Canada

A broadcast debate on the Canadian Broadcasting Commission between on the one hand Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which actively campaigns in the oceans of the world to preserve whales and other forms of endangered marine life and, on the other hand, Elizabeth May, now leader of Canada's Green Party showed two poles of North American environmentalism, one authentic and one counterfeit. Only the latter enjoys the hear of the official media and the patronage of the gullible who hand their dollars over in the belief that something is being ‘done’ about the environment. In fact, the purpose of environmental NGOs is to do nothing about the environment, to keep problems unsolved, so they have a raison d'etre. Watson is the only one who speaks the truth.

As always, the CBC gave the last word to the politically correct, soft green, growthist, Elizabeth May.

Paul Watson vs. Elizabeth May

The following is a transcript of a CBC interview conducted on May 17/06 with Paul Watson and Elizabeth May, now leader of Canada's Green Party. It was transcribed from a CD by Brishen Hoff.

Anna Maria Tremonte (host) : And the latest numbers show the population of the US grew by 2.8 million people from 2004 to 2005. Half of them identify themselves as hispanics. It is precisely those growth numbers that have some environmentalists raising concerns and raising hackles, arguing that immigration is central to the United States environmental problems. It's causing rifts among
environmentalists and raising lots of questions and that is where the current begins today.

[Theme music]

Well what began as a skirmish is looking more and more like an all out war. For months now an intense debate about immigration policy has been simmering south of the border. Earlier this month supporters of an open immigration policy upped the stakes as millions of people took to the streets in cities across the US. On Monday, President George Bush fired back announcing he was deploying the National Guard to the Mexican border, "We do not yet have full control of the border, and I am determined to change that. By the end of 2008, we will increase the number of border patrol officers by an additional 6,000. When these new agents are deployed, we'll have more than double the size of the border control during my presence."

#PaulWatson" id="PaulWatson">Interview with Paul Watson

Well as both sides dig in for a prolonged fight, those advocating less immigration have found an unlikely ally inside the environmental movement. Paul Watson, the one-time co-founder of Greenpeace, later the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has thrown himself headfirst into the debate by challenging the environmental movement to come clean about what he says are the links between immigration, population growth and resource depletion. And Paul Watson is on the phone from Seattle this morning.

Good morning.

Paul Watson:
Good morning.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Why are you convinced that immigration is a problem for the environment in the United States?

Paul Watson : Well you know the United States has got one of the fastest growth rates of
any country in the world, and immigration is a major contributor to that. At
a growth rate of 1.3% a year, that's going to give us a population of 1
billion in the United States by the end of the 21st century.

Anna Maria Tremonte : And why is that bad?

Paul Watson : [LAUGHS] Well the average American consumes much more than the average citizen of other countries, so everytime you have a new American you increase the consumption of resources considerably. The US is also responsible for 25% of all the greenhouse gases emissions in the world, so more Americans, more pollution, more sprawl, more problems.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Well, but new immigrants aren't really the big energy consumers in North American society. Why do you focus on immigrants and not the stereotypical
Hummer-driving air conditioning American?

Paul Watson : Well we do do that too, but the fact is is that every year almost 3 million people are added to the US population and most of that is from immigration. In fact, all we're advocating is that immigration numbers be reduced to levels to achieve stabilization of population. By birth rates alone in the United States, you don't have that increase. Immigration is solely responsible. Not only immigration but births by immigrants, because the birth rate amongst immigrants is far higher than the birth rate amongst non-immigrants.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Why is that?

Paul Watson : I don't really know except that people who enter the country have a higher birth rate than people who are already living here. That's just an established fact.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Are you looking at the US and looking at where there is ecological/environmental damage and attributing it to how many people are living there? Is that what you're doing?

Paul Watson : Well yes, because everytime people come into the US they greatly increase their rate of consumption of resources. The other problem we're concerned about is that there is terrific damage being done especially in the desert regions of the southwest because of people coming over that border everything from garbage to trampling of species and this is not only done by immigrants but also by the patrols against the immigration. So there's that consideration to be taken into account. You know the problem is is that if we don't control the numbers of the overall US population, we're headed for some very serious problems. The United States is already running out of valuable resources especially water.

Anna Maria Tremonte : So, but is it a point of you just have too many people in one place in the US? What if they all moved to Missouri or something?

Paul Watson : No, I think generally its right across the board. But the other problem is that we have an acceptable form of slavery in the United States. When I was recently a director of the Sierra Club I put forth a motion that one way to deal with this is to demand that farm and factory workers wages be increased and that they be given full benefits and that would discourage a lot of the illegal immigration. But you know people don't really give much thought to the fact that in the fields of California, people are working in very toxic conditions for long hours, for low wages and no benefits and that's just really intolerable, and the only reason it's going on is because big business and big agriculture benefit from cheap labour.

Anna Maria Tremonte : So you're saying that you think the US should curb immigration?

Paul Watson : Yes I think that they should reduce the numbers to achieve stabilization of the population.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Specifically over the Mexican border?

Paul Watson : Right across the board, I don't really discriminate against the origins of where the immigrants come from, it's right across the board.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Now this has been a divisive issue in the Sierra Club. You resigned from its board last month, in part over this issue. Tell us about that.

Paul Watson : Well I resigned in part because of that and also because of the Sierra Club's pro-hunting stance. But the Sierra Club, as is most major environmental organizations have taken a neutral position which means "We don't want to get involved &endash; We don't want to talk about this." You know back in 1972 at the UN Conference On The Environment the population issue was the number one concern on the environment. By the UN Conference in Rio in 1992, 20 years later nobody is talking about it.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Why is that?

Paul Watson : Well, it's become too politically correct. Nobody wants to talk about it. I much prefer to be ecologically correct than politically correct. We have to deal with the fact that it's a contributing factor and we have to deal with the fact that population is the single greatest source for all of our environmental problems. From diversity of species, to pollution, to greenhouse gas emissions. All of this is because there's more and more people. And also, the more people, that means that we have to steal the carrying capacity of other species. They have to disappear for our numbers to increase. And we're going to reach a point where we are going to run out of key species and everything is going to collapse because of the ecological law of interdependence.

Anna Maria Tremonte : You, yourself are an immigrant.

Paul Watson : Yes, I'm a permanent resident of the US. I'm a Canadian citizen.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Aren't you part of the problem?

Paul Watson : Oh yes, we're all part of the problem.

Anna Maria Tremonte : What are you suggesting? Are you suggesting sending people back?

Paul Watson : No, I'm just saying that we have to reduce the number of people coming into the United States to achieve stabilization. That is, there's already limits, there is no open borders. So, I'm saying lower those limits so we don't have an increase in the population of 2.8 million people every year.

Anna Maria Tremonte : You know, reducing immigration doesn't reduce the population on the planet, just the population of the United States. Why not focus on the global population?

Paul Watson : Well we do focus on the global population but by reducing the number of Americans you're actually addressing the issue of consumption because US citizens consume much more resources than other citizens so when somebody crosses that border they become a mega-consumer. You know, maybe not right away, but that's where they're heading and so the more Americans, the greater the level of consumption of resources, the greater the emission of pollution.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Well, it's the environmental footprint right?

Paul Watson : Americans have the biggest environmental footprint of any citizens on the planet.

Anna Maria Tremonte : At the same time, immigrants have smaller environmental footprints in their countries of origin often because they're poor. So how fair is it to condemn them to poverty by not allowing them to enter the US?

Paul Watson : Well then, what you're doing is condemning the United States to poverty in the future, which is where we're all heading anyway unless we curb population. The other problem is that other countries are trying to solve their population surplus problem by pushing people into the United States. Also it's a brain drain too. A lot of people who could be making a contribution to their countries of origin are coming to the United States. And that's not solving problems in countries like Guatemala and Honduras where people should be helping to make things better in their country.

Anna Maria Tremonte : To what extent do you think the same issues apply in Canada?

Paul Watson : I think Canada also has a problem too because our population is growing and that means more wilderness area is being taken up. And my big concern is that as people come in, the sprawl increases, there's more and more impact on wilderness. I mean for instance we have this situation in the United States where they don't understand why the alligators are attacking people. Well the reason the alligators are attacking is we're moving into their territory, we're taking their ecosystems and they're trying to survive and everybody's saying "It's amazing, why is this happening?" Well because we're invading.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Do you think President Bush's announcement this week calling for National Guard troop reinforcements on the US/Mexico border is a step in the right direction?

Paul Watson : Oh I think he's just posturing. I mean, 6,000 National Guard isn't going to make any difference at all. Really what they should be doing is enforcing US law against employers of illegal immigrants and the key to that is to make sure that people couldn't hire illegal immigrants in the farms and the factories, that would certainly go a lot further to discourage illegal immigration. I mean we're talking here of legal immigration of 2.8 million people every year. But the other factor is illegal immigration which is anywhere from 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

Anna Maria Tremonte : But you want to see them cracking down on both essentially. Not only illegal, but you want legal immigration to be reduced?

Paul Watson : Yes

Anna Maria Tremonte : Paul Watson, thanks for talking to us today.

Paul Watson : Thank you.

Anna Maria Tremonte :
Paul Watson is the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He was
also one of the founders of Greenpeace and he was on the phone from Seattle.
You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and on Sirius Satellite
Radio 137. I'm Anna Maria Tremonte.

#ElizabethMay" id="ElizabethMay">Interview with Elizabeth May

Anna Maria Tremonte (conitinuing) : Well not everyone in the environmental movement agrees with Paul Watson's argument about the links between immigration and environmental degradation. Elizabeth May is a candidate for the leadership of the federal Green Party. She's also the former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, and she is in Syndey, Nova Scotia this morning.

Hello.

Elizabeth May : Good morning Anna Maria.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Well what do you think of what Paul Watson is saying? He says that anti-immigration opinion is something that environmentalists are afraid to talk about.

Elizabeth May : Well we've never been afraid to talk about it in Canada and as you mentioned I just recently stepped down as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and while I was there, we answered it across countries with a set of discussions and seminars and came up with what I think is a very good policy in relation to immigration and the interrelationships which are far more complex than Paul has suggested, between immigration, population pressures, consumption, militarism, women's rights. It's a very complex web, and to say that immigration is the problem is really to put the emphasis on something that is, when you really look at all the various factors, it's basically #trivial" id="trivial">trivial. I mean, only 3% of the world's population dies in a country other than that in which they were born and most of that migration is from developing countries to developing countries, not coming into North American consumptive societies, so the key factor here in environmental destruction, as Paul hints of course, is that North Americans consume far more than any notion of fair share and far beyond any sense of the carrying capacity of the planet. So when you have 4% of the world's population which is the United States, producing 25% of the planet's greenhouse gases, the answer isn't to make as George Bush seems to think, to make the United States a gated community and put guys with guns at the border so that we can protect, you know, the United States and protect a completely unsustainable and highly polluting and unnecessarily consumptive way of life to achieve the quality of life they want. There's other ways to do that and it means unhooking themselves from their extremely wasteful use of energy; it's not beating up on immigrants.

Anna Maria Tremonte : He says that global population growth used to be the global environmental movement's number one issue but it disappeared from the agenda in recent years. Why do you think that happened?

Elizabeth May : Well it's not quite like Paul &endash; it is true that I don't think there's any question that environmental groups are concerned about population increases. I mean, the doubling from 3 billion to 6 billion people occurred in my life time. The historic trend it is more than, you know, an astonishing reality that 2000 years ago the population on earth was 200 million people. It took 1500 years for that to double to 400 million, so there are exponential rates of growth. Population is a clear global issue of which immigration is merely a trivial factor, but when you look at the issue of population and why it is such a significant environmental threat, it's entirely linked to the question of how much is each person on earth consuming, and whether those rates of consumption are sustainable.

Anna Maria Tremonte : So where does global population growth rank then as a threat to theenvironment?

Elizabeth May : No, I think it's a huge issue, but it's very much connected to how much we're consuming. So if you figure what the carrying capacity of planet earth, maybe it's six billion people living like Ghandi or, you know, a couple hundred thousand living like Bill Gates. It's very much related to how much each person is consuming and how do we, you know, it's critical that North American society, because Canadians have just about as large an ecological footprint as the United States, it's critical that we reduce that enormous impact that we're having, otherwise the climate crisis is going to rather redress our standard of living for us.

Anna Maria Tremonte : So is it not true then that the one place that you don't want more growth then is a place like the US that already has such consumption?

Elizabeth May : The issue is really one that's far too complex to say the problem is more immigrants. If you look at Canadian environmental problems, our biggest increase in greenhouse gases and our biggest loss of boreal forest is happening in the Athabasca tar sands and that's not because of a mass migration of people from other countries rushing there and destroying the environment. That's immigrants like Shell and Exxon. So we have to look at what the real issues are and where we have increased sprawl which is a real problem, it's related to bad land use planning. It's related to bad policies that'll affect where immigrants settle and it'll affect where Canadian born settlement occurs. This is, actually, you know, everyone in Canada who isn't First Nations is an immigrant, we've got to deal with land use planning so that we're not building increased levels of suburban sprawl in areas which are critical wildlife habitat. That is happening in Canada. It is a problem, but curbing immigration is really focussing on the wrong, and rather trivial aspect of the overall problem.

Anna Maria Tremonte : How should countries then that rely on immigration for population growth balance that with environmental concerns?

Elizabeth May : Well it's really that for all of us we need to reduce the amount of energy we're consuming, the amount, and that's a basically a factor in increasing the efficiency of the way in which we use energy and raw materials. The global economy just to give you an example, produced in North America, achieved a revolution in productivity, in reducing the amount of labour per unit of good produced per unit of energy. It was just a huge efficiency in the number of people employed to produce goods. We need to do that again by reducing by a factor of ten, which is doable on the technologies that are available, the amount of energy we're using to get the same quality of life; the same lighting, the same heating, the same cooling can all be achieved at a fraction of what we're now consuming because we've underpriced raw materials and carbon and underpriced energy and we've overpriced labour, so we've skewed, it's all a question of responding to, really to, fiscal signals.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Paul Watson though is not alone in what he says. How much of a wedge issue is immigration amongst environmentalists in the US?

Elizabeth May : In the US it is and I think it's unfortunate because I know that Paul's motivations are completely honourable. People have attacked him as a racist or something. It's not the case at all. He's genuinely someone concerned particularly about the fate of non-human life on this planet and that is a critical concern. We're in a biodiversity meltdown. We're in an extinction crisis and by focussing on immigration I must say that's the most divisive and unhelpful way to approach the issue of what can humanity do to reorient ourselves on this planet so that we can both live in peace with each other and not destroy our life support systems.

Anna Maria Tremonte :Well how damaging do you think his line of reasoning is then to the image of the environmental movement?

Elizabeth May : Well it was fairly disastrous in terms of just the mere fact that Sierra
Club US was considering, because it's a democratic organization, by their constitution, they had to consider the referendum put forward by a minority of members to vote on an immigration policy. The immigration policyproposed, that Paul supported, was roundly seen by the membership of Sierra Club US, but I bet a lot of listeners right now are thinking "Oh yeah, I remember something about that, about Sierra Club US thinking that we should, you know, that we should, stop immigrants as if they were toxic waste". Well that is, you know, not an acceptable position but the mere fact that it was debated I think has done some long-term damage to the reputation.

Anna Maria Tremonte : If the US experienced a serious population decrease, how much would that relieve the pressure on the environment?

Elizabeth May : Well it depends on how much they're consuming. If the United States consumption of, particularly of fossil fuels, continues its current rate which, you know, if it's an advantage to reduce the population but if every family bought themselves an SUV or moved from an SUV to a Hummer, it would make no difference at all.

Anna Maria Tremonte : So what should US environmentalists who are genuinely concerned about population growth be doing to address this issue?

Elizabeth May : No, I think the key thing is to protect wilderness by having the kinds of laws that ensure that land use planning does not involve sprawl into areas which are critical and threatened ecosystems and at the same time we need to fundamentally re-examine the consumption patterns, our dependency on cheap and very highly polluting fossil fuels to improve and regulate vehiclestandards. You know, the Bush administration in addition to putting guards at the border to Mexico is in court fighting Arnold Schwartzenegger in California having these tougher laws to get better fuel economy from their automobile fleet. So, they're opposing those very simple straight-forward measures that would mean that every American driving would pollute less. So it's a really complicated web and I'm sorry I'm giving complicated answers but a simple solution is wrong when the answer is, when the question is complicated.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Elizabeth May, we have to leave it there. Thanks for talking to me today.

Elizabeth May : Thank you, Anna Maria.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Bye Bye

Elizabeth May : Bye.

Anna Maria Tremonte : Elizabeth May is a candidate for the leadership of the federal Green Party. She's also the former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and she spoke to us from Sydney, Nova Scotia this morning.

#Observations" id="Observations">Observations

May says that immigration, at 3% of the world's population, is “trivial”. Trivial to whom? To the workers whose jobs are displaced and whose wages are depressed? (Rubenstein, Briggs, Borgias). Trivial to the taxpayers who must pay for the social services of immigrants? (Robert Rector study, Heritage Foundation 2006, Grubel study, Fraser Institute 2006). Trivial to those who fight traffic gridlock, suffer pollution, housing shortages and inflated prices and loss of farmland? Is it trivial to the Israelis, the Spanish, and the Indians who have also resorted to building expensive walls to keep migrants out? Will the prospect of 300 million global environmental refugees be trivial?

May speaks of laws that ensure that land use planning will not involve sprawl into areas that are critical to threatened ecosystems. What kind of ironclad laws would they be? The kind that Portland, Oregon had? The kind that was supposed to keep Yosemite safe from mining companies? The kind that is supposed save the Steve Irwin Nature reserve? Bullshit. There is no sanctuary from human population growth. “Smart” Growth is a fraud and a snare.

May talks of vehicle standards and Bush's opposition to Schwartzenegger's fuel economy plans. The best fuel economy plan would be to reduce the number of drivers on the roads. With nearly 3 million of them entering the country every year by legal means alone, May's focus on tech efficiency is a joke.

“Everyone who isn't First Nations is an immigrant”. Give me a break. When is someone going to call May out on her racist self-loathing? The “First Nations” emigrated from across the Bering Strait, and one wave displaced another. Each tribe or band occupies land that was taken by the conquest or annihilation of a previous “First Nation”. I am a Caucasian but I was born in this damn country. That makes me as “native” as anybody. If there is to be a hierarchy of Canadianism based on seniority, then I am more Canadian than 80% of the aboriginal population of the country who are younger than I am. May continually makes reference to the inherent “wisdom” of First Nations peoples in matters of resource management, despite their appalling record. Would she make similar references to the inherent “cleverness” of Jews, or the inherent “rythym” of blacks, or the inherent parsimony of Scotsmen?

Tim Murray

See also: Sea Shepherd appeals for Greenpeace's cooperation in fight against whale slaughter
Were "Intact Aboriginal Cultures" really good custodians? of 19 Jun 08.

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Canada’s social democrats have not experienced an ideological epiphany in the past seven months. One might recall that New Democratic party (NDP) premier Lorne Calvert in calling an election for November 7th declared that growth was a good thing so long as its “benefits” were shared.

This revolutionary statement was made to distinguish social democrats from the growthists on the right who simply promised that growth’s benefits would “trickle down” to the less fortunate without state intervention. But between them was complete unanimity that growth should proceed. The boreal forest would continue to be clear cut no matter how timber royalties were spent, potential farmland would be sold for housing, wetlands would be cleared for development and uranium mined.

In a speech given 22 May 08 to the Shepherds of Good Hope, NDP leader Jack Layton revealed that his party had not changed its attitude to growth:

“As a country, we have a responsibility to ensure that no member of our society is denied the essentials of life. But today, we are seeing a very disturbing trend in Canada: the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. More wealth (sic) is being generated than ever before—but that does not mean that everyone is better off. In fact, the opposite is true. The reason is pretty clear―the benefits of economic growth (sic) are not being shared equally among all Canadians.”

Oh Jack. So that’s what’s wrong with economic growth? Just that its benefits are not being shared equally among all Canadians. Well they certainly weren’t shared equally in NDP British Columbia, NDP Saskatchewan and NDP Manitoba. All three provinces recorded the worst child poverty rates in the country. And homeless people were out on the street in force in the latter half of the nineties in BC too, during the NDP reign. The growing gap between top and bottom income levels also rose during their tenure. Analysts even on the left also report that the gap between social classes or at least regionally between north and south actually grew under Tony Blair’s centre-left government. Clearly there is a gap between the rhetoric of social equality and its delivery. And just as clearly, economic growth is not the mechanism of that delivery.

But I thought what was wrong with economic growth was what it did while it was “growing”. Eating into natural capital and destroying real wealth in creating the “wealth” that Mr. Layton defines as such. For what is “wealth”? Is it the toys we accumulate with all this economic activity? The consumer goods, the cars, the furniture, the sparkling new housing units? What is it? Seldom factored in as wealth are the 33 trillion dollars worth of biodiversity services that the planet provides free of charge to support human life. Services which are daily being destroyed by relentless economic growth. Clean water, unpolluted air, healthy vibrant fish stocks in our lakes and streams, viable microorganisms―these constitute the real wealth of the nation that are not to be “shared” and parceled out like tax rebates to Jack Layton’s low income constituency or offered to the developers’ greed. When are we going to a measuring stick that reflects this fact and replaces GDP and the statistics politicians are using to test reality?

To seal the deal Layton was asked by veteran parliamentary reporter Mike Duffy if his plan to tax the worst corporate polluters might impede economic growth. Layton quickly reassured him, “Oh, no, look at Germany. Thegovernment forced penalties on the car manufacturers and revenue went to the development of wind turbines. There is more economic growth now than before.” Layton’s plan is in opposition to the Liberal-Green plan to introduce carbon taxes. He apparently has not heard the news that the Royal Academy of Sciences concluded that ALL economic growth must end if we are to stop short of raising global temperatures by that critical 2 degree tipping point.

Tim Murray, 1 Jun 08

See also: Growth is OK if it is shared? of 12 Oct 07.

Stephen Hazell,
Executive Director
Sierra Club of Canada
April 28/08

Mr. Hazell,

In your latest solicitation you enumerate the number of results that Sierra Club volunteers and staff have achieved this year owing to my support. You mention postponing the Kearl tar sands mine pending environmental impact assessment (climate change). You mention stopping the Digby Neck mega-quarry in Nova Scotia that would have proved harmful to right whales. You say you convinced the federal government to develop a new water strategy. You kept global warming at the top of the agenda by advocating "strong" action at Bali and providing needed criticism and analysis of the Harper governments (non) actions following this up. And then you successfully urged the Ontario government to "Grow the Greenbelt" and protect millions of acres of "environmentally sensitive" and "agricultural land" in Southern Ontario.

It sounds like, Mr. Hazell, that you and your team have been busy. Busy like a hyperactive janitor mopping a floor but ignoring that the tap is left wide open to continuously pour water over your work.

Do you remember the IPAT equation? Probably not, I suspect you were not even born in 1970 when the Sierra Club and the whole mainstream environmental movement accepted it as conventional wisdom. "I" (Environmental Impact) equals "P" (Population level) times A (Affluence or per capita consumption) times "T" (technology). Still makes sense to me. But no longer to the politically correct, who have taken the "P" right out to render environmental degradation incomprehensible.

Let's illustrate. We will have to cut global GHG emissions 60% just to make up for the increased emissions brought about by population increases globally in the next four decades. In Australia the population increased 30% from 1990-2006 and its GHG emissions increased by exactly the same number during that same period. In the United States, the population increased 43% from 1970 to 2004 and its GHG emissions increased 43% during that same period. The correlation is clear, is it not? Yet Sierra Club "analysts" in commenting on the governments emissions targets failed to even note Canada's immigrant-driven G-8 leading runaway population growth of 1.08%. Just as they were completely silent following the release of the March 07 census report. A stunning omission for an "environmental" organization.

Environment Minister Gordon Miller said that Southern Ontario can expect to have to jam another 6 million people into its agricultural region in the next 25 years if immigration rates are not curbed. And you want to "Grow the Greenbelt". How? "Smart Growth?" (Smart growth, Smart clear-cuts, Smart extinctions etc.) Check out what is happening to British Greenbelts, once 14% of the UK, now crumbling under development pressure. If Portland Oregon went down, anything will. There is no sanctuary from relentless population and economic growth. Renewable technologies? The energy produced by the 900 wind farm at Sarnia will be erased by the energy demands of 23 days of immigration. BC Hydro claims that if every British Columbian household turned their lights off for one hour it would provide enough power for 4000 households for a year. But the population growth rate in BC is such that in just one year everyone would have turn their lights off for 6 hours a day to power those 4000 households and in four years time everyone would have to leave their lights off permanently. Recycling is also futile. A British study revealed that one new citizen via the maternity ward or the airport wipes out 80 years of responsible re-cycling. I could go on. You get the point Mr. Hazell.

No, no. The point is not to quit recycling. Or to abandon the search for more efficient technologies. Or not to make more efficient and rational land use decisions. Etc. Etc. Rather, it is to point out that without population stabilization all of those worthy goals are pointless. That is why the Sierra Club of the United States was committed to it for most of its recent history and why one third of its current membership are trying to restore that commitment, led by a group of Sierrans called SUSPS (Sierrans for US Population Stabilization).

But I doubt, if you are a typical Canadian like me, that you will be interested in rocking the boat.

So get back to your mop and whistle your happy tune. Who knows, maybe Walt Disney was right, if you wish something to be true and avoid nasty thoughts and phrases like "over-population", "immigration", "limited carrying capacity" and "over-shoot" your Al Gore fantasy just might come true. By living greener lifestyles and vesting our hopes in renewable technologies, you might wish away the fact that there are twice as many Canadians here now as when I was born and pretend that doesn't make a whit of difference to the habitat they're destroying. Just whisper the magic words, “Aba-ka-dabra, Smart Growth!”, and presto! Done!

PS. Is there a technological fix for an extinct species?

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC.

The original article can be found on sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com.

It was a different world in the 1940s. Nearly half of Canadians and 40% of Americans lived outside urban areas. People grew much of their own food. During the war many had "victory" gardens and my parents had a farm in the Fraser Valley. As a boy my memories were that some things just were not available "out of season". No one expected that the full range of fruits and vegetables now exported from California and beyond should be provided as a matter of right. One other memory, when you ate a tomato or orange, you almost had to eat it over the sink. They were rich and obviously dense with nutrients.

That was a Canada of 10 million people (18 by 1960). Could a Canada of three times that number be fed that way? What happens to agriculture when it must serve an artificially high population base? When 18% of Class 1 farmland is covered with subdivisions to house more people, two-thirds of whom are imported? When to increase the productivity of that farmed land the soils are stripped of nutrients and filled with chemicals? What happens to our food? Thomas Pawlik answers that question in his book The End of Food.

Pawlik notes that since 1950 supermarket potatoes in Canada haven’t contained Vitamin A and their iron content has been reduced by 57%, along with their Vitamin C. Tomatoes have lost 61.5% of their calcium, 35.5% of their iron and 50% of their Vitamin A while gaining 200% more sodium. Of course, what’s got into livestock is an entirely new chapter. Bottom line: I have to eat five times as much of what I did in the 50s to get the equivalent amount of vitamins and minerals. We’re over-weight and yet under-fed.

We must ask some serious questions about agriculture in the face of runaway population growth and the collapse of the oil economy. We expect to feed a country like Canada which has only 5-7% of its land base as legitimately arable, with comparatively poor quality soil in relation to America, Britain and France and a population of 33 million that is currently growing faster than any G8 country. When the oil runs out, Canada and the United States might expect between one half to one third of its population to starve. (cf. Eating Fossil Fuels, Dale Pfeiffer).

According to an analysis by J.R. Wakefield of Komoka, Ontario, a typical Canadian city like London, population 400,000, in the heart of farm country, could not feed itself, despite conscripting all of its labour to replace petroleum dependent farm machinery. 200,000 draught animals would be needed, but even then, productivity per acre would drop dramatically, and of course, food could not be frozen for storage. "Relocalization" for the population we have is, as Wakefield has shown, a joke and a pipedream.

If that scenario is not to your liking, try climate change. James Lovelock says that the United Kingdom, to survive global warming, will have to confine human habitation to one-third the island’s land surface, devote one-third entirely to wilderness, and the last third to intensive agriculture. Here’s the trade-off. One can deliver low-nutrient food to a high volume of people, or high-nutrient food to a low volume of people. It is unlikely that 61 million British people, or more if current immigration rates persist, are going to fed by mechanized, oil-based, soil-depleting methods, so strike off the first option.

Whenever one warns of global warming, of course, Mary Poppins chimes in that this is good news for northern countries who could use a longer growing season. Yeah, but could we use the tropical pests and droughts? Australia is an object lesson on the dangers of letting land developers and politicians determine your population level without bothering to notice how climate change and water shortages will affect agricultural productivity.

In Canada post-carbon agriculture should give us a better product, but not for the market that has been built up the last 50 years. Agribusiness and its criminal mistreatment of the land is but the inevitable creature of the population explosion, not simply an extension of wicked capitalism. Its welcome demise with the death of oil and the re-emergence of small farming and backyard gardens will, like renewable energy sources, not even begin to save the day for the masses. Instead more labour-intensive farming that relies on manure and crop-rotation will provide nutrient-dense food for far fewer people.

We have been living on borrowed time. And some of us will survive to eat the way we were meant to----eating local produce, and eating it in season. Others, like myself, will likely succumb to disease, malnutrition or illness untreatable by a medical system that has collapsed under the weight of too many foreign passengers that developers, cheap labour employers and human rights activists have lobbied to bring to our shores.

Tim Murray

If the Canada of 1965 could have been preserved in aspic its medicare system might have been viable. But how is it now to contend with the massive numbers who make major claims on hospital services? Tim Murray, Director of Immigration Watch Canada describes the strains that runaway immigration levels have placed on Canada's health system.

A cynic might characterize Canada's medicare system as the universal, free, democratic and egalitarian access to a two-year waiting list. You jump the queue only if you have the bucks and the referral to jump over the 49th unless a life-threatening emergency sends you to the OR.

America's health care system on the other hand is discriminatory and expensive, but it offers immediate access to the best medical treatment in the world.

In both cases timely care for everyone is an elusive goal.

In any event Michael Moore's take on Canada is superficial, euphoric and unrealistic. New technology, abuse and the insatiable demands of an ever expanding clientele of elderly relatives sponsored by Third World immigrants is breaking the bank. It has been calculated that each sponsored immigrant in that age group will cost the Australian medical system $250,000. Since roughly 75% of Canadian immigrants and refugees, drawn from largely "non-traditional" sources, in fact consist of their unskilled dependent children, a terrifying portrait of the toll that Canadian immigration policy is taking on medicare could no doubt be drawn.

A recent article featured in the London Free Press (Thursday, March 13, 2008 "Hospitals forecast deficits") recognized population growth as one principal reason why the Canadian health system was on the brink of deficit financing, with half of Ontario's hospitals facing service cuts to meet the legal requirement for a balanced budget. Seventy percent of Canada's population growth is driven by immigration.

It was economist Milton Friedman who commented a decade ago that "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." As Robert Rector explained, to be properly understood, Friedman's observation should be viewed as applicable to the entire redistributive system of benefits, subsidies and services that lower income groups disproportionately enjoy at the expense of higher income groups.

Unfortunately this superstructure of benefits and services rests not only on an economic foundation but a cultural one as well. A people that is very much alike is more inclined to trust one another, and this trust translates into a willingness to vote for redistributive policies. But we are no longer a mostly ethnically homogeneous society with a shared respect for institutions and a shared sense of civic obligation. When a significant portion of the population is from another hemisphere, another culture or even another generation with different values, the welfare state is perceived as an unlocked candy store with services to be exploited to the maximum.

Redistributive policies like medicare are inversely correlated to cultural diversity. Rather than confront this reality, Canadian leftists demand yet more financial IV injections into the morbid body of the health care system. They refuse to acknowledge that even the Swedish Social Democrats, their role models, were forced to discover the "Laffer curve". That is, push the tax rate up beyond a certain level and tax revenues fall in response. Tax payers will not keep working and producing if they can't keep enough of their income. There are limits to what can be funded.

The Canadian model is not sustainable. It works only if there is enough public money to fund it and not enough patients with doctors to help them abuse it.

Those days are gone forever

Poet and author Mark O’Connor has written another important analysis of Australia’s ecological eclipse at the hands of the growth cult. While the continent is obviously unique in its botanical character with problems that don’t challenge Canadians, the similarities with Canada that O’Connor reveals in his description of the evolution of the growth ethic are simply astounding.

Like Canada, “Australia was, and still is, even though much trashed and abused, a treasure house of biodiversity,” toward which the people have a somewhat schizophrenic attitude. On the one hand, “Australians are genuinely proud of their wildlife…many people assign a very high, almost religious value to conserving nature”, as evidenced by their tolerance of crocodiles which make it impossible to swim in their waters. 10.7% of Australia is incorporated in a strategic network of parks.

Yet, O’Connor writes, “Attitudes to Australia’s biodiversity remain mixed.” It may be inspirational to watch them in flight but “people don’t appreciate kangaroos eating their crops.” Sadly Australian experience shows that democracy is not good at preserving other species---they don’t vote.  "(There is) a theme that runs through Australia’s ecological history: the clash between the desire to protect biodiversity versus the need of an ever-growing human population to make a quid from it.”

O’Connor reminds readers that Australia’s ecology was dynamic. While “we might prefer to praise the Aborigines’ achievement in living sustainably with the land for millennia, and contrast this with the damage eight generations of  European lifestyle have wrought,” Aboriginal hunters had already modified ecology by the fire regime they imposed before Europeans arrived. Paul Watson, it should be pointed out here, asserts that Aborigines killed off 85% of the continent’s megafauna before the British hit Botany Bay, an assertion that has been contested. Nevertherless, Watson is one of the very few Canadians not given to romantic illusions about indigenous stewardship of precious resources.

The foundation of Australia’s current ecological crisis, and that of Canada, is their false self-perception as vast empty lands desperately in need of more people: two bloated bulimics who look in the mirror and see themselves as Twiggy with lots of room to grow. The myth is best captured by Australia’s national anthem “Advance Australia Fair” when it says “For those who’ve come across the seas. We’ve boundless plains to share.”

But as O’Connor notes, Australia has only 6% of its land mass proven
as arable. For Canada it is 7% with soils marginal by European standards. As for wheat, because Australia provides 20% of the world’s wheat imports, feeding 40 million people, “boomers” argue that Australia could feed a far higher resident population than its current 21 million. But they forget that much of that foreign exchange is needed to pay for the fuel and nitrate fertilizer used for production, and soil loss, acidification and climate change will diminish yields. “Every tonne of wheat still costs some tones of eroded soil”, O’Connor observes.

Even so, with the drought tolerant wheat grown in fertile soils in a good year Australia produces less wheat than France, and in a bad year sometimes less than Britain. And all at the cost of ‘fascinating’ bio-regions cleared and species eliminated.

So if the big empty land in fact suffers from a limited carrying capacity, if food self-sufficiency is a myth, if biodiversity is taking a beating, why then does Australia seem in a frenzy to add to its numbers? (Canada could be asked the same question). Who drives growth? Qui Bono? Who Benefits?

The answer might be found in research done by the Australian Green Party that revealed that the governing Labor Party of New South Wales received $8.78 million in 1998-99 from property developers, while the opposition Coalition Parties received $6.35 million. Not surprisingly then, Sydney’s councils have been instructed to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people (24%) in 25 years so that Australia offers the paradox of a huge country with urban housing prices comparable to New York or London, where land prices double in a decade and its 1.5% population growth is higher than Indonesia’s and indeed many Third World countries.

“Local and even national newspapers run a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers---alternately with pieces about how we are desperately short of projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like.”

O’Connor cites Australia’s Anglo-Celtic property system for fuelling the drive to “fill the country with people” by rewarding private speculation in land. “By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.”

To footnote this observation, it should be noted that Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman has ably documented the relationship between the British property system and the population growth lobby on the one hand, and the French property system and the absence of anymeaningful lobby for growth in France on the other hand. Students of Canadian civic politics know that developers virtually own city councils. What sinister role do they play behind the scenes in framing federal immigration policy or influencing it? The Urban Futures Institute, a high profile Vancouver-based think tank, is a consistent cheerleader for massive immigration. Its former mouthpiece was “demographer” David Baxter who couched his arguments in demographic statistics to prove that he was in possession of a crystal ball. In fact, he had no credentials as a demographer. He was merely a front man for the real estate industry which fully funds the institute. He was guaranteed an interview by every media outlet when occasion demanded it.

Has any voice of caution or restraint been raised against this mad rush to ecological oblivion? Well there was the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-75 which reacted to the first Global Oil shock by limiting immigration and population growth. Then the Australian Academy of Science made a major public statement in 1994 that advised that Australia’s population not exceed 23 million and that immigration be half of what it was during the Hawke-Keating era. The Science Council of Canada issued a similar report in 1975 when it warned that Canada’s population should not go beyond 30 million. The government responded by abolishing the Science Council and then proceeding along a path that saw the land of frozen tundra, lakes and mountains fill up one-fifth of its Class 1 farmland with subdivisions and become a nation of 33 million with the fastest growth rate in the G8 group.

The Australian Democrats came out in favour of zero-net-migration, but the political culture was poisoned. Under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996, Australia was essentially a “plutocratic democracy” where voters were presented with a Hobson’s choice between parties who were “servants of business-growth lobbies”. While cognizant of conservationist sensibilities, “Hawke dared not offend the growth lobby.” But even the large immigrant communities were among the 73% of voters who in 1991 said immigration levels were too high, or the 71% in 1996 who held to this opinion. Again, Canadians have affected consistent opposition to immigration in the same proportions, but like Australians, have been presented with a solid parliamentary front in favour of a policy they detest.

But nevertheless, given the scale and persistence of this discontent, Labor’s spin-doctors needed to give the old myth of Australia, as an empty land, a make-over. There was no farmland available and urban land prices were beyond reach, so alright then, it would no longer be Australia’s manifest destiny to build a “great” nation but rather a “diverse” one. It would become a United Nations of ethnicities and races, sustained by permanent immigration, long after the pioneering period had passed. But the obsession with cultural diversity would trump concern for preserving biological diversity.

“Thus instead of being ashamed that we have lost so many of our marsupial species, many Australians on the left seem more ashamed that we do not have a flourishing Inuit or Bantu community in their particular city. Quite why it should be Australia’s duty to turn itself into a representative sample of the cultures of the earth is never explained. Instead, there are constant shouts that any reduction of immigration will lead us tumbling back into an abyss of ‘racism’ and ‘boring monoculturalsim’.”

“Hawke’s and Keating’s spin doctors even took advantage of the Anglo-Celtic guilt over having immigrated upon the Aboriginal tribes without their permission and violently displaced them. Somehow this became a further reason why high immigration, so long as it was no longer Anglo-Celtic, was essential­--as if inviting in the rest of the world would legitimize it.”

O’Connor forecasts that the incoming Labor government of Kevin Rudd will continue the traditional quest for economic growth, only addressing GHG issues if they do not compromise this goal. He compares Australia to “a cruise liner whose captain is required to sail in the direction chosen by a deck-steward whose priority is to keep the sun shining on the deckchairs in the saloon section, so that their occupants will order more drinks.”

The metaphor is an interesting one, for Canada too could be compared to a cruise liner: The HMS Ecological Titanic still robotically stopping to pick up more passengers as it ploughs forward toward the iceberg of over-population.

We may, albeit in diminished numbers, adapt to climate change, but we will not adapt to biodiversity collapse. O’Connor spoke of Australia’s botanical and ecological fragility, but this is what environmentalist Brishen Hoff said of Canada: “Our boreal forest continues to experience wholesale clearcutting and relentless road expansion. More water is being diverted from the Great Lakes watershed than what is being replenished, causing the highest lakes (Nipigon, Superior, etc.) to dramatically drop their water levels. I could go on with thousands of examples of species extinctions and worsening environmental quality right here in Ontario and Algoma-Manitoulin all because of human population growth.”

In fact most of the more than 500 threatened species dwell within the range of Canada’s major urban centres where they are imperiled by sprawling subdivisions, roughly 70% of which are occupied by immigrants. But remember, mass immigration is to be celebrated in Canada as, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “our great multicultural project.” Like Sydney, Vancouverites are told that they must move over and accommodate another 800,000 migrants in the coming 23 years (24% growth) and appreciate the newcomers for the “diversity” they bring. But at what cost this “cultural diversity”? An infinitely richer, more vital heritage. The biological diversity of the species that this growth will extinguish.

What’s the answer? O’Connor quotes Gordon Hocking of NSW: “As long as we stick with an economic system that needs to perpetually grow we will remain trapped on the road to ecological and climate disaster.” Brishen Hoff would add “None of these symptoms can be reversed without shrinking the size of our economy and then moving to a steady state economy.”

Bulimics gorge, then purge. Let’s hope our national binging ends soon and our demographic weight loss is progressive and incremental rather than dramatic and deadly.

Watch for Mark O’Connor’s upcoming book, “Overloading Australia”.

Tim Murray
Director of Immigration Watch Canada
8 January 2008

To read the Royal Bank's website, one might confuse this commercial goliath with the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth. A bank that in 2006 had a net income of $4,6 billion presents itself as the Jolly Green Giant of corporate Canada. Its "Environmental Blueprint" is 12 pages in length and talks of RBC's commitment to climate change, biodiversity, forests, indigenous peoples and our water supply." And it boasts that it has been named one of the world's top 100 sustainable companies, the first Canadian bank listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and is Canada's most respected corporation for the fourth year in a row. President and CEO Gordon M. Nixon stated that RBC's corporate responsibility can be seen in, among other things (how we) "support environmental sustainability". One problem. Mr. Nixon is the same man who spoke in favour of an RBC report in October of 2005 to raise immigration levels from 260 to 400,000 immigrants annually. The environmental cost of our current level of a quarter million immigrants a year, not to mention the levels Mr. Nixon advocates, is manifest. Urban growth has devoured up to one fifth of the country's Class 1 farmland, threatened perhaps more than two thirds of its endangered species and paved over wetlands. What propels this urban growth was suggested by a $3 million federally commissioned report submitted in 1997 by UBC's Dr. Michael Healey entitled "Prospects for Sustainability". It called for an immigration moratorium and Population Plan to rescue the ecosystems of the Fraser Valley and similar regions across Canada from immigrant-driven growth. He pointed out the federal Department of Immigration and federal Department of the Environment were working at cross purposes. Today it is guesstimated that perhaps 70% of all housing units built in the sprawling extensions of Canada's major cities are occupied by immigrants, but in Greater Vancouver that figure is more like 85%. Inter-provincial migration cannot be the convenient scapegoat for sprawl that immigrationists contend it is if the facts are faced. 1.08% annual population growth, the highest of all G8 countries, clearly has Canada's biodiversity up against the ropes, while Kyoto targets simply cannot be met. Population growth and rising GHG emissions go hand in hand. The absurd hypocrisy of RBC's stated "environmental objective" can be found in the proclamation that it is "committed to continuing to reduce our environmental footprint," while lobbying to have the government import 400,000 additional "footprints" each year through Pearson and Vancouver International airports. In its "Environmental Blueprint" it states that it will "not engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests (etc.)", and speaks of comprehensive environmental risk management policies. However, it doesn't say anything of deforestation in London, Ontario or any other of Canada's growing centres to build the new housing developments the bank finances. Apparently clearcuts are fair ball in Canada because they are not a cause celebre or in the media spotlight, but whether it is in the jungles of Borneo or a forest grove in the GTA carbon sequestration is equally important to the planet.. Nor does RBC invoke their vaunted "environmental due diligence" in stopping the sprawling subdivisions they underwrite from covering farmland. They talk only of their determination to "direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes." The Nature Conservancy of Canada is a perfect example of the Royal Bank's "philanthropy". By steering money to Nature Conservancy (NC) for each client who switches to electronic bank statements, NC provides RBC with ecological dispensation, the PR brownie points---or greenie points--- it needs to mask its raison d'etre. That is, of course, providing loans to developers and home buyers so that they can keep on building the sprawling subdivisions that are exterminating the wildlife that Nature Conservancy supposedly cares about. It is a symbiotic relationship. Nature Conservancy gets a big-time corporate bag man to collect donations and RBC buys credibility as an institution that cares about the environment. The Royal Bank would like to be seen as it sees itself, as the Dr. Jeckyll of corporate environmental responsibility, but its position statements are so much green window dressing, an archive of deception, for at night this "green" corporate citizen becomes a Mr. Hyde who wreaks havoc on biodiversity and the atmosphere by underwriting and pushing for rapid, unchecked economic and population growth. The benefits of runaway population growth to the major lending institutions are self-evident. More people, more demand. Demand for car loans, credit lines, and mortgages. Recently a credible argument was made that the Royal Bank was primarily interested in expanding its client base. (Canadian Immigration Reform, January 2/08) "Its about importing potential RBC clients.Canada's financial institutions realize that future client growth, thus profits, resides in immigration. No CEO wants to be in charge when share prices decline or remain stagnant." What is critical to the understanding of RBC's immigration politics is that the origin or complexion of immigrants is as important as their number. Canada must, CEO Nixon contends, "unleash the power of diversity if it wants to improve productivity and increase its standard of living." (The notion that one must have a diverse and heterogeneous society to achieve high productivity should come as news to the Japanese and Chinese.). Presently 80% of Canada's visible minorities are immigrants and almost 75% of them are visible minorities, who constitute 17% of the population. RBC wants to tap into this talent pool, hire and promote it and capture its business. It offers scholarships only to those born outside Canada. Most telling is that on the home page on Royal Bank Scholarships for New Canadians there is only a Chinese face presented to the reader, while on the Application checklist page, of the six young people pictured, three are "people of colour". Applicants are asked to write an essay on how "new immigrants have contributed to this country." No negative impacts are entertained. The underlying assumption of the literature is that due to its aging population, Canada will soon depend on immigration to grow its labour force and will have to compete for talented immigrants in the global marketplace. Unfortunately, few are talented as mass immigration is providing us with a superfluous population that generates GHG, crowds out wildlife habitat and , according to a Statscan report of May 2006, depresses wages and displaces jobs, including those of recent immigrants. And the so-called "skills shortage" is really, in the words of one 'Pax Canadiana', "a shortage in counter help at fast food restaurants," with Canadian engineering grads working them. One must also question the nature of the "diversity" that RBC champions. Just as it has co-opted the language of environmentalism with its liberal use of words like "sustainable", "footprint" and "green", the jargon of multiculturalism has been insinuated into corporate discourse. In a company committed to "building and maintaining an inclusive and respectful workplace", it is natural that every office needs a "Multicultural Calendar" like the one advertised in one of its links. In the month of January alone, 11 dates are set aside for equal commemoration, from Guru Gobind Singh's birthday on the 5th to "Pongal" on the 14th to the First of Muharramon on the 20th. But this kind of diversity is decorative. It is the fig leaf concealing a more calculating plan. RBC's diversity is much more focused than the United Nations. The kind of multiculturalism they have in mind is more like that of Richmond, B.C.---a monoculture. RBC, you see, is in pursuit of a more narrow, lucrative demographic---the South Asian population. Now 3% of the country, South Asians , as the fastest growing minority in Canada will double that percentage within the decade. By 2017, they will reach two million, equivalent to the number of Chinese-Canadians. The prospect of four million Canadians of South Asian and Chinese origin, augmented perhaps by even higher immigration levels, has RBC salivating. Clients of these cultural backgrounds save more, and take out more and bigger more mortgages than other groups. Bank branches located in Asian enclaves flourish. Simply put, Chinese and South Asians are a boon for the banking business. (cf. insideToronto.com Jan.17/08) It is not likely then, that the Royal Bank will be calling for a repeal of the White Paper of 1966 and a return to traditional immigration patterns. In a sense, RBC's immigration agenda is the inverse of the White Australia policy, but under a politically correct banner: "The Nearly All Asian Canadian Mass Immigration Policy" better expressed in code language: "Diversity". From this unflattering portrait a question emerges, what is the genesis of growth in Canada? It is not initiated by Ottawa. It is orchestrated by the big banks like RBC and big businesses who work with and pressure government to deliver population policy that will create the profits they want. A look at the political contributions made by the six biggest banks from 1982 to 2003 reveals just what they want from government. RBC really doesn't care a rat's backend for Official Multiculturalism. That's a smokescreen. Otherwise they wouldn't have contributed all that dough to the Reform Party and its successor, the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. No, their bottom line is population growth (read economic stimulus) and low corporate taxes. A tax policy customized for Chartered Banks and not for Food Banks. And the Liberal and Conservative Parties they've paid off so generously have delivered with the Grafkin-Angus Report that recommends just that. Meanwhile food banks in Ontario have grown 14.3% since 2001. RBC and its corporate competitors are not beneficent enterprises. Chip off the green paint and the statements about corporate social responsibility and its still an organization that is about making profits for its shareholders and pursuing the obsolete and lethal paradigm of economic growth. But RBC does not work alone. It lobbies Ottawa for mass immigration at absurd levels and a growth rate which will accelerate the destruction of our environment, then cloaks its malevolence by green pronouncements, trivial green corporate practices and an unseemly arrangement with a high profile conservation group who lends the bank legitimacy in return for hush money. This group accepts the bank's money in return for saying nothing about the fact that immigration is eclipsing the wildlife it claims to be the guardian of. The collusion of big banks, environmental groups and the government's Multicultural Industry is a partnership in crime. RBC, Nature Conservancy, Multicultural-Immigration. A Triad of Ecological Ruin.

I had quite the educational experience on Tuesday night (18 Dec 07). The phone rang at 8:30 pm and the call display read "Ontario". Who would be phoning me from Ontario at one half hour past 11 pm? Probably one of those persistent telemarketers. Yet it could be pertaining to a personal or environmental matter. Better take a chance. "Hello, Mr. Murray? I am calling on behalf of the New Democratic Party of Canada." Immediately I cut her off and launched into a rant that was broken only two minutes later by her strident objections. Everything I said flowed without a break from my lips as I knew all the statistics by heart: "The New Democratic Party, is that the party that favours 1% plus immigration for this country when there is clear evidence that population growth drives GHG emissions, when biodiversity in urban Canada is being destroyed by immigrant-driven growth , the party that pretends that something called smart growth will defend wildlife and farmland and somehow stop people from generating waste and pollution.?" "Wait, she interjected with sublimated anger, "you can't blame immigrants for these things ..." "You can blame population growth which is driven by immigration" and before she could get a word in edge-wise, I fired my three favourite correlations at her. "Did you know that since 1990 Australia's population grew by 30% and its GHG grew by 30%, that between 1970 and 2004 America's population and GHG emissions both grew by an identical 43% and that between 1990 and 2006 Canada grew by 19% and its GHG was up by 24%?" In an argument I heard last spring on the Internet, when a critic stated that a typical immigrant arriving at Pearson International consumed much less than the typical Canadian, this socialist lady, carrying an Indo-Canadian accent, vociferously denied that immigrants were doing anything to impact our environment negatively. "I don't see a problem with taking more", she said. She went on to say that claiming that population growth caused GHG emissions was simplistic and flawed. "Otherwise, why hasn't India more GHG emissions than us. You have got to be more holistic in your thinking." It was at that point I realized that I had taken the wrong tact in this debate. I should have begun my rant with an attack on economic growth, not population. So I had to make amends. "You are right. We have to take a holistic approach. But the NDP, the Greens and the Sierra Club aren't taking it. Our focus should be the damage that Economic Growth is causing the environment. But realize that economic growth is a function of population level and per capita consumption. If all you want to do is tell Canadians to reduce consumption, as do the Greens and the environmentalists, then we are going to have reduce to unbearably Spartan levels if you allow population to climb. If I freeze population, but permit Canadians to merrily consume at even greater amounts, then population will have to be reduced further." "So are you saying no more Economic growth?."she asked. "The planet is saying that and I am joining the chorus." "No one can get elected on that platform, besides, (and this is the classic cliché) we can have economic growth and a clean environment too. We couldn't promote our Climate Change strategy if people thought we were against economic growth." "Do you know there was a British study revealed on the 4th of this month that said that if we don't stop Economic Growth, we're finished, because we'll pass the 2 degree rise in global temperature threshold." "Oh, they have been saying things like that for years. They said they would never be able to feed the world and they were proven wrong." "Actually, just wait a while, and you will see what happens to modern agriculture without oil. Some say one-third of us will die." "You haven't thought of technology." At that I interjected, not that old song. Renewables are a joke. Maybe 3% of our needs so far. But if I am wrong on that, google "Jevons Paradox". Technological efficiences just promote more consumption, and more births too. "So who are you going to vote for then?" she challenged. "The Conservatives? They are worse than us surely." "I don't know that they are", I replied. " Premier Calvert left office with GHG emissions 60% higher than when he came in. I think a write-in ballot would be a good choice." At that she announced that it was midnight and she must sign off. My opinions, as filtered by the interviewer, would be relayed to someone higher up the chain of pre-fabricated thought. My conclusion? Again, if immigration is to be discussed, it must be discussed within the context of population stabilization. But the latter in turn should be discussed within the framework of a steady state economy. Immigration/population growth waves a lot of red flags and before a dialogue can get untracked the debate spirals into emotional outbursts. I think Neil Dawe has been right about this one from Day 1. Secondly, I doubt that much is to be gained from debating Socialists or Greens on population issues. Their minds are set in concrete and are unable to break free and think outside their tight box. We have to target people who don't think in clichés. Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC 18 December 2007

The autopsy on the 17 year reign of Saskatchewan premier Lorne Calvert must conclude the he lived and died a liar. Like his colleagues across Canada, he promised us that we could have our cake and eat it too. After seeing his province’s greenhouse gas emissions grow more than 60% since 1990, he still had the cheek in 2006 to promise his audience that “while continuing to grow the Saskatchewan economy, we will stabilize the absolute level of green house gas emissions by 2010.” It is doubtful that even Houdini could accomplish that feat, as no jurisdiction in the world has contained or reduced GHG emissions while experiencing population and/or economic growth simultaneously. Like so many politicians today, Calvert was master of oxymoronic dualities. A “Green Strategy” in tandem with the “Saskatchewan Action Plan for The Economy”. A “healthy” environment that can coexist and indeed proceed through our economy. Calvert was like the quack doctor of a fast buck diet centre that promises you that you can lose 50 pounds a month and still enjoy a litre of ice cream every day. But then, it’s a proven marketing recipe these days, isn’t it? Who doesn’t promise an economic boom with a Green agenda? A “clean” environment with a “robust” economy? Two solitudes. Matter and anti-matter, can come together in wedded bliss. All it takes is green Newspeak and spin. Lorne wasn’t shy about his promises. He said that thanks to his initiatives Saskatchewan would reduce GHG 80% by 2050, by various conservation and efficiency measures from industry, business and homeowners. Trouble with efficiencies though, is that they tend to get wiped out by the very growth that Lorne promoted. During the time that the efficiency of air conditioners improved by 17%, for example, the number of air conditioners grew by 36%. It’s called Jevon’s paradox, or if you prefer, the Khazoom-Brooke postulate. Then he promised more natural carbon sinks from Saskatchewan’s boreal forests. Too bad he presided over the logging of so much it so that he could reap the royalties of the growth is craved so much. Calvert made similar promises about eradicating child poverty. When he was ejected from office in November, Saskatchewan still had the third worst child poverty rate in the country, 2.4% above the national average. Second worst was the neighbouring fellow NDP province of Manitoba, at 4.1% above the national average, where 49% of residents of the capital city of Winnipeg in a recent poll complained that their growthist, social-democratic government also failed to solve poverty. It is as Dr. Peter Victor of the University of York observed, growth is not particularly effective at eliminating poverty, creating full employment, or safe-guarding the environment. Since 1976, as both the GDP and the greenhouse gas emissions have gone up consistently, levels of unemployment and poverty have bounced around. Lorne Calvert believed in social and environmental alchemy. He believed that population and economic growth could be sequestered from ecological consequences, and even if it couldn’t, he was on record as saying that it was acceptable as long as its benefits were equitably distributed. A social democrat of the 1960s vintage, he’s now been relegated to the dustbin of history. But lamentably, his place has been quickly taken up by ten equally myopic and deceptive premiers and a Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who just took the John Howard award for Global Miscreant in Germany by postponing our Kyoto target 13 precious years. Taking the classic cake-and-eat it approach, Harper is proposing a so-called “intensity-based” reduction plan which would allow countries like China and India to join in climate change efforts “without having to sacrifice their economies.” Go on a diet, but keep eating your ice cream. Harper et al obviously haven’t been apprised of the latest terrifying research. It appears that Chanceller Merkel’s prescriptions or that of the IPCC’s are far too moderate. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters finds that even a 90% global cut in emissions by 2050 will see the fatal 2 degree temperature rise threshold broken. We need a 100% cut. The total decarbonization of the economy. But the news is even more shattering than that. Professor Rod Smith of the Royal Academy of Engineering reveals that each period of economic growth that it takes the economy to double causes the economy to consume as many resources as all previous doubling periods combined. Says journalist George Monbiot, “in other words, if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs.” Translation: we must halt growth. Using these guidelines, if Canada continues to grow at 3.6% annually as it has since 1990, its economy will double in a mere 20 years. It would stretch credulity to the extreme for Canadian politicians to perpetuate the pretence that this kind of economic growth can happily coexist with an effective climate change strategy, or that a nation that grew its population by 19% since the Kyoto base line year could expect to meet a 6% GHG reduction target by 2008. Little wonder Harper backed out of his commitment. Reducing immigration, of course, is an option outside Ottawa’s imagination. It ‘s time for politicians to stop telling us The Big Lie. The lie that there is no correlation between economic and population growth and environmental degradation. It is no accident that in the United States, between 1970 and 2004, both GHG emissions and the population rose by 43%, and that between 1990 and 2006 the increase in GHG emissions in Australia almost exactly matched that of population. Population levels coupled with per capita consumption, produces economic growth. The imminent ecological crisis makes it clear. It is showdown time in the OK Corral. It’s us facing Growth. Our own Frankenstein. We won’t walk out of the corral together. Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC Canada December 8/07

Peace in our time, Habitat forever?

For those who recall the scene when Neville Chamberlain stepped down on the tarmac of London's Heston aerodrome on September 30th of 1938 waving his piece of paper, the #announcement">announcement by the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia (B.C.) on October 16, 2007 must have seemed like déjà vu. On both occasions, an announcement promising 'peace in our time' (for people or wildlife) was met with jubilant relief from people who wanted to believe that the insatiable appetite of a monster can be appeased with an hors d'oeuvre.

In 1938 the monster was Adolf Hitler and he was not to be believed or trusted. In 2007 the monster is economic growth, and its need for lebensraum will not stop at greenbelts, farmland, wetlands and nature reserves. It will devour what it needs to fuel its momentum and bend governments and laws to serve its ends. The strictest land use plans will fall before its armies. Even the home of 'smart growth', Portland, Oregon, stood helpless as growth forced population to spill over tight urban boundaries into adjacent farmland. British greenbelts are beginning to suffer the same fate. As planning consultant Eben Fodor was moved to comment, "smart growth is merely the planned, orderly destruction of our remaining environment."

Economic growth is a function of population growth, driven in North America largely by immigration, coupled with obscenely excessive consumption---and it is crowding out wildlife habitat. The question is, can the dedication of conservation areas permanently shield wildlife and flora from developmental pressures? Experience suggests that it cannot.

In their 2005 Report, the National Refuge Association of the U.S. revealed that "many endangered or threatened species are not even found on the refuges, including 40% of all listed mammals, birds and reptiles, 75% of listed fish and amphibians, and about 85% of listed plants and invertebrates." The area outside refuges will be more and more a killing zone. Much of the 40% of all housing units that will exist in America in 2030 will be built on previously open lands, and "lands within five miles of fully 78% of the western refuges have been mined, drilled , offered to or otherwise controlled by mining, oil and gas interests." And nearly 40% of refuges have greater than 50% human-impacted landscape within 5 to 40 miles. Particularly vulnerable are the 20% of wildlife refuges smaller than 1000 acres, or refuges fragmented into small parcels that can't adequately defend the ranges of the species that need protection.

Of course, the #announcement">announcement on October 16 by the B.C. government offers habitat protection on a vastly larger scale. An area twice the size of Jamaica of old growth cedar, pine and spruce, and a buffer of forest that is to be harvested with sensitive care. The coalition of ten environmental groups who fought for the habitat are sanguine. But even with 2.2 million hectares set aside, they would be advised to keep their powder dry. Especially when you look at the province's barren mountainsides and remember the government slogan, "Forests Forever".

The hard truth is, as long as economic growth runs loose like a mad dog, no land of any size is safe from predation. Growing populations and growing development envelop pristine sanctuaries, reach a tipping point, and then the resources that these sanctuaries are harbouring will be ravaged. Just as the B.C. government set aside this Mountain Cariboo habitat, the U.S. Congress once established Yosemite National Park. When mining and logging interests came knocking at the door, with the stroke of a pen, Congress released 1400 hectares of the precious park for their exploitation.

Shocking betrayals of this kind by government have and will be made when the economic chips are down, as the Plains Indians will attest. The solemn Treaty of Laramie guaranteed the sacred Black Hills to the Lakota people in perpetuity, but when white prospectors found gold, all bets were off and the monster was let loose. Miners flooded the area and in just eight years the Dakota territory was a white colony and the sacred hills a hub of activity.

One day soon, in a country near you, with the oil the price of gold and power down, there will be a desperate and ruthless scramble to use up resources wherever they can be found, even behind the sacrosanct walls of conservation lands. And government will pave the way.

First it was the tiny Sudetenland, then it was Poland and then it was the vast steppes of Russia. Feed a crocodile a morsel and he becomes stronger and bolder, coming back for more and more. The only safety for nature is to slay the beast, not to hide from it within the confines of a National Park. Economic growth must be stopped and a steady state economy instituted. Now.

Tim Murray, dirrector of Immigration Watch Canada
Quadra Island, BC
Canada
October 25/07

Premier Lorne Calvert, New Democratic Party (NDP) Premier of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, in calling an election for November 7, declared that growth was a good thing, so long as it was "shared". This fascinating concept is meant to stake out a distinctive position for social democrats on the ideological spectrum. Whereas the Saskatchewan Party and the Liberals---the "right"---follow the old formula that growth of any kind is to be promoted because of an alleged "trickle-down"effect whereby even the poorest citizens feel its benefits, the New Democrats are so much more enlightened. While their opponents are campaigning from a 1925 policy book, the NDP is way ahead of them waving their 1961 ideas. Some choice. 1925 or 1961, as environmental Armageddon looms on the horizon. Calvert's thesis evokes interesting logic. His manifesto would read: It's OK to rob a bank so long as the proceeds of the robbery are shared among the fashionably oppressed constituency of the NDP. The 'working people' (Businessmen don't work). First Nations. The handicapped. Seniors. Single Moms. Transexual Dwarfs, whatever. It's OK to clear-cut old growth forests if timber revenues are equitably shared. It's OK to develop farmland if the sale of homes in new subdivisions reaps sales tax revenues for the provincial treasury and they are equitably shared. It's OK to generate radioactive waste if the nuclear plant provides power for low-income people. It's OK to wipe out an endangered species if the housing built on its habitat provides affordable options for low-income people. Growth is OK so long as it is shared. And if you still feel uneasy about it, go to the NDP website for Saskatchewan or Manitoba , and you will find that growth becomes "sustainable". Sustainable growth? Virgin birth! Whether these snake oil salesmen represent the left or the right, or the environmental movement, they can't make growth palatable to discerning taste by sugar-coating it with these oxymoronic neologisms that attempt to cloak the fact that economic expansion in a finite environment cannot be sustained. Calling it "shared", "sustainable", "managed" or "smart" will not rescue it from this ironclad law. Get real Calvert. Tim Murray, Quadra Island, BC Canada V0P 1N0

Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes it taboo to discuss the population question and to air views that are critical of immigration? …

Since the early seventies, “a steady and insidious process among governing circles, opinion-formers, the greater bulk of the media, including the BBC, has built a powerful and near universal censorship, by consent…that the absolutely fundamental ecology question, the need for a sustainable balance between numbers and resources---is almost totally ignored. The sad corollary of this is that mass migration---since it has a major and obvious impact on the overall population situation---cannot be rationally discussed either.”

Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes it taboo to discuss the population question and to air views that are critical of immigration? If so, where is it coming from: the journalists, the presenters, the researchers, the producers or the administrators? Is state media more a captive of political correctness than the private media?

In attempting to answer some of these questions, it is useful to look at two fascinating accounts, one about the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC), another about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) and finally to summarize the disgraceful record of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

In “The Treason of the BBC” , the late Jack Parsons argued that “The BBC has been systematically excluding virtually all material on the question of basic population policy.” For example, BBC reporters allowed Beverly Hughes, a former Minister of Immigration, to “blandly repeat, unchallenged, the government’s mindless policy of continued mass immigration to meet the alleged needs of the economy.” Also, it granted a free pass to former Home Secretary Charles Clark to say that there were ‘no obvious limits’ to net migration and rapid growth. At the same time, the BBC did not question the fact that “our present government has adopted a policy (without discussion or mandate) of deliberately increasing our numbers by about one million every five years,” making Britain the fastest growing country in Europe with a population density almost twice that of China.

Parsons asks, “How can BBC claims about the carrying capacity of the prison system and its “overpopulation” be made so openly, so effortlessly, so devoid of fear and moral opprobrium, while not the slightest hint can ever be allowed to slip out vis a vis the vastly more important case of the carrying capacity and numbers of the nation as a whole?”

He accuses those who run the BBC of “colluding in a very Great Betrayal, fostering the myth that human numbers have so little consequence that there is no need to take them seriously.” “The charge I am leveling at all executive levels of the BBC as a corporate body concerns what I am convinced is coercive, institutionalized bias which for years has prevented virtually all BBC news of, and discussion about, a literally vital object, the long-term balance between human numbers, resources and the quality of life…; this was not always so, but has been the case for at least 15 years."

The signs of population myopia were apparent to Parsons in 1967 when he asked the BBC why it was so concerned about the Tory Canyon Oil-Tanker Spill disaster, but so unconcerned about the doubling of the world’s population in 30 years. Since the early seventies, “a steady and insidious process among governing circles, opinion-formers, the greater bulk of the media, including the BBC, has built a powerful and near universal censorship, by consent…that the absolutely fundamental ecology question, the need for a sustainable balance between numbers and resources---is almost totally ignored. The sad corollary of this is that mass migration---since it has a major and obvious impact on the overall population situation---cannot be rationally discussed either.”

Parsons, in a letter to a BBC Complaints Unit, asks, “Dare one hope that, one of these days, someone in the higher echelons of the BBC will screw his/her courage to the sticking point and actually issue and follow through on a set of instructions that free the BBC---and hence the nation­from this appalling and near-totally disabling taboo.” He is given to wonder “Why does this large, wealthy, powerful, highly prestigious institution…cringe so abjectly at the very idea of free speech in the realm of discourse?” And why the taboo? “Has there been an explicit but secret directive to all producers to steer clear of the subject? Has this policy been built up by means of nods, winks and frowns on high; or does it stem from tacit acceptance by all concerned at the prevailing orthodoxy in the wider society?”

According to Parsons, four things are needed to reform the BBC. Firstly, there needs to be major change in ‘media Zeitgeist’ (thinking) that will permit an open discussion about population. Secondly, the BBC needs to “stop cowering beneath its cloak of political correctness” and, by honest analysis, foster the emergence of a mature, ecologically informed electorate. Thirdly, the BBC needs to hire reporters who are population experts. “Some BBC presenters, who have an overweening confidence in their qualifications, start laying down the law on those population topics which are allowed a mention, and in the process frequently display their ignorance…They pick up and mindlessly repeat half-baked notions about alleged labour shortages and pension problems, and swallow hook, line and sinker any free-floating opinions about how much better things will continue to become as numbers inexorably swell.”

Fourthly, it would be nice if the BBC followed its own Producer Guidelines. “Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All BBC programmes and services should be open-minded, fair and show a respect for truth. No significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented at the BBC.”

Until then, however, its Motto will remain that of the Three allegedly Wise Monkeys: See no population problem! Hear no population problem! Speak no population problem!

Mark O’Connor, poet and one-time Vice-President of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP, re-named SPA), has made a similar assessment of the ABC. In his upcoming book, "Overloading Australia", O’Connor concedes that the ABC is critical to Australian democracy and is able to speak to the people---“and often does”. “But the ABC has in some parts of its news and current affairs sections failed to provide objectivity or fairness to portray debates or news coverage relating to population, immigration or economics." It is living the Comfortable Lie: that growth is good and sustainable, and that the mass immigration that fuels it must continue. “The fact must be faced. There is something deeply wrong in some parts of it.”

But O'Connor is unable to locate precisely where the fault lies. Whether researchers withhold information from presenters, or presenters refuse to use the research provided to them, or whether producers, strategy planners or management dictate programming, is a question outside observers can't answer. "But there certainly is a bias," he asserts.

He offers some examples of this bias. During those years when Australia had the highest per capita immigrant intake of any country in the world, the ABC refused to challenge propagandists who illogically and brazenly claimed that Australia's high immigration intake was "shamefully low" and "proof of racism". In addition, the ABC collaborated with both the government and the opposition party to promote high immigration by ignoring inconvenient facts like the one about Australia's high per capita immigrant intake and suppressing most of the debate. And while going after the jugular of the One Nation Party as if it were alone in its call for a zero net immigration policy, “among its many acts of censorship, ABC TV News suppressed the fact that the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Democrats (two other parties) had long been calling for zero net migration."

O’Connor speculates as to why the ABC behaves in this manner. “The ABC’s failure through nearly three decades to deal with population issues ­the most important matter facing Australia today--- may have less to do with individuals than with a pervasive institutional culture.” Nevertheless, “if there are such persons blocking the debate, then it is assuredly time they were persuaded to move on to other areas where their biases will do less harm.”

He concludes, “The ABC has a problem with its news service and current affairs programs. It may not be able to rectify past unfairness, but it needs urgently to offer guarantees that the censorship will cease, and that at least in future those who disagree with high immigration or with ‘birth-bribes’ will receive equal time on its programs.” New ‘balance and accountability’ guidelines announced by management in October of 2006 “will not address ABC News’ pro-growth, pro-natalist, pro-conventional economic views.”

Can what has so far been said of the BBC and the ABC be said of the CBC as well? In one word, yes, and more. While some regional centres have attempted to bring more balance to immigration issues, CBC Radio, especially the National centre in Toronto and the Vancouver centre, have emphatically not. In general, the CBC (like the ABC previously) has refused to engage the public on the two questions that critics keep asking: Why is the government importing more people per capita than any other country in the world? And what effect is this infux, which gives us the highest growth rate of any G8 nation, having on our economic, cultural and environmental health?

Timidity and cowardice are not the exclusive province of CBC journalists, but the fact is that only the private media outlets have on occasion exposed abuses of the immigration system and questioned the country’s high immigration intake. The CBC, on the other hand, has done what it can to promote mass immigration on the basis of its misinterpretation of its 1991 legislated mandate to promote “multiculturalism”. Somehow, CBC logic equates the stated “CBC Vision” (to reflect “the cultural diversity of our people”) with support for mass immigration. In addition, to the CBC, the promotion of a diversity of cultures displaces the promotion of a diversity of opinions.

Those very many Canadians who voice negative concerns about immigration are simply denied airtime by the people they subsidize. As Immigration Watch Canada has noted, the CBC sees no contradiction between holding out one hand to ask for public funding while clenching the other in a fist to drive into the mouth of the taxpayer who dares to challenge the CBC line on immigration. Furthermore, the CBC allows generous airtime and interviews with pro-immigration groups, so that they may in turn, as a quid pro quo, advertise for the non-commercial CBC. So to partiality and deceit, one can therefore add corruption to the list of CBC immigration vices.

So what then is the remedy? Suffice it to say that the CBC’s commitment to mass immigration and multiculturalism comes at the cost of balanced, honest journalism. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage can obviously rectify this situation by ordering the CBC executive to answer for this conflict of interest. It can further help by demanding that the CBC terminate the corporation’s corrupt arrangements with the immigration industry, its blatant pro-immigration advocacy and the employment of its employees who engage in it.

Such measures would seek not to curb journalistic freedom, but to end shameless CBC journalistic abuse---and return public broadcasting to the public. As with the BBC and ABC, our National Broadcaster should be offering a forum where indeed “no significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented”. The exclusion of topics or the shunning of voices should be foreign to its corporate culture and democratic mission.

The BBC, ABC and CBC conspiracy to silence critics of immigration and population growth has been an insult to democracy and to the public that has had to put up with it. The conspiracy has to end now.