysteria, I feel compelled to emphasize that the aim of this article is to analyze Canada's policies on immigration. It doesn't mean that I am anti-immigrant, that I want to entirely shut the door on immigrants and refugees, or that I think people from other cultures and ethnic backgrounds are less worthy as human beings. I am saying that, for about two decades, Canada has been pursuing a policy of increasing its own population by something approaching 1% each year through immigration, that this policy is having a major impact on Canada's environment, economy, and society and that it should be subjected to public scrutiny and discussion. Boosterism, emotional appeal, human interest stories, and unsupported statements about our need for immigrants should not be allowed to sideline a factual analysis on the impact of continuous very high levels of immigration on Canada.

#MythAndReality" id="MythAndReality">Population growth and immigration: myth and reality

What I propose to do with this analysis is to (#PopulationAndEnvironment">1) briefly look at the global and Canadian realities in terms of the impact of human population growth on resources and the environment, (#Pro-ImmigrationArguments">2) list the principal arguments used to justify Canada's current immigration policies, and (#AssessmentOfArguments">3) examine how those arguments hold up to scrutiny.

#PopulationAndEnvironment" id="PopulationAndEnvironment">1. Human population growth and the environment: globally and in Canada

Something is amiss with the state of planet Earth. Human activity is bringing about the sixth great extinction of species, with the current rate of species extinction estimated to be 1000 times above background level. About 50% of the world's forests have been cleared and 25% of coral reefs have been destroyed. Over one billion people lack access to clean water, a number that is anticipated to rise steeply. All the world's fisheries are being fished at or beyond capacity and the number of large fish caught has declined by 90%. Despite the fact that much more land has been put to agricultural use in recent decades at the expense of wildland, the number of people that must be fed per hectare of arable land has risen from 4 in 1950 to 8 in 2000 and is anticipated to be 14 in 2050. Humans have in some way impacted about two-thirds of the global land surface outside of Antarctica (and one could say that it has been impacted by climate change) and 41% of the oceans' area have been strongly affected by human activities relating to climate change, fishing, pollution and shipping. Human activity through the use of fossil fuels is driving climate change. We are running out of said fossil fuels and there is no alternative energy source with the density and versatility of oil. Yet, much like immigration levels to Canada, the annual increase of about 80 million people and the projected human population of 9.2 billion are accepted as an inevitability.

Traditionally, Canada has thought of itself as "underpopulated." The idea that a country or area is underpopulated is primarily a reflection of human anthro-pocentrism. The perception of Canada as underpopulated persists despite the fact that Canada's population increased six-fold during the twentieth century (compared with "only" a four-fold increase in the world population). People still refer to Canada's "vast open spaces" as if the best thing that could happen to these vast open spaces would be to fill them with people. But putting humans there would require a great deal of energy to heat their houses and to transport their food -- as little could be grown locally and hunting can support only a small population. Furthermore, immigrants don't go to those mythic vast open spaces -- almost all settle in Canada's twelve largest urban centres, and in particular in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. The habitable parts of Canada are already experiencing serious problems associated with their rapid unplanned growth: urban sprawl, loss of inner city greenspace, garbage disposal problems, traffic congestion, and smog. The Ontario Medical Association estimates that there are close to 6,000 premature deaths and 17,000 hospital admissions in Ontario each year caused by smog. Energy sufficiency in that province is also a concern and future shortages are anticipated.

Environmentally, the trends in Canada are going in the same direction as those globally. The most recent appeal (August 8, 2008) sent to me by Nature Canada says that during the last 40 years, the populations of common terns, boreal chickadees, and evening grossbeaks have dropped by 71%, 70%, and 78%, respectively. The letter also says that of the 428 species of birds that regularly breed in Canada, 60 are at risk of extinction. Overall there are now close to 500 endangered species (plants, fish, reptiles, mammals, birds) in Canada. But we're not just paving over wildlife habitat, we're paving over our own food supply. The amount of class 1 farmland in Ontario converted to urban use increased from 6% in 1971 to 11% in 2001, the comparable numbers in Alberta are 2% and 6%. Furthermore Alberta, which is now destroying its environment at a breathtaking pace in the mad extraction of tar sands oil, might be facing much more severe drought conditions through global warming and may lose much of the glacial melt that currently irrigates its agricultural land. Water shortages on the prairies caused $5 billion in economic damage in 2001. The western pine beetle has devastated British Columbia's forests and has crossed the Rockies into Alberta. The east coast cod fishery collapsed and other fisheries (fish and crustacean) in Canada are showing signs of stress. Climate change is anticipated to affect all aspects of the Canadian economy but to have the greatest impact in the north, where its effects are already being felt most strongly.

From an environmental perspective--Canadian and global--there is absolutely no evidence that Canada is underpopulated. Canada is one of the highest per capita users of energy and producers of greenhouse gases in the world. Bringing people to Canada from almost anywhere else in the world increases their carbon footprint even if their relative standard of living in Canada is low.

Canada's leaders know, or ought to know, that the pursuit of growth is harming Canada. In 1998, I came across a newspaper clipping from 1991 describing a confidential government document which said that environmental degradation in the Third World was so severe that North-South conflict over the issue is virtually certain, that global warming would have devastating consequences globally and in Canada, and that Canada could expect to have increasing numbers of environmental refugees. The article said the document was prepared by the "Canadian Intelligence Committee" with input from Environment Canada, the Defence Department, and External Affairs. My quest to obtain the document is a story in itself. After months of futile enquiries at the departments named, I was directed to the Privy Council Office. My Access to Information request was rejected by the PCO.

Following a complaint with the Information Commissioner's office, I obtained a copy that was about one-third blanked out. Fortunately I had a diligent officer, and finally, in December 2000, he obtained a copy of the document that was only about 10% blanked out. The confidential document was called "The environment: marriage between Earth and mankind" _#main-fn3">3. The letterhead on the first page (deleted in the first release) indicated it was from the Intelligence Advisory Committee. As my Information Commission officer had predicted, the report, while blunt, contained very little information that an interested person would not be able to find from publicly available resources, including the Internet.

The report states that "Controlling population growth is crucial to addressing most environmental problems, including global warming" (p. 9). The report says that with the emergence of global environmental problems which threaten their own self-interest, developed countries will have to engage in policies in which resources are transferred to developing countries to promote environmentally sound development. "This can be seen as one aspect of paying the bill for our past environmental damage caused by rapid economic growth" (p. 11). With respect to Canada, the report says that "It is, because of its harsh climate and long distances, the most energy-intensive of the free-market industrialized nations. Canada is endowed with vast water resources, but with 90 percent of its population concentrated within a band up to 100 miles of the USA border, water resources in these areas are already being utilized to their fullest.

Polluted water has become an everyday concern. .. Although Canada's population is not large in world terms, its concentration in various areas has already put stress upon regional environments in many ways. Canada can expect to have increasing numbers of environmental refugees requesting immigration to Canada, while regional movements of the population at home, as from idle fishing areas, will add further to population stresses within the country." There are chapters painting a bleak picture of the environmental situation in different countries and regions of the world.

There is no way that a reasonable person could interpret the report as promoting population growth in Canada, through immigration or otherwise.

#Pro-ImmigrationArguments" id="Pro-ImmigrationArguments">2. Arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy

The arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy are ultimately based on growth -- the sacred doctrine of our economic system. Like all sacred doctrines, the paradigm of perpetual growth which has guided Western economies for a few centuries is not receptive to challenges based on facts. So when in 1972 a document was published challenging the idea that there can be infinite growth on a finite planet, it was met with resistance, and ultimately sidelined. The document, commissioned by the Club of Rome, was called The Limits to Growth_#main-fn4">4. Using computers (a novelty at the time), Limits to Growth (LTG) examined the evolution of the whole world's economy using a mathematical model that kept track of a large number of variables and their interactions as the system changed over time.

Based on a number of scenarios with different assumptions, LTG's authors concluded that, unless specific measures were taken, the world's economies would collapse within 100 years (i.e, by 2072). About 10 million copies of LTG in 30 languages were sold. Despite creating a big stir, LTG's message was ultimately ignored. According to an article by Bardi (2008), the Italian economist Giorgio Nebbia identified four primary sources of resistance: those who thought that the message threatened the growth of their businesses and industries; professional economists who saw LTG as a threat to their dominance in advising on economic matters; the Roman Catholic church; and the political left in the Western world, who saw LTG as a scam of the ruling class_#main-fn5">5. The message of LTG was distorted and ridiculed. Conveniently for LTG's detractors, the oil crisis of the early 1970s, which helped get LTG's message across when it was first published, seemed to be over by 1980.

Canada's blind adherence to the growth doctrine is reflected in the fact that all administrations have ignored the findings and recommendations of the confidential document prepared for Mulroney's Privy Council. The denial of the concept of limits is reflected in the term "sustainable growth," a mutation of "sustainable development." One even hears the argument that the environment must be protected so that economic growth can continue. And one way to promote economic growth is with population growth. Since Canadian women are falling down on the job, producing on average only 1.5 babies, we are told that we have to turn to immigration.

The economic arguments for immigration are repeated often and emphatically and totally without analysis. They seem to be meant to scare us into acquiescence. How can we question Canada's immigration policies when our country is facing a looming labour shortage (the alliteration itself has a fine ominous ring to it). We are warned that by 2011, a few short years hence, ALL (!!) labour force growth in Canada will be due to immigration. Nobody explains why it is essential for the Canadian labour force to keep growing--it seems to be taken as a given that it will be a disaster if it doesn't. Another favourite bugaboo is Canada's aging population--soon there will too many old people supported by too few working people. The buzz word here is the dependency ratio, the number of people not working (including children and retirees) over the number of people in the workforce.

#AssessmentOfArguments" id="AssessmentOfArguments">3. Assessment of the arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy

The widespread perception that there would be no population growth in Canada without immigration is false. Women of the baby boomer generation have small families, but they constitute such a large cohort that population growth in Canada would continue until 2030 in the total absence of immigration. Of course, the rate of growth would be much lower. And that's not good enough for developers, bankers who like mortgages, and others who benefit from growth.

No one says specifically that more people would benefit the environment. When our alleged need for immigrants is being promoted, the arguments given are always economic ones or fuzzy ones, like promoting diversity. The economic arguments implicitly assume that the economy is separate from the environment. In fact, as pointed out by economist Herman Daly, it is a "wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." But if we go along, for the moment, with the fiction that we can "save the environment" in the face of continuing population and economic growth, how do the economic arguments stack up on their own merits?

I think that nobody would deny that the Fraser Institute, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is focused on the economy. It may therefore come as a surprise that some of the best arguments demolishing the reasons usually offered to justify Canada's very high intake of immigrants have come from the Fraser Institute. Fraser Institute Fellow Martin Collacott has written a number of papers on Canada's immigration policy, including "Canada's immigration policy: the need for major reform" (2002) and "Is there really a looming labour shortage in Canada, and if there is, can increased immigration fill the gap" (2003). (Papers from the Fraser Institute can be found by following the links at www.fraserinsitute.org.)

The following are some of the relevant pieces of information assembled by Collacott in his papers:

• a 1991 study by the Economics Council of Canada found that in the past century, the fastest growth in real per capita income occurred at times when net migration was zero or even negative;
• a 1989 report issued by Health and Welfare Canada called Charting Canada's Future noted that, according to the OECD, there was no correlation whatsoever between population growth and economic growth in its 22-member community;
• a 2000 United Nations study concluded that immigration can only serve as a tool to arrest the aging of the population if carried out at levels that are unacceptably high and ever-increasing;
• Statistics Canada released 2001 census data in July of 2002 showing that the population was aging and that immigration, even at very high levels, would have little impact on the average age of the population;
• a 2002 survey by the Canadian Labour and Business Centre found that only a very small percentage of managers and labour leaders in the public and private sectors regard the hiring of foreign-trained workers as very important in resolving the problem of a specific shortage of skills from time to time, instead they looked overwhelmingly to solutions involving the existing workforce, such as upgrading the skills of current employees, hiring young labour market entrants, and phasing in retirement policies.

Things have not changed since the above studies were published. According to Statistics Canada's analysis of the 2006 census, the median earnings of Canadians (in inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars) have increased by 0.1% since 1980_#main-fn8">8. Not only that, but the earnings of the poorest fifth fell dramatically in that time, by 20.6%, while the top 20% of earners saw their incomes rise by 16.4%.

The finding that population growth through immigration does not translate into economic benefits was also made by a cross-party committee of the British House of Lords (Lords Economic Affairs Committee), which published its findings in March 2008. The House of Lords' panel said that the British government's claim that immigrants were boosting the economy was a misleading measure, and that a better one would be the impact on income per head of resident population. The Committee said that some groups, including the low-paid, young people seeking jobs and some ethnic minorities may have suffered because of competition for work from immigrants willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions (which is in agreement with US economist George Borjas, who estimated that immigration reduced US workers' salaries by 5% in 2006). The House of Lords Committee also predicted that a continuation of the high rate of immigration would result in a 10% increase of house prices over what they would have been without immigration by 2028._#main-fn9">9

In June of this year, I attended a one and one-half day conference on immigration held in Montreal by the Fraser Institute. Virtually every paper presented challenged the Canadian government's immigration policy. Several speakers presented data showing that overall immigrants receive in services and benefits far more than they pay in taxes. (Milton Friedman's remark "Mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible" was cited by at least 2 presenters.) Economist Herb Grubel of Simon Fraser University and a Fraser Institute fellow calculated that the 2.9 million immigrants who came to Canada between 1990 and the end of 2002 received $18.3 billion more in government services and benefits in 2002 than they paid in taxes. Other presentations addressed the fact that, despite the government's economic arguments, only 20% of immigrants are selected on the basis of their skills_{#main-fn10">10}, the remainder are family class, refugees and humanitarian cases. Six million offspring of the boomer generation will soon be entering the labour market and may be facing stiff competition for jobs. In big city ridings, members of parliament spend most of their time dealing with immigration questions.

To keep the dependency ratio at 0.2 (retirees/workers), one would need to raise the population to 165 million by 2050, or take in 7 million immigrants each year. Productivity will only increase if immigrants are more productive than the existing population, but recent immigrants have been less productive. The performance of recent immigrants has been deteriorating according to the 2006 census and recent cohorts of immigrants haven't been catching up to native born Canadians in their earnings. This could lead to the creation of an economic underclass.

#Conclusion" id="Conclusion">Conclusion

One question that we should be asking is: Is all this growth really improving the lives of Canadians? The economic arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy are contradicted by every major study and by census data. A large percentage of immigrants from recent decades have not succeeded economically. Only 20% of immigrants are selected on the basis of their skills (most are family class and the definition of family is very extensive indeed). Nevertheless, by seeking to attract the most educated people from developing countries, we deprive those countries of the people that could best promote development and in whom they may have invested many resources (eg. by subsidizing their education). Canada's immigration policy has an adverse impact on the environment, not only from the paving over of wildland and farmland in Canada but from the net increase in global greenhouse gas production caused by moving people to Canada, because in Canada, their greenhouse gas production will almost always increase.

It is clear that Canada's immigration policies are not designed for the benefit of ordinary Canadians, who are not even considered to be "stakeholders" by the government. Canada's immigration policies are beholden to the growth_{#main-fn11">11} and immigration industries and designed to get the immigrant or visible minority vote in swing ridings in urban areas. There is also credible evidence that our immigration policy is influenced by organized crime. Donna Jacobs of the Ottawa Citizen describes the struggles of diplomat Brian McAdam to expose infiltration and corruption at the Canadian consulate in Hong Kong in the early 1990s _#main-fn6">6. The consulate was far too cosy with members of organized crime gangs connected to the Chinese Communist party, the Triads, who were buying visas and smuggling their members to Canada. McAdam's reports to Foreign Affairs were ignored, and he was eventually called back to Canada and eased out of his job. A joint CSIS and RCMP investigation into Chinese criminals and the Communist government's program of acquisition, espionage and political influence, called Operation Sidewinder, was launched in 1995. It supported McAdam's allegations. A few days after Sidewinder's final report was sent to CSIS in 1997, Sidewinder was shut down. CSIS disbanded the team and directed the investigators to destroy every document. The Sidewinder team destroyed hundreds of pages of McAdam's research, his books and his reports. The Sidewinder team leader was demoted after submitting the report and resigned.

So far, immigration has never been a major issue in Canada. Despite the evident environmental impact of Canada's immigration policy, the lack of economic success of many newcomers, and the appearance of what might be called an economic underclass, Canadians have not yet begun to ask serious questions of their politicians nor to demand a more intelligent and objective coverage from their media. It is time they woke up.

See also: "How skills migration has denied careers to Canadian engineering graduates" of 8 Feb 09, www.immigrationwatchcanada.org, and Immigration Watch Canada articles on this web site.

.

---

Madeline Weld is a toxicologist evaluator at Health Canada (Food Directorate). She is president of the Population Institute of Canada, an organization that seeks to raise awareness of the impact of human population growth on Earth and promotes the development of ethical policies for population stabilization and reduction (www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca).

References :

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">(1) #main-fn1-txt">↑ Gord Miller, Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, 2004-2005 Annual Report, Planning our Landscape. The media reaction was described by Andrew Athanasiu (Gord Miller says GTA can't take more folks; why is he getting trashed?) in News This Week, vol. 25, no. 11, 28 November 2005.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">(2) #main-fn2-txt">↑ CTV Mednews Express. 2006. Mulroney praised for his green record as PM. (April 20). CTV.ca

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">(3) #main-fn3-txt">↑ Intelligence Advisory Committee (Government of Canada). 1991. The Environment: Marriage between Earth and Mankind. CIE [Canadian Intelligence Estimate] Chapter 11, May 1991. (This CIE comprises a series of papers previously issued individually by the IAC.) The article that describes it is by Paul Mooney, "The polluted third world," The Ottawa Citizen, 24 June 1991.

#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">(4) #main-fn4-txt">↑ Meadows, D.H, D.L. Meadows, J. Randers, and W.W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.

#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">(5) #main-fn5-txt">↑ Nebbia, G. 1997. Futuribili, New Series, Gorizia (Italy) 4(3): 149-182. Cited by Ugo Bardi, in "Cassandra's curse: how 'The limits to growth' was demonized", posted online 9 March 2008 on The Oil Drum: Europe (europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551).

#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">(6) #main-fn6-txt">↑ Jacobs, D. 2008. "The price of fighting for what you think is right" (18 August, p. A2) and "One man's China crusade" (25 August, p. A4). The
Ottawa Citizen.

Footnotes (added to original document on 11 Apr 09)

#main-fn7" id="main-fn7">(7) #main-fn7-txt">↑ Possibly this dubious honour may now be held by Australia, and not Canada. This would be a result of Labor Immigration Minister Chris Evans having, in May 2008, ramped up immigration to levels even higher than the record levels reached by the former Howard Government. In spite of a much ballyhooed reduction of skilled immigration by 18,500 places on 15 Mar 09 immigration levels have been left at record levels as noted by Andrew Bolt ("What cut in immigration?" of Monday 16 Mar 09).

#main-fn8" id="main-fn8">(8) #main-fn8-txt">↑ I would personally even dispute that there was a 0.1% per capita growth in income. These figures are based on two clearly wrong assumptions: (1) that all monetary transactions (e.g. to pay for an alarm system to protect from burglary) are necessarily indications of greater material prosperity and (2) that only activities that result in monetary transactions are necessarily beneficial.

This is addressed by Geoff Davies in Economia (2004) p23 where he discusses the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure devised by Simon Kuznets in the 1930's for use by the administration of the US President Roosevelt . Kuznets, himself, subsequently complained that the GDP was misused by economists for the reasons mentioned above. In reality, if we discard those assumptions, and come up with more accurate measures of human prosperity then we will most likely find that the prosperity of Canadians on average, let alone for poorer Canadians has declined. If, to the contrary, it can still be shown that true average prosperity has coincided with population growth, it will almost certainly have been as a consequence of the accelerated destruction of our natural capital and, hence, will be paid for by future generations. See also article "Living standards and our material prosperity" of 6 Sep 07 by James Sinnamon in Online Opinion. - JS

#main-fn9" id="main-fn9">(9) #main-fn9-txt">↑ See House of lords tells UK government to limit immigration of 11 Apr 08, House of Lords' immigration report "forgets environment" of 2 Apr 08 based on British Optimum Population Trust media release of 1 Apr 08. The second, whilst acknowledging the value of the House of Lords report, is still critical of the report's shortcomings in its treatment of the environment.

#main-fn10" id="main-fn10">(10) #main-fn10-txt">↑ Of course, this argument can cut both ways. As acknowledged further on in this article, the goals amongst immigration proponents can be mutually contradictory, or at least appear to be. Some are able to profit at the expense of the rest of society regardless of the qualities of the immigrants, whilst others attempt to use skilled immigration as a means of shifting the costs of training onto other countries, often poor third world countries.

An example of the latter is the Queensland state Government which infamously poaches qualified professionals, particularly medical professionals, from other countries. This was referred to in "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future".

An example of the former thinking is to be found in the transcript of "Paying to be permanent" the episode of 17 Aug 08 of the ABC Radio National's Background Briefing. In this program, Polish born immigration proponent, Sev Osdowski, acknowledged that he considered the mismatch between skills and immigrants irrelevant. He said:

"We are really talking about the size of the population of Australia, whether it should be around 10-million as some people close to environment movements have suggested, or 20-million as it's about now, or maybe 50-million as some people are proposing. So all the other battles are really proxy battles. The focus is about the size of Australia's population for the future."

#main-fn11" id="main-fn11">(11) #main-fn11-txt">↑ See also "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09, republished on Online Opinion.

A report by Engineers Canada (Ingeniéurs Canada) found that in 2006, well before the current economic crisis, Canada's seemingly thoughtless policy of acquiring practically unlimited numbers of engineers from all over the world had caused a massive glut of engineeers in Canada. As a consequence, "Two thirds of persons with a Canadian university degree in engineering were employed outside engineering occupations." Yet, in spite of this and in spite of the global financial meltdown, Canada, like Australia, continues with its high immigration program.

The following article was originally published as "New jobless figures should drive the last nail into high immigration's coffin" on 6 Feb 09 on www.immigrationwatchcanada.org.

New jobless figures should drive the last nail into high immigration's coffin

On Friday, February 6, Statistics Canada reported that Canada had lost 129,000 jobs in January. The big question all Canadians should be asking is this: What sense does it make for Canada to continue to bring in 250,000 regular immigrants each year and to allow an additional 200,000 temporary foreign workers to work here when unemployment in our own population continues to rise? As some Canadians know, Canada has the highest net per capita immigration intake of any country in the world. If Ottawa applies the most elementary logic, the Stats Can news should be all the evidence that MP's of all stripes need to drive the last nail into high immigration's coffin.

Undoubtedly, Canada's immigration industry will find excuses to maintain Canada's high immigration levels. But even the most gullible Canadians should now be demanding a dramatic cut to immigration. If politicians at all levels do nothing to fulfill their moral responsibility to this country's unemployed, then those politicians are abdicating their primary responsibility and deserve immediate censure from Canada's unemployed and the rest of the population.

Engineers Canada, the national organization of provincial and territorial associations of engineers, has recently completed one phase of a labour market study which adds further evidence to the argument that Canada can satisfy most of its labour needs within the country. Engineers Canada partnered with the Canadian Council of Technicians and Technologists to do this study.

Here is a summary of findings of recent labour market research entitled "Engineering And Technology Labour Market Study" . The research was done by Engineers Canada. We have provided "Editor's Notes". Paul Martin, a professional engineer and a former board member of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, an engineering advocacy group, has contributed substantially to these notes.

The following three points are findings which Engineers Canada has extracted from Canada's 2006 Census.

(1) "Two thirds of persons with a Canadian university degree in engineering were employed outside engineering occupations. For those who obtained their degree outside of Canada, the proportion was over 80%."

Editor's note : These startling figures indicate a serious over-supply problem. As of 2008, Canada had more than 160,000 licensed professional engineers, and a great many more engineers without licenses. Here is an example of how over-supply occurred:

The Engineers Canada study cites Statistics Canada figures which show that in 2001, 15,863 immigrant engineers entered Canada. In the same year, Canadian universities graduated 8733 engineers.

This total of 24,596 engineers could not be absorbed by the labour market. The Engineers Canada study comments: "It is not surprising that in these circumstances both recent immigrants and many recent graduates in Ontario experienced considerable difficulty in finding employment commensurate with their training." Furthermore, 2006 Census data indicate that there was already a surplus of Canadian-educated engineers relative to the needs of the labour market! This surplus, not "credential recognition", is the issue that the federal and provincial governments should be dealing with. Canada's primary responsibility is to the engineers it has educated, yet Ottawa and the provinces act as if their duty is to supply employment for engineers and other skilled workers from everywhere.

(2) "Individuals who obtained their engineering degrees outside Canada accounted for approximately 20% of all employment in engineering occupations. For technicians and technologists, the proportion was 6%, although this excludes persons in technology occupations who have non-Canadian educational qualifications in a field other than engineering or technology (e.g. general science)."

Editor's note : This quotation may shock many. They will be further shocked to read another part of the report which says that around 45% of all of the engineers in Canada are immigrant engineers. The Engineers Canada report further states that "The (2006) Census data also strongly suggest that a significant number of persons with a university degree in engineering were working in occupations for which they were over-qualified."

Again, the point to be made is that federal immigration policy has created a situation where Canada has imported a large number of engineers (and other skilled workers) that it does not need. This has occurred because MP's and others have assumed that Canada should collect all the engineers it can find and that it can find employment for them. The point is that there are limits to the ability of Canada's economy to absorb engineers or any other skilled group. In the desperate search for immigrant votes and in the face of threats from Canada's immigration industry to maintain high immigration, MP's have blamed this surplus problem on provincial certification agencies. The truth is that MP's are the ones who created this problem and it is high time that they take responsibility for their actions.

(3) "Approximately 30% of persons classified by the Census as working in engineering occupations were not university engineering graduates. The proportion is high and warrants consideration by regulatory bodies."

Editor's note : This should be even more shocking. Ottawa and the provinces should take careful note of this point. Employers are working under exemptions to the licensure rules and are hiring non-engineers because they are cheaper. For far too long, both Ottawa and the provinces have acted as if their duty is to pressure regulatory bodies to approve the credentials of immigrant engineers as quickly as possible and as if Ottawa and others are acquiring superior moral status by doing this. The point is that neither Ottawa nor the provinces give adequate consideration to whether immigrants who claim to be qualified are truly qualified.

The following are projections made by Engineers Canada :

"Short term outlook for 2008-2010" :

(1) "DEMAND : Overall employment demand for engineers, technologists and technicians was expected to increase by 3.6% per year between now and 2010. The down-turn in the U.S. and its spill-over effects in Ontario and Quebec will bring this projection down. Survey data suggest that hiring will be weighted to technologists/technicians."

Editor's note: When the down-turn prediction was made, the extent of the down-turn had not been anticipated. The additional large question that has to be asked is this: With the loss of additional engineering jobs, can the supply of Canadian graduates satisfy most future demand for engineers?

(2) "Supply" :

(a) "Graduates--Since 2002, new enrolments in engineering and technology have declined. "

Editor's note : It is no co-incidence that the huge inflow of immigrant engineers in 2001 had a significant effect on engineer enrolments after 2001. As other countries such as Australia have noted, unnecessary high immigration of skilled workers often brings dim employment prospects to young people and discourages them from entering professions they have dreamed of entering. Once again, it should not have to be said that Canada's primary responsibility is to its own people and its immigration policies should state that responsibility.

(b) "Immigration : Immigration of engineers peaked in 2001. In 2001 and 2002, more than two thirds of increases to supply in Ontario were derived from immigration and less than one-third from new graduates. Since 2001, owing to crowding in the Ontario labour market, there has been a decline of almost 70% in immigration of qualified engineers."

(3) "Outlook" : Western Canada: significant excess demand ; Ontario: excess supply ; Quebec : better than Ontario, but will drift into excess supply ; Atlantic : Excess demand conditions will abate by 2010.

Editor's note : Recent developments in the entire labour market have probably significantly diminished demand all across Canada.

(4) "Skill Requirements And The Nature Of Shortages" : "A serious skills shortage can, and often does, co-exist with serious unemployment."

Editor's note : This statement may not seem to make sense. However, employers regard skill shortages and labour shortages as 2 different things. To employers, the word "skills" means both technical university training and non-technical qualities such as business/communication attributes. Therefore, the phrase "skills shortages" means the absence of people with these qualities.

"Labour shortages" mean an actual insufficiency of potential skilled workers. Employers may declare that skill shortages exist, but there may be no real shortage of job applicants with the formal educational qualifications needed. Rather, employers mean that they are unable to recruit employees with the requisite non-technical qualities. Often, this means that employers are addicted to not having to train, develop and mentor their employees to the extent that they once did. It also means that employers hope the public will pick up the costs of educating Canadian engineers and also of permitting the immigration of vastly more engineers than the economy could possibly use!

Paul Martin's final Comment on the engineering labour issue will provide even more shock:

"While sitting on the steering committee for Engineers Canada's "From Consideration to Integration" project, I was appalled to repeatedly hear engineering referred to as "the new liberal arts education" by senior members of the engineering regulatory and university educational community. It would appear that these people no longer see engineering education as training for a profession, and hence feel no responsibility to ensure that we educate numbers of engineers even approximately matched to our labour market needs. While it is true that some people go into engineering in university with no intention of ever pursuing engineering as a career, I'm sure that a great many would turn tail and run to other programs if their dean came out with such a statement to them in their first year! The fact that less than 30% of Canadian graduates currently bother to go on to professional licensure, and that Ontario has for many years granted more licenses to foreign-trained engineers than to engineers who gained their education in Canada, should give any prospective student of engineering serious reason to reconsider their choice of the educational program they have enrolled in."

---

The Engineers Canada report is entitled : Engineering and Technology Labour Market Study--The Results So Far : An Interim Report, November 2008

The report was funded by Human Resources and Development Canada (HRDC) as a part of phase III of Engineers Canada's "From Consideration to Integration" (FC2I) project.

It is downloadable as a PDF file (746K) from www.engineerscanada.ca.

Paul Martin has extensively researched the labour market for engineers. His work provides many valuable insights and is available at: www.geocities.com/martinsmoltenmetal

Economic house of cards, ecological devastation

That the home building industry is the prime mover and catalyst of our ecological ruin was never more clearly illustrated than by statements recently made by University of West Florida economist Rick Harper, director of the UWF’s Haas Centre for Business Research. Harper argued that the real estate market would never recover from the current recession until population growth soaks up existing housing inventory and prices consequently begin to appreciate. “If we don’t stimulate population growth…we are going to take 10 years or more to recover from this recession”, he said, “we’ve had a huge overbuilding of the housing sector, there was just too much investment in residential structures.” He therefore advocates an easing of immigration standards to allow more people of higher education and net worth into the country.

Bob Carr

The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades.

Bush administration

The Bush administration followed a similar course. By outsourcing decent working class jobs and tolerating the blatant mass employment of millions of low wage “undocumented” service sector workers they not only relegated 5 million Americans from the middle class but eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector. Land speculation and homebuilding assumed a greater importance in this new economy with a hollow core. Like a drug addict who has forsaken proper nutrition for energy, the new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix (and birth incentives to a lesser degree) for energy.

One fix never enough for an addict

But each succeeding fix requires greater injections to achieve the same jump start, and the cycle of boom and bust plays out with greater and greater consequences. More severe labour shortages, that call for more foreign injections, and the devastating ecological results, largely unsung, manifested in massive losses in prime farmland at a frightening pace and a cost in wildlife habitat that lies at the perimeter of expanding urban boundaries. Not to mention the greater energy consumption, waste disposal and pollution involved with never-ending urbanization. North American studies reveal that at most, rational land use planning could only mitigate half these problems. The other half are the inevitable consequence of largely immigrant-driven population growth.

Never enough fuel, never enough money

But real estate development itself requires fuel. It requires a favourable interest rate climate, and local governments bought and paid for together with their planning departments, staffed with growth managers who can converse in “greenspeak” and greenwash to assuage anxieties about their development plans. And of course it requires home buyers. People. The more the merrier. And where do people come from? Through the airport or the maternity ward, and the federal government is the gatekeeper at the first and most important port of entry, and quite influential in manipulating the volume at the other port too. Home buyers, in turn, have a requirement too. Financing. This holds the key, at least in Canada, to the demographic pyramid scam of the immigrant-propelled economy. For the big Canadian banks and credit institutions are not only the essential lubricants of home purchase and land development, but potent immigration lobbyists and influence peddlers as well.

Royal Bank of Canada

In fact the president and CEO of Canada’s dominant Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 2008 reiterated the position taken by an October 2005 RBC report that the government should hike its annual immigration intake from its present approximately 240,000 to some 400,000. No doubt he would be speaking on behalf of his competitors in that ambition. What is most impressive about Mr. Gordon Nixon’s political strategy is that is conducted on a broad front. RBC realizes that the federal government may be the gatekeeper, but the environmental movement is the barking dog which must be silenced if the gate is to be left open wide for the avalanche of consumers that it wants.

Financing entropy

So RBC laid out a Machiavellian plan. To cover their quest to underwrite the conversion of Canada’s best farmland to sprawling subdivisions and hundreds upon hundreds of species at risk to extinction in the process, they concocted an “Environmental Blueprint” that would signal to the environmental movement that “(they) support environmental sustainability”. They declared that would not for example“engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests”. But the trees of urban Canada were presumably fair game, as are the rich fields of BC’s Fraser Valley and the Class 1 farmland of Ontario that is being developed at a pace of perhaps 60,000 acres per year. One might think that this kind of ecological damage, not to mention this threat to our national food security, would meet with the outrage of our environmental NGOs. Apparently RBC thought so too. That is why they bought their silence.

Silencing the barking dog

To prove their determination to “direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes”, they arranged to steer money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) for each client who switched to electronic bank statements. A cute deal for both parties. NCC, always thirsty for dough, got a corporate bag man, and RBC got to wear a green cloak over its mercenary endeavours. It was not done for the environment, it was a strictly commercial transaction, ecological dispensation for suburban sprawl in return for cash and acquiescence.

Failure of environmental flagships

Many of us have been dumbfounded by the failure of flagship environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club of Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation to publicly contest the federal government’s mass immigration policy. NCC not surprisingly has been silent too, even though population growth is an obvious culprit in habitat loss. How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.

Ideological myopia and donor bases

The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good Doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr. Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialized countries are already overpopulated.

Demographic lockjaw

The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the BC Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organization. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.” Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the raison d’etre of the organization, and the environment itself. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.

Arguably then, homebuilding is not the prime mover of ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the ‘green’ watchdogs who haven’t barked because big money has thrown them a bone.

Tim Murray,

Quadra Island, BC

December 29/08

The Elephant In The Room

Written by Norm Smith, Mayoral Candidate for the Save Chilliwack Citizens Alliance.

l have received phone calls and emails recently from residents who are questioning the validity of my position, stated on page one of the Save Chilliwack website, that we are facing a water crisis due to runaway growth, and my position that we cannot sustain our official community plan without depleting the Sardis-Vedder Aquifer.It is appropriate to issue a press release regarding the facts concerning our City's dwindling water supply, and the water crisis we are facing if Chilliwack continues with it's pro-growth "Official Comunity Plan".

I stand by these assertions, and I cite as evidence information published on the City of Chilliwack's official website.

The city admits "We are approaching our limit for water withdrawal from the Sardis-Vedder aquifer and will have to seek out new sources of water for the future. These new sources will be more expensive to develop and operate and will not be the same quality as the Sardis-Vedder aquifer."
www.chilliwack.com/main/page.cfm?id=1445

Elk Creek was generally viewed as our city's "backup water supply" but it is already being diverted to accomodate the vast commercial and residential development plans that have already started on our Eastern Hillsides.

It is now apparent that this unreliable source is going to be stressed out sooner rather than later. Elk Creek dries up in the summer and freezes up in the winter.

The city plans to divert the Sardis-Vedder Aquifer to accomodate the Eastern Hillside developers. This will be the straw that breaks the back of our aquifer and triggers the water crisis.
Reference: http://www.chilliwack.com/main/attachments/files/774/Appendix_B2.pdf (see 3.8)

This is a bad deal for Chiliwack residents because the cost of these massive water projects would be better spent on "quality of life infrastructure" such as a network of bicycle and pedestrian trails and an improved hybrid bus service. The whole mess is a direct result of Chilliwack's "pro-growth" strategy.

The whole situation is a huge tragedy, as our Sardis-Vedder aquifer has won several contests and won the best drinking water in Canada contest two years. It is rare to have a pristine water source that requires no chlorination. It should have been protected from overdevelopment, and we need to protect what is left.

The whole thing could probably have been prevented if City Hall had been promoting a "pro-infrastructure strategy" instead of a pro-growth strategy. The needs of Chilliwack residents must come ahead of the interests of developers.

The continued promotion of growth in our city is an unsustainable blueprint for disaster. We need to change direction.

Norm Smith
Mayoral Candidate and Co-founder
Save Chilliwack Citizens Alliance
savechilliwack.ca

History buffs might recall the strategy employed by General MacArthur and the US Navy against the Japanese in the Pacific War. It was a clever one.

The Japanese were famous for their fanatic tenacity and their determination to fight and die to the last man in futile and suicidal attempts to impede the Americans in their march to conquer and occupy the Japanese homeland. The Japanese goal was to inflict such heavy casualties upon the Americans that America would give up and negotiate a peace more agreeable to the Japanese than unconditional surrender would surely be.

General MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, however, sensibly realized that it was not necessary to challenge every single Japanese-held island and subdue it. Why not just leave them be, they reasoned? Why spend the time, and the blood, taking them? Why not just “leap frog” over them to more strategically important islands, and let the other less important ones die on the vine? This became known as “island hopping” and it proved cost-effective in lives and results.

I would suggest a similar strategy be employed by those in the movement who are addicted to debates with inveterate pig-headed cornucopians in their intellectual bunkers. Their obsolete paradigms are impregnable and cannot be breached by reason, and the only battering ram available is your head. So why press the issue? Why not cut your losses and get on with that book you are supposed to be writing or re-introduce yourself to your dog or something. Leapfrog over the lost causes and save your energy for the winnable battles.

If we are right, their ideas will “wither on the vine” and their convictions will die unrepentant, as Thomas Kuhn predicted they would. Reality and the passage of time never forces a dogmatist to recant his beliefs. On the contrary, like a 90 year old Japanese soldier still lost in the jungles of the Philippines, he will maintain that the war is still being fought and that Shintoism, er, Growthism, is a durably viable cosmology for the end of time.

Canadian Election Results
Conservatives 143 seats
Liberals 76 seats
BQ 50 seats
NDP 37 seats
INP 2seats
Green 0 seats

1. All four parties lost the election. It is another minority government.
2. The Liberals, with their phony “green shift”, in reality a shift into neutral because of their support of immigration policies which would wipe out any gains from carbon taxes, lost 18 seats.
3. Elizabeth May, leader of the counterfeit Green Party, was kept out of parliament when she lost to Conservative Peter Mckay in Nova Scotia. My “strategic” donation was well spent.
4. My own NDP MP, Catherine Bell, lost to Conservative John Duncan. This was like a dagger driven into the heart of politically correct soft greens. Without her as a rallying point, so many of their pet causes will find no patron. Maybe free speech might stand a chance in my community. A contrarian opinion might be heard and printed.
5. Only 58.3% of registered voters voted, the lowest turnout in history. This is not only a resounding rebuke of the alternatives offered, but, I believe of the system of representative “democracy”. Why must I delegate my power to them in the first place? It is assumed that those who don’t vote are apathetic and have deserted their “democratic’ responsibility. I offer an alternative explanation. Perhaps it is those who vote who desert their democratic responsibility by giving legitimacy to them and their system. Have you considered that the 41.7% who didn’t vote are not apathetic but simply wise to the futility of lending credibility to one of these frauds?

Ah yes, but we must make a choice, we are told. Not between black and white but between shades of grey. Really? A choice between McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Arby’s? What if we prefer to fast rather than wolf down fast-food and then purge at leisure? What if we prefer NOT to vote for any of the four GROWTHIST parties and their QUICK MASS IMMIGRATION FIX as a remedy for whatever ails Canadian society. Need skilled labour? Fly in immigrants. Need to support an aged population? Fly in immigrants. Need to stimulate the economy? Fly in immigrants. Need to win over the ethnic vote for our party? Fly in immigrants.

But we don’t need the Economic Council of Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute, the former Director of the Canadian Immigration Service James Bissett , Professor Don DeVoretz of SFU, Dr. Herbert Grubel of SFU or Dr. Michael Healey of UBC or Statscan to file any reports to tell us that immigration is of no net benefit to Canadian society. It is costing us wages, jobs, 60,000 acres of prime farmland a year and putting over 500 endangered species at risk, as well as causing the emission of close to ten million metric tonnes of green house gasses annually.

Those of us who stayed home and didn’t vote actually cast our votes tonight. We cast our votes twice. Once against the growthist one-party state coalition of Conservative-Liberal-NDP-Green, and at the same time, against the system of representative “democracy”.

Call me misguided. But don’t call me apathetic.

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.

Immigration: How Much is Enough for Canada?

Original article published on 6 March 2008. The standard of much of the discussion that ensued was very high.
See #OtherDiscussions">below for links to other online discussions.

How many immigrants should Canada accept each year? What population can Canada support - and how to determine that number? And how many do we want?

These are difficult questions, and it is a sensitive issue. My grandparents immigrated to Canada when my father was eight years old. My wife and stepdaughter are currently permanent residents, and we have sponsored my wife's mother. My business partner and his family are immigrants. I am well aware of the value that immigrants bring to Canada, and the conditions in developing countries. And "Isn't the real problem overpopulation?" is one of the most frequent questions I receive during my Inconvenient Truth presentations.

Having revealed all this, I believe:

• We should allow immigration at levels that stabilise our current population
• We should conduct a 'sustainability audit' that determines how many people Canada can realistically support
• We should determine what kind of population density we want, from sparse to Singapore levels
• We must stop using population growth to postpone problems like a funded Canada Pension Plan, or to drive continuous economic growth
• We must build in a buffer to account for climate change

This is difficult stuff. First, how many people can Canada support sustainably? We must be capable of sustainably producing all our own necessities, including food, shelter, clothing, energy, mobility, and communication. That means we can't count our coal mines or the tar sands for energy. It means that importing food from China doesn't count toward a sustainable food supply for Canada. It also means we have to leave space for the natural world; humans are not living sustainably if other species are going extinct by the bucketload.

Second, once we know how many people the country could support, we must determine how closely we want to live together. It is one thing to say "Canada has lots of space and could hold more people." It is another when you start telling people they must live up north, or that Montreal is going to have the population of Beijing.

Trying to force people to live in sparsely populated areas of Canada has never worked for long. Most immigrants migrate to the big cities for a reason - for many reasons, in fact, and they are generally the same reasons most of us end up in the cities.

I also think we grossly overestimate how many people Canada can and should "hold." Yes, we have vast unpopulated areas. It is also true that many of these areas are inhospitable to humans, and most necessities would have to be shipped in from other regions.

In addition, these unpopulated areas act as buffers for human activity. Paving our vast forests so Canada can accept "her share" of the world's population makes as much sense as razing Brazil's rainforests to cram in more people there. Europe once had vast tracts of forest, but they are all gone, and the Europeans are working toward reforesting - exceptionally difficult, because there are people everywhere.

Finally, we need to get over ourselves. We are not the only beings on this planet. We are not the Supreme Beings, though we certainly have the power to destroy life, including our own. We must learn to live with Nature, as we are Nature and Nature is us.

Brian Gordon
Nominated Candidate, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca
Green Party of Canada

Trained Presenter
An Inconvenient Truth

People - Planet - Prosperity
The New Green Economy

#OtherDiscussions" id="OtherDiscussions">Other online discussions on immigration and population

Is it reactionary to oppose immigration? of 19 Dec 07 on webdiary.com.au.

Is there intelligent life on Planet Green? of 9 Sep 08,

#comment-470700">Will "the great immigration debate" take place? of 21 May 08 on larvatusprodeo.net.

Have the Greens lost the plot on immigration? of 11 Jul 08 on Online Opinion.

August 28, 2008
Media release by Earth News, a project of Ecological Internet
Dr. Glen Barry, +1 (920) 776-1075
Originally published on 28 Aug 08 on forests.org.

(Earth) -- Rainforest Action Network (ran.org) of San Francisco has long been one of America's leading rainforest campaign organizations. Yet in July their campaign to protect Ontario, Canada's boreal forests doomed half this vital global ecological system to industrial destruction. In return, RAN and other proponents received vague promises of protections over a decade from now, but no protected area boundaries or protection plans.

Canada's boreal forests are home to hundreds of sensitive species of animals including polar bears, caribou and wolverines. Boreal forests are some of the world's largest carbon storehouses, with holdings equal to decades of global emissions from fossil fuels, while continually absorbing new emissions. The boreal region is also the world's largest reservoir of clean fresh water.

"Just how much longer do you think environmentalists can strike deals that give up half of large wilderness ecosystems to industrial development for vague promises of protection? Simply, more ecologically attuned folks know no more natural habitats can be lost and expect to survive climate change," explains Ecological Internet's President, Dr. Glen Barry.

Neither RAN, WWF or even Greenpeace realize that there is no longer any acceptable reason to industrially destroy or diminish an intact natural ecosystem -- not if falsely FSC certified, not to briefly alleviate poverty, and not because indigenous people are in favor. The state of the Earth is so grim, and the needs to protect and restore natural ecosystem so large, that only sufficient campaigns seeking to end industrial cutting and burning are worthwhile any longer. The rest is greenwash.

It is unknown if 50 percent protection -- of unknown strength and placement -- will be enough to fully sustain Ontario's biodiversity and ecosystem services. Future protections will likely center on the sparsely populated and largely unthreatened northern boreal, while with its promotion and endorsement of the vague plan, RAN has greenwashed intensified forestry and mining in the already heavily fragmented southern boreal.

"The only meaningful forest protection is to work to keep all ancient primary forests standing, and to meet needs for forest products from secondary forests regenerating into old-growth. There is no chance of achieving global ecological sustainability until ecological destruction ends, what remains is fully protected, and restoration begins," explains Dr. Barry.

Further developments

This is the second time in recent history -- the other being in British Columbia, Canada's priceless Great Bear temperate rainforest -- that RAN has been a driving force in continuing industrial loss of the world's most important remaining large, intact forest wildernesses. Greenwashing millions of acres of industrial wilderness destruction in the name of indigenous rights is not doing these people or the environment any favors. Thankfully, RAN now does little tropical rainforest campaigning, so they may be safe. With more victories like this, soon there will be no ancient forests or an operable climate.

RAN's slide from a force for forest good to a force for forest greenwash must not go unchallenged. This is particularly difficult for Ecological Internet, as President Dr. Glen Barry is a RAN rainforest award recipient, and has worked collaboratively with them for decades. Yet RAN's string of blunders -- also including occupying campaign offices of Al Gore to protest oil investments (which Nader also had), possibly swinging the 2000 election -- cannot be forgotten nor forgiven, particularly while ill-informed appeasement continues. RAN has censored those questioning these policies on their blog.

Dr. Barry laments, "You can?t present yourselves as cutting edge, selfless and knowledgeable forest protestors and be routinely cutting deals to turn over millions of acres of ancient forests to fatcat loggers and minders. We need to focus on how many ecosystems are necessary to maintain the Earth's habitability, and reaching these levels of protection and restoration, not upon what can be indelicately and easily negotiated.

RAN is called upon to get on board protecting all ancient forests and working to restore mature, old-growth forests; or they, like so much of the mainstream environmental movement, are part of the climate and biodiversity crises. "Giving up on half of Canada's boreal forests for a pocket full is mumbles is not the role of the Rainforest Action Network, members or donors. They have no authority or expertise to be pursuing such deals."

---

Dr. Glen Barry is a leading global spokesperson on global forest and climate policy. Ecological Internet provides the world's leading climate and forest web portals at www.climateark.org and forests.org. Dr. Barry frequently conducts interviews on the latest environmental policy developments and can be reached at: glenbarry [AT] ecologicalinternet org (note confirmation email response required) and +1 (920) 776-1075.

(Original source: http://problemsoftheworld.com/archives/tag/painted-girls/; uploaded by bgn59)

Wall Street money talks while the Lips of Barrack Obama and Jack Layton move in sync.

It all makes sense now. Why a socialist. Oh, I’m sorry. Why a “social democrat” from the frozen north, Canada, would come down to the Denver convention of US Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama to roll over on his stomach and bark at his feet. They both stand for the same things. But not quite in the way Canada’s Jack Layton, leader of the leftist NDP, says they do.

He said, “Democrats here are talking about the same kind of change we’re talking about in Canada.” Layton’s correct there. Democrats are talking about turning a blind eye to runaway population generated by both illegal and legal immigration. He continued, “Whether it’s real action on climate change, forging trade policies that work for working families or standing up for jobs and better health care, there is a real desire here to put the concern of the kitchen table head of the board room table.”

That must be news to Wall Street, Jack. They bought and paid for Obama, and now this socialist from the north has come down to Colorado and told everybody that their nominee is concerned about ordinary people. But, hey wait. Democrats have been doing that for decades. They talk like Robespierre and govern like Louis XIV.

In assessing a politician it is best to cast rhetoric aside and look at who is bank-rolling his campaign. Follow the money trail. The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by referring to The Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP). http://www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s comrade Democrats are their clear favourites as the figures will show. Let’s cite some examples of the more prominent corporate contributors.

The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to Jack’s friends, the Democrats.

The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.

This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence-peddling.

This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million in political contributions to the two-faced Democrats.

Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its 8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton is a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as “the Military Industrial Complex” once more. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.
Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.

Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million from private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By the August 28/08 Barrack Obama had raised $389,423,102. Friends, that money most assuredly did not come from cab drivers, hairdressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks, gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary, down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama. And City Group who gave him $389,989. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375.

Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate IT benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and congress for even $1 billion in campaign contributions would be bargain for the IT industry.

Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a progressive party of the downtrodden, the Democratic Party of the United States of America has done pretty well for itself, as did Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act.

I just loved their spiel too. “Please Mister, could you spare me a million, when I am elected I’ll open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another five million middle class jobs, expand the visa programs, displace jobs, depress wages, replace Canada as the country with highest population growth rate in the G8 and accelerate green house gas emissions, ruin the environment. Please Mister. Please. I won’t let you down sir..’

Now, it’s true. Organized labour has deployed 91% of its donations toward the Democrats and this has offset the corporate influence. But the scale is so pitifully small as to be compared to a peashooter firing back at a cannon. But then, if Big Labour did have the same financial clout, how would they wield it? The answer is not encouraging.

Until 1993 it was understood by trade union leaders that a tight labour market was a workers best friend. As the Democratic Socialist leader of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.’

Obviously Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S.

Woodsworth, the founder of the CCF, the precursor to Mr. Layton’s New Democratic Party, since Woodsworth favoured restrictive immigration policies during his tenure as leader before the war. Layton is intent upon “jacking” up Canada’s immigration intake another 70-80,000 people immediately to achieve his arbitary goal of an annual quota equivalent to one percent of whatever of the country’s population level is. He maintains a steadfast ignorance of any study that undermines his rationale for growth. Studies like the C.D. Howe report that revealed that pensions could not be indefinitely supported by increasing immigration unless immigration was multiplied 28 times its existing level. Is Mr. Layton prepared to process over 7 million immigrants a year just to support pensioners? It would be interesting how his “Green Agenda” held up after a population hike like that after five years. Not to mention his plans to cut GHG emissions. And then there is that inconvenient Statistics Canada report of May 2007. The one that showed that immigration has depressed Canadian wages. That’s good news for the people who sit at the board room table. Bad news for the people who sit at the kitchen table that Jack claims to speak for.

In America, the voice of organized labour, the AFL-CIO, is singing in harmony with Obama’s Democrats. But the song is not “Solidarity forever”, its “Money, Money, Money”. In 1993 the AFL-CIO made a shocking break with its past by attacking the critics of illegal immigration. Three years later it joined a coalition of business, agribusiness and Christian conservatives to kill provisions of bill to limit refugee admissions and verify social security numbers of newly-hired workers to discourage illegal workers. But the landmark moment came in February of 2000 when it was announced that the AFL-CIO would “support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration law and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups.” Translation: The AFL-CIO was abandoning American workers to champion legal and illegal immigrant workers in their greed to recruit and harvest a larger dues-paying base.

Organized labour in Canada, as represented by the CLC, and its parliamentary wing, Jack Layton’s NDP, has precisely the same attitude. Xenophiliacs who love strangers within our gates more than the workers born right here. Some would call this a Christian attitude. Perhaps they should refer to 1st Timothy 5:8. There are many translations. But essentially, charity begins at home, and if you don’t begin at home, you aren’t practicing Christianity. I would prefer to call it an attitude of selfish condescension, one easy to accommodate if you are a trade union bureaucrat with a degree in Labour studies or economics sitting in an office insulated from layoffs and passing judgment upon “ignorant” blue collar workers who are obviously guilty of “false conciousness” because they don’t see the world as you do. Tougher though if you are on the front lines of competition, mopping a hospital floor for a subsistence wage and you’re in danger of losing your job because it might be contracted out to a cut-throat company that uses illegal immigrant workers. The ones the CLC says enrich our culture.

The reality is that although Jack Layton and Barack Obama may be talking about the same things, the populist script they are reading from is carefully crafted to decoy our notice from their corporate obligations. We may hear their rousing speeches, but it is money that is doing the talking, and it has an agenda. Its agenda is not American or Canadian. It is globalist. And it will do anything to have its way. It plays dirty. It doesn’t care about equality, but if it needs to, it will play the race card. It doesn’t care about migrant workers, but if it needs to, it will pretend to care. It doesn’t care about cultural diversity, but if needs to build up a constituency among Hispanics to gain support for amnesty and a bigger labour pool, it will. And it doesn’t care about the environment, but when there was a danger that the Sierra Club was going to return to its former policy of favouring restrictive immigration policies to stabilize the country’s runaway growth, a billionaire stepped in with $100 million to ensure that it didn’t happen.

Wall Street money talks. And if it keeps talking, in four decades, thanks to corporate mandated manic immigration, one half billion North Americans may be alive, or dying, to hear, the sound of a silent spring and a dead continent.

Thanks, Jack, for your role in making it happen.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
August 29/08

Greed cannot be defined in conventional terms exclusively as a quest for more money or material possessions. It is simply a desire to have more and more. More than one needs. More than one can use. We know that billionaires don't need and can't use four yachts and a fleet of twenty antique cars but most North Americans have affluenza too. And our greed is manifested not just in our insatiable material appetites, but in our need for more activity. More hobbies, more “courses”, more “lessons”, more structured leisure events, and volunteering. All this in tandem with a double income work schedule.

Something must give. So what is deemed expendable? Small talk with friends. (Sorry, gotta go). Real talk with family. Time with pets. (North American dogs average a 20 minute nightly walk). Reading time. (remember novels?). Writing letters.(Emails mutilate the language ) Our sleep. (Canadians slept 9 ½ hours a night a century ago). Our health. (Indigenous people averaged 2 hours of work daily—the industrial revolution turned us into mindless robots.) In our contemporary society it is a sin to be seen not to be busy. I recall the words of Thoreau:

“If a man should walk in the woods for love of them of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Above all we must be “goal-oriented”. We must have “plans”and “objectives”. The impression must be left that my life is not something to be experienced but rather like a career in the Cub Scouts where I get various performance badges to mark my “progress”. Just like the people who plaster their cars with the decals of National Parks to prove they had a good time. Well, I am an not a Japanese tourist and I feel more like just experiencing the moment rather than ruining it by recording it. I don't think life is like a carport that you have to fill up with junk —activities—so much to the point that there is no room for your car, that is, for what is essential.

In the 1950s people found time for people. Because they were satisfied with less. Satisfied and happy for the most part. When people had problems, my recollection was, hey, come over for a cup of tea, dear, and let's talk about it. Grandparents and their concerns were an integral part of the family. Mom was always home waiting for me to arrive from school with a cup of cocoa and a peanut butter sandwich, wanting to know how my day went. She could do that, because it took only one income to deliver what we wanted. A 950 square foot house, with three small bedrooms, one small bathroom, one icebox and one car for seven people. And no foreign vacations. A typical middle class lifestyle. Rich in time and quality of life.

But times have changed. 950sq feet is now a telephone booth for today's Canadians. Bathrooms are that size it seems. Some kids today have their own ensuites. I had to share my bathwater with two brothers, third in line, and one bath a week sufficed for hygiene. Many people in my boyhood were of the belief, like my parents, that Canada's wealth was not fairly shared, and that it was outrageous that there were poor among us who did not even have shelter or medical care. This situation is even worse today. But with one difference.

While folks like my parents, the socialists of the 1950s, believed that government services should assist the needy, they did not think, as apparently many people now do, that government should substitute for the care and assistance that friends, neighbours and relatives used to provide in the 1950s. The role of government in their view was to supplement what was already being done. Nothing is so debilitating as the notion that one has no individual responsibility, or community responsibility, to help people because we can just sit back and leave government to carry the ball. Or that we must await “funding” from government to proceed. In the post-carbon era we will have to return to the old Canadian pioneer ethic, get off our butts and help people ourselves. Barn-raising was not done by government employees. But by neighbours and friends who found time to help neighbours and friends. For nothing. No “funding” was available.

Presently, when an individual in obvious need of help or assistance is encountered the reflexive response is to offer the recommendation that he seek the help of some government agency or counseling service. That cup of tea that was offered in the 1950s is never proffered. There is a comfortable and convenient belief about that “these people” will be taken care of “if only” they will seek help. The fact is that if we spent 50% of our GDP on psychologists and counselors it would not take the place that stay-at-home moms, live-in-grandmas, and kindly neighbours did 5 decades ago. And given the choice between the fashionable trauma counselor of this century and my grandmother's apron, I'll take my grandmother any day of the week. The people who survived the London blitz didn't need psychologists—maybe if they had had them, they would have surrendered to Hitler. As it was, they just spent the time to help each other.

But the 50s will never return, you say. Just wait until the oil economy is done. You're going to get a crash course in Amish living and I am going back to the future… You'll have lots of time to slow down then and get re-connected with the people around you. But hey, you can do that now. You have time for me. Your day is 24 hours long just like mine. The point is, you will not make time for me because you have put too much on your plate and I am not a priority.

Now, I most probably should not be a priority. You have your family after all. But realize that is not external forces that are making you run so quickly on a treadmill. It is the force of your own greed to have it all. The bigger more expensive house, the higher paying more stressful job, the two cars, your yoga classes, the two kids, their music lessons, their soccer practices, your Mexican vacations that have to be financed by working over-time. etc. I didn't twist your arm to make those choices.

You “gotta go” because you are as “Type A” and wired into the system as is any Vancouverite, who at least doesn't have the hypocritical trappings of Island culture.

Have another expresso.

But one day, please read Leo Tolstoy's “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

Tim Murray
June 13/06

See also: Living standards and our material prosperity of 6 Sep 2007 on Online Opinion and discussion.

This article was originally posted to Sinking LifeBoat.

We still value your opinion.

We're working to create our vision for Sierra Club Canada five years from now.

If you haven't had a chance to complete this opinion survey, we'd like to remind you that you still can!

It will take a little of your time, but will make a great difference to our planning!

We would appreciate your reply by Friday, July 4. Please use this link to fill out your survey.

Sierra Club of Canada

Dear Sierra Club,

This is just a friendly reminder that you have until Friday, July 4th to reply to MY “survey”. This was the set of questions I sent to you to pre-empt the pre-fabricated set of twenty-one questions that you sent to me, not a single one of which mentioned over-population or over-immigration as an issue or factor to be considered in the environmental degradation of Canada. Kind of like my fitness instructor stressing cardio, strength training and flexibility without mentioning my chain smoking habit.

Please reply to my questions by my arbitrary deadline or I will continue to follow your lead and make policy decisions without your input.

Remember our slogan. “Tell us what we want to hear or take us off your list!” (but we'll never take you off of ours. And Oh, of course, send us your money to save our poster endangered animal of the month ….”

In case you have forgotten, these were the questions in my survey:

And if you think we should just keep tightening our belts to accommodate more and immigrants, cut back our per capita consumption more and more just to increase total consumption through immigration more and more, tell us, how many immigrants is too many for you? Another 10? 20? 30? 40? 50 million? How many Canadians would there be in an ecologically sound Canada as defined by Sierra Club Canada? Do you have any evidence that wildlife “sanctuaries” and reserves enjoy permanent safety from human population growth? As for Sustainable Energy options, is there a technological fix for the species lost from human population growth? Is there a technological fix for marine life eradicated from over harvesting and pollution? Is there a technological fix for soils exhausted by 10,000 years of intensive farming? Why does the Sierra Club think that climate change warrants more concern than the loss of biodiversity services? Why does the Sierra Club not seem to understand that population that is the underlying agency of both? No climate change without climate changers. Growing cities shrinking wilderness.

One should also ask: Why haven't you taken action on your leader Stephen Hazell's comments on TVO's May 5, 2008 “The Agenda” when he said we should decide what an optimum population for Canada is? What do you believe an optimum population for Canada is? Are you afraid of covering this uncharted territory because you don't know of a politically correct way to answer that question? Is Mr. Hazell afraid to follow through on his own advice?

source:
www.tvo.org/podcasts/theagenda/audio/TAWSP_Dbt_20080505_0_0_40k.mp3
ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com/2008/05/review-of-tvos-agenda-may-5-2008.html

This is my survey. I will not be confined by your prefabricated questions. The questions I need answering involve your complicity in the overpopulation of Canada, and your focus on inconsequential feel-good concepts of consumption, conservation and recycling. Remember it is our total consumption which is relevant, not our per capita consumption.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Home of the sanctimonious
Sierra Quadra Club
Motto “Take HIM off the island”

Dear Ben West, Chairperson of The Green Party of Vancouver,

A friend, Tim Murray, has alerted me to a quote you have made in a letter you wrote to the Mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan:

"Densification is of course environmentally positive in so far as it prevents the devastation of agricultural lands or wilderness areas but this initiative if not part of an overarching smart growth land use plan would not accomplish this goal."

I have some questions for you.

How is it "environmentally positive" to concentrate people into highrise apartment complexes where it takes massive energy inputs to treat their drinking water and sewage, run their elevators, maintain their multi-story parking garages, power their artificial indoor fitness club environments, and bring them food and resources from distances that grow in proportion to their population size, giving them no hope of growing their own food to survive the new end-of-cheap-energy era?

Isn't it more environmentally friendly for people to live in the country where their water needs no chlorine or UV treatment and their sewage requires no chemical treatments and their septic tank uses less energy per person in its lifecycle than urban waste treatment facilities? Just because people own no land doesn't mean they don't require resources from land in order to survive. Wouldn't it make more sense for people to live on the same land where their food comes from, work this land with their own muscle instead of with machines, and find wood for heating and building materials from their own land instead of importing it from far-away industrial clearcuts? Of course, for this ultra low footprint lifestyle (rural, not urban) to work really well, there would have to be few enough people that each person could have enough quality and quantity of land that they could be self-sufficient without breaking their back.

In the upcoming era of depleted fossil fuels whereby the only oil, coal, wood, and natural gas remaining will take more energy to extract than what you get out of it, we simply will not have a use for so many urban bureaucrats living densely in highrise apartments. The earth's carrying capacity will be drastically reduced due to lack of energy resources. Finding a new unprecedentedly abundant source of energy with zero impact on the environment is not only impossible, but it is also undesirable as it would enable humans to further grow their population, which would displace even more other species, destroy biodiversity services, and therefore lower quality of life on earth for humans.

Would you agree that it is not just the average consumer's consumption level that is relevant, but also the number of consumers?

Whether population growth occurs in the city, in the suburbs, or in the country, is there such a thing as "Smart Growth" when it still involves population growth, which guarantees that environmental damage will increase no matter what conservation measures are imposed? (HINT: Each person must consume finite resources and produce waste just in order to survive. If the number of people keeps growing, it is only a matter of time before the total environmental damage increases even if the theoretical minimum for average per capita consumption is achieved.)

Are you one of those people who uses cliches like "You can't stop progress" or "Growth is inevitable" as a cop-out excuse for letting our environment get worse, while lying at the same time by telling people that our environment can get better alongside continued population growth so long as this growth is "managed/contained/smart/densification/steered/deflected"?

How long will Canada's protected areas be protected if our 1% annual population growth trend continues (doubling our numbers every 70 years); how many National and Provincial Parks will relax legislation to allow agriculture, roads, power corridor easements, mining, native hunting, increased camp sites and recreational development, etc to meet this growing demand? How many Parks will incidentally fall victim to air and groundwater pollution as well as poaching and alien species infestations caused by Canada's population growth?

Would it not be prudent for the Green Party of Canada to advocate lower immigration to Canada so that Canada can set a good example in an overpopulated world by reducing its population to a sustainable level to avoid mass species extinctions and human deaths due to the downside of Peak Food caused by fossil fuel depletion?

Thanks and I look forward to your reply,

Brishen Hoff
President of Biodiversity First biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com