Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

No sooner did Madeline Weld finish her CBC interview about human overpopulation, when the Green-Left brigade swung into action trying to douse the flames ignited by truth. But this time they were too late. The truth got out.

This is a podcast of the 20 minute discussion (and debate) between Madeline Weld and Robert Engleman.
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2011-2012/qq-2011-10-29_04.mp3

While I was not impressed by Engleman's dismissive and somewhat condescending tone----or with his arguments for that matter---- for an exercise in pure denial try this response from Canada's very own Ian Angus, who is allied with fellow ego-socialists like Australian Simon Butler of The Green-Left weekly and Derek Wall of the Green Party of England and Wales http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=5707 . Having just published a 'population-is-a-red-herring--and--old---Malthusian--myth' book and conducted a misinformation tour of Australia, these folks are in fever-pitch to fight off reality wherever it turns its ugly head.

Angus must be kicking himself though, because this time, it appears he and his smear network were asleep at the switch when the CBC invited Madeline to their show. Normally they are vigilant about upcoming media interviews with Malthusians and immigration-reformers and are quick to forewarn the producers, editors and journalists that we are racist, anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-people and apologists for the rich and greedy. That's why we often find that the interview or op-ed that was promised to us has been cancelled without credible reasons given. This time, however, we slipped through before the blacklist could be made operational. This might prove that Angus might have a life after all. Maybe he was distracted by important things------ who knows. But he clearly let his side down on this one. Some Grand Inquistor he is. Writing a letter to the producer AFTER the fact is like closing the barn door after the horse has got away.

Ian, if you are going to fill Joe McCarthy's shoes you are going to have to put all you have into it. Silencing the population debate must be a full-time job. Letting us in the door to exercise our freedom of speech is simply unacceptable. What kind of blacklister are you, any way? I'll bet Betsy Hartman won't even speak to you now.

Never mind, its too late now. The damage has been done. Madeline Weld has spoken the truth and 500,000 Canadians heard it. At last.

Tim Murray

PS Mr. Angus thinks population concerns are purely ideological and without scientific merit. What one wonders then, is what exactly is scientific about his assertion that population numbers are irrelevant. I think he needs to visit an optometrist. He seems to have trouble seeing elephants at close quarters.

On October 29, CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks featured two guests to discuss the world at 7 billion people, Robert Engelman, President of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington and Madeline Weld, President of the Population Institute of Canada.

Podcast of Quirks and Quarks program on World at 7 Billion

.

The United Nations estimates that on October 31st, the world's population will reach 7 billion. Although the actual number is not certain, it does underlie the fact that our population is growing at an alarming rate. It took until the early 1800's to reach the 1 billion mark, but the last 50 years alone have seen the births of 4 of the total 7 billion This rapid increase raises the question, how many more people can the earth sustain? Or have we already surpassed the earth's capacity? Among the many people asking questions like this are Dr. Madeline Weld, President of the Ottawa-based Population Institute of Canada, and Robert Engelman, President of The Worldwatch Institute in Washington. They discuss how various factors - including access to contraception, the empowerment of women, poverty, consumerism, and the environment - apply to our population growth, now and in the future.

God chooses Canada's ruin while we remain mum

Once again the silence was deafening. One might recall that in March of 2007 the Canadian census report was released and revealed that immigrant-driven growth made Canada the fastest growing country in the G-8 at a ruinous pace of 5.4% in 5 years. 70% of that portion was attributable to immigration and its effects were evident in farmland and species loss as well as pollution and pressure on landfills and fisheries, among other things. But not a single environmental organization chose to counter what became a cheerleading chorus amongst editorialists and commentators across the country for our record growth.

Now it seems that the cat still has environmentalists' tongue. On Saturday July 26th, 2008, in a story that was repeated in many other news outlets, The Canadian Press reported that a Romanian immigrant couple in Abbotsford, British Columbia had their 18th child in 23 years, 13 of whom have been born since they came to Canada in 1990.

They explained that they "never planned how many children to have.we just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that's the reason we did not stop life."

Seeing how it is God's personal choice, apparently neither the Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation, or the other major environmental groups are making mention of the environmental impact that this Romanian couple, the "Ionces", are having on the planet. Even so, by living in Canada rather than Romania, each Ionce child is , by 2003 footprinting data, contributing 2.73 times more GHG emissions to the atmosphere than he or she is had he or she stayed in Romania. The total cost to the planet for God's personal choice, and the Immigration Minister's decision to let the Ionces emigrate to Canada, is 314.82 metric tonnes per year for the 18 children.

British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell and his Environment Minister Barry Penner just finished spending a bundle of taxpayer money on glossy propaganda pushing his fancy "carbon tax" scheme which is supposed to do wonders to counter climate change in this province. Oddly, no comment issued forth from his office about God's personal choice in Abbotsford to thwart the good effects of the carbon tax scheme.

I think that could be for the very good reason that neither the Premier of British Columbia nor any politician in Canada nor any environmental organization in our country will ever acknowledge a link between population growth via the maternity ward or the airport and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

As could be predicted, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporatian (CBC), the public broadcasting network that we are constantly told is necessary to give us a critical perspective that commercial broadcasting doesn't give us, failed to offer any critical commentary of the story, but just parroted what the Canadian Press already provided, as a heart warming human interest tale.

Didn't Simon and Garfunkel do a song called "The Sounds of Silence"? Could have been the theme song about our population debate.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 27, 2008

Postscript: The British newsmedia gave similar treatment to woman pregnant with her 14 child in the story of 21 July 2008:

Mother of 13 pregnant with number 14 just seven months after she last gave birth

Just seven months after giving birth to her 13th child, size zero mother Joanne Watson is delighted to be pregnant again.

The slim 37-year-old says she loves being pregnant and is lucky enough to have regained her pre-pregnancy figure of 7st 5lb after the birth of every child.

Just five days after giving birth to child number 13, daughter Tallulah, the supermum had no problem squeezing into a pair of size six (American size zero) jeans.

'I'm lucky because I always sail through my pregnancies and have no symptoms whatsoever,' says Joanne, who is three months pregnant.

Husband John, a 42-year-old haulier added: 'I feel like I'm the happiest daddy in the world. To have so many healthy happy children and a wife who has such a fabulous figure is amazing.'

...

See also: Pronatalist Policy in Australia: 1945-2000 of 28 Jun 08 by Sheila Newman

An Analysis You Don't Get From the PC CBC

I once wrote that the CBC was an infallible guide as to what was not happening at home or abroad. It was like a weathervane that if it pointed in one direction, it offered me the assurance that the wind was blowing in exactly the opposite direction. Yet so many people for so many generations have been spoon fed information from Mother Corp that they have come to accept it as gospel when it is not. Pull the plug and maybe, just maybe, these people might learn to shop around , compare sources, match them with reality and feed themselves. Then bingo, a generation of smart, self-sufficient information consumers might emerge in this country.

The CBC treatment of the South African riots presented a case history of prefabricated politically correct journalism. The CBC reporter on assignment need not have bothered going to South Africa—he could have simply huddled with his former journalism professor in Ottawa at Carleton and written up a good storyline about xenophobic rioters who take out their misery upon poor foreigners who have a right to displace their jobs. The xenophobia template has served the CBC well for stories about riots in France, Germany, Cronulla and elsewhere—there is really no need for complexity or idiosyncratic national difference. The theme is the same. The rioters are an ignorant, reactionary, racist, evil bunch who are being manipulated by sinister forces. The foreign element must be accommodated without restriction.

Watching the CBC cover such events is like eating at MacDonalds. It is fast food journalism. It is news in a hurry all right, but it doesn't go down well. And it is the same old crap. Not very nutritious for the mind. Surely we are better off without the CBC. We are better off on a diet. Better just to shut our eyes rather than look at the world through their lens. Ordinary Canadians have an instinct for truth and balance that public broadcasting apparently doesn't have, as evidenced by this commentary I received from James Schipper of London, Ontario. It is about the tyranny in Zimbabwe that led to the riots in South Africa that the CBC allegedly was "covering". The CBC, however, did not take his holistic view of the problem which would have made the South African situation comprehensible. Schipper's common sense is the kind that our journalism schools filter out and the CBC doesn't hire. Schipper on emigration as a safety valve for dictators:

Zimbabwe illustrates how emigration allows countries to export problems and how emigration can delay political reforms. It should be obvious that Zimbabwe has massive problems. This has led millions of Zimbabweans to go abroad to SA, where they are competing against domestic unskilled labor, which is already superabundant and therefore plagued by high unemployment and low wages. The results have been the recent "xenophobic" attacks on foreigners. Zimbabwe simply exported its self-inflicted economic problems to SA.

Of course, this would not have been possible without the indulgence of the SA government, which has done very little to stem the massive inflow of Zimbabweans into its territory. Countries can't export their problems through emigration unless the country that is importing them allows it to happen.

What would have happened if no Zimbabweans had been permitted to settle abroad? Most likely, the economic situation in Zimbabwe would have become so desperate that there would have been a massive popular uprising and the overthrow of Mugabe's regime. In the short term, the situation might have been even worse, but the long- term prospects of Zimbabwe would have been better.

Emigration is a safety valve that helps tyrants to stay in power. When people know that they can't go abroad to escape the problems of their country, they have a very strong incentive to try to solve or mitigate those problems, while governments, knowing that the safety valve of emigration does not exist anymore, have stronger incentives to improve their performance.

As a postscript to Schipper's commentary I am moved to pose the question that many have asked before. Why then should special allowances be made to "refugees", or in the parlance of those outside Canada, "asylum seekers". I am puzzled why men like Dr. William Rees who have made a career talking about the need not to exceed our "carrying capacity" should, at the drop of a hat, be willing to accept literally tens of millions of refugees into my country because they are a different category of humanity than "immigrant". Excuse me, does the environment know this? Do refugees have no footprint Dr. Rees? James Schipper has just made the case, a case that a great many of us have long silently supported, that bulking up our countries with political refugees in the long term does neither us nor the country of emigration any good on many different levels. #comment-473317">Senator Bartlett take note.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 5, 2008

See also: CBC condemns South African rioters of 25 May 08, Will the great immigration debate take place of 21 May 08

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.

How do the politicians and the CBC define prosperity?

It is time we ask ourselves: Has this ”progress“ called ”Economic Growth“ (of which population growth is the main factor) really made our lives better? Politicians say it improves our lives. The CBC's host of ”The Sunday Edition“ Michael Enright said on his June 7, 2008 radio show that we need immigration-driven population growth in order to ”prosper“.

I would like to know what his definition of ”prosper“ is. Does Enright think that prospering means converting hundreds of thousands of hectares of Canadian land from biodiverse ecosystems into new roads, subdivisions, clearcuts, malls, parking lots, and open-pit mines to accommodate about 250,000 additional immigrants every year? Does that make life better for the average Canadian? Has real wealth per Canadian increased?

When I was born in 1980 there were only 24 million people in Canada. 28 years later, would a middle class person be able to afford more quality and quantity of real resources now than in 1980? I don't think so. In 1980, a middle class person could easily afford a 40 hectare hobby farm where the climate is mild such as Southern Ontario. Today, you'd have to be upper class to have that.

In 1980 a middle class person could afford more seafood with more varieties to choose from, thicker fillets and less chemical contamination in those fillets. In 1980 the furniture that the average person bought was made from solid wood, not particle board with a glued-on veneer that peels off when wet. In 1980 grocery stores in Canada gave patrons paper bags that could be used as tinder in your woodstove, used as mulch in your garden, or composted. Now we get non-biodegradable plastic bags, which are overflowing landfills, littering the countryside, and we are made to feel guilty for using them.

The lesson: ”Economic Growth“, or increasing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does so by increasing the population, which explains why it results in less real wealth per person. More people means less space and resources per person. No wonder ”progress“ has made life worse for the average Canadian

.

Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First
(biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm)

See also: Living standards and our material prosperity 6 Sep 08 concerning the quality of life in Australia

“It seems to me we gotta solve it individually…” from the 1968 hit song by the Young Rascals

Somebody hand me a barf bag. Quick. I was in the supermarket yesterday and came upon one of those innumerable escapist books on how we can ignore the big picture and the root cause of the coming apocalypse by retreating into private solutions. It was a book by cheery CBC talk show personality Gill Deacon called “Green for Life”, a compendium of some 200 “eco-ideas” (ego-ideas?) on how to pack school lunches, plan picnics, birthday parties and weddings, decorate and do what Sir Richard Branson called, in his endorsement, “the simple things in your everyday lives that will positively impact our future.” It is Deacon’s hope that just living sustainably in this fashion will become normal. Branson’s “normal” of course is burning up the stratosphere with jet trails all over the globe and investing in biofuels that entail the destruction of rainforests in Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia. But those are just one or two simple things.

Deacon established her credentials for lecturing me about sustainable living by giving birth to three sons, who collectively will emit 69 metric tonnes of GHG this year. She must be a bona fide environmentalist, however, because she was a director of the World Wildlife Fund of Canada in 2002 and demonstrates her love of wildlife by living in Toronto. You are familiar with the WWF. They suction money from dupes who think you can defend wildlife from population and economic growth by creating sanctuaries for it, while refusing to take positions on population growth and immigration in whatever country they operate. In their defence though, they at least divert donor money away from Nature Conservancy, who make similar fraudulent claims.

The WWF deserves notoriety for providing ammunition to pro-immigrationists by producing eco-footprinting data that purports to show Canada as capable of accommodating more people than it should. The 2000 Living Planet Report, for example, identified Canada as having a carrying capacity of 38 million, an estimate that Optimum Population Trust UK declared took no account of the unsustainability of Canadian agriculture due to serious soil erosion.

It is rather telling that Deacon would devote a section of her “Eco-ideas” to selecting the environmentally correct kind of lubricant to, as she puts it, “grease the wheels of your lovemaking machine.” Yet it is apparently acceptable to conceive three sons in Toronto, or six for that matter, so long as you don’t fuck up the planet with petroleum jelly. I suppose inflicting a large brood on the world is a matter of “personal choice” but tossing a plastic container in the landfill is not.

One Green eco-idea Gill left out, I notice, was for consumers to send a letter to Ottawa or launch a petition against an immigration policy that makes all of her 200 “little things” a joke. Deacon might also send an eco-idea to her employer, the CBC, to drop their euphoric coverage of Canadian foreign aid missions, like Harper’s trip to Haiti, so that Canadians busy with their “Green” lifestyle might learn that their tax money is encouraging people in Haiti, Afghanistan and Africa to have four and five children each and ravage local environments for survival.

But one must not be too harsh with Gill Deacon of course. Cutting down her hypocrisy is like cutting off the head of a many headed hydra. There is a plague of these Green lifestyle books on the market. There is Adria Vasil’s “Ecoholic:Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada.”. Kim McKay’s “True Green: 100 Everyday Ways You Can Contribute to a Healthier Planet”. Greg Horn’s “Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability.” Elizabeth Rogers’ “The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Step at a Time”. And Ellen Sandbeck’s “Organic Housekeeping”, to name but a few.

The impetus for this myopic preoccupation with our personal lives can be traced to the famous entreaty by Al Gore in his documentary “The Inconvenient Truth”. There he states, absurdly, that “each of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.” Gore does not appreciate that green consumers can never reduce their consumption to zero, and that an increase in the number of even green consumers is going to increase total consumption. The solution does not lie in the hands of individual consumers, but in the collective hands of citizens to effect political change.

The limits of green lifestyle habits can be illustrated clearly by a study conducted by Optimum Population Trust UK that found that one new citizen either born or admitted as an immigrant to Britain, wiped out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling. Put differently, a lifetime of responsible recycling would only make up for one and one-quarter per cent of the damage done by a new citizen. Even if all of domestic waste was recycled, only 10% of the waste contributed by an additional citizen would be counter-acted.

It must be remembered that it is consumption that generates waste. While reducing our profligate per capita consumption is laudable and necessary, one must be aware that it is the number of “per capitas” which is relevant. Thus reducing our per capita C02 emissions from 23 metric tonnes to something reasonably obtainable will prove to have little effect if population growth is permitted to continue at 1.08% per annum.

Similarly our lifetime per capita consumption of 3.7 million pounds of minerals, metals and fuels, if reduced, will still be problematic if more people consume them even at a lesser rate. And turning off the lights for one hour, as we recently did in solidarity with other conservers globally, is a futile gesture if we allow population and economic growth to continue. Case in point. British Columbia Hydro encouraged customers with the thought that if they did that every night it would save enough energy to power an additional four thousand homes for an entire year. But as analyst Rick Shea of Salmon Arm, BC observed, “ British Columbians would apparently have to turn off their lights for about 6 hours each day in order to accommodate the provincial population growth in just one year. After four years of this, we will apparently have to leave our lights off permanently, 24 hours a day, to accommodate that growth.”

In summary then, the movement toward “sustainable living”, as represented by books like Gill Deacon’s “Green for Life”, is largely an exercise in ineffectual do-goodism and feel-goodism. If “every little bit counts”, it counts for little. If “it all adds up”, it doesn’t add up to much buried in a demographic avalanche. The call to “reduce, re-cycle and conserve” in the face of runaway population growth can only be likened to a cheerful cleaning lady tidying up a cabin in the Titanic as the ship is listing, making sure everything in the room is bio-degradable. She could never be relied upon to tell you the truth about the ship’s prospects, or yours, but she was hired by Captain CBC for her pleasant disposition and you will find her trivial advice entertaining.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
April 4/08

The Shunning of Immigration Critics by the BBC, ABC and CBC. See also CBC Townhall meeting to be stacked with immigration advocates The Shunning of Immigration Critics by the BBC, ABC and CBC By Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada Thursday, 28 February 2008 Originally published by Canada Free Press (canadafreepress.com) Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes the population question taboo and the pro-immigration stance the default position? Is there an intrinsic bias, and if so, where is it coming from? The journalists, the presenters, the researchers, the producers or the higher-ups? Is state media more captive of political correctness than the private media? In attempting to answer some of these questions it is thought useful to first review two fascinating accounts, one about the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC), another about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) and finally a short summary of 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." This while "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. Yet the BBC allowed Beverly Hughes, Minister of Immigration, to "blandly repeat, unchallenged, the government's mindless policy of continued mass immigration to meet the alleged needs of the economy." Much in the same way that Home Secretary Charles Clark was granted a free pass to say that there were 'no obvious limits' to net migration and rapid growth. 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 is not accusing those who run the BBC of criminal activity but "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 nation-from 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?" Four things are needed to reform the BBC according to Parsons' prescription. Firstly, there needs to be major change in 'media Zeitgeist' that will permit a Population Glasnost. 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 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 National Vice President of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP, renamed Sustainable Population Australia - 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 the mass immigration that fuels it must continue. "The fact must be faced. There is something deeply wrong in some parts of it." O'Connor asserts that "issues and news items that require at least occasional coverage have been ignored. These issues certainly have reached the initial attention of those researchers who filter stories up the chain. Thus we are forced to speak of a given ABC program 'suppressing' stories even if many or most of those in a given unit were unaware this was going on. But there certainly is bias." Even if outside observers will never be able to locate its precise source. He offers some examples of this bias. The ABC collaborated with the bipartisan support of high immigration by suppressing most of the debate and repeatedly gave airtime to propagandists who claimed that our 'shamefully low immigration quotas' were 'proof of racism'. The inconvenient fact that Australia had the highest per capita intake of immigrants in the world when these brazen assertions were made was never raised by the corporation to challenge them. And "among its many acts of censorship, ABC TV News suppressed the fact that the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Democrats had long been calling for zero net migration. Yet as soon as the One Nation party announce a zero net migration policy, the ABC cited it as "racism". 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, the National centre in Toronto and the Vancouver centre have emphatically not. The corporation has refused to engage the public on the two questions that they keep asking: Why is the government importing more people per capita than any other country than 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 only 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 there is an equation in corporate logic of the stated "CBC Vision" to reflect "the cultural diversity of our people" with support for mass immigration. But apparently the promotion of a diversity of cultures is quite different than 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. It is indeed an impertinent supplicant who holds 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 corporate line on immigration. And yet, 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. Immigration Watch Canada demands that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage should order the CBC executive to answer for this conflict of interest and to terminate the corporation's corrupt arrangements with the immigration industry, its blatant pro-immigration advocacy and the employment of people who engage in it. Such measures would seek not to curb journalistic freedom, but journalistic abuse. And return public broadcasting to the public. Then once again, the National Broadcaster would offer a forum where indeed "no significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented" and the exclusion of topics or the shunning of voices would be thought foreign to its corporate culture and democratic mission. It's time to end the conspiracy of silence against critiques of immigration and population growth.

People with dark skin or from Asia are not the only people who suffer racial vilification these days. In arguing for more immigration a Maltese immigrant complained on the "Sounds Like Canada" program of Friday, January 25/08 that one or two maritime provinces were mostly white and that others were "even worse". Typically, multicultural enthusiast and host Sheila Rogers did not challenge him for this outrageous racist statement.

One wonders how a CBC interviewer might react if a guest said that the downtown core of Regina was mostly aboriginal but other communities were "even worse". Or that many districts in Greater Vancouver are predominantly Chinese but others, like Richmond, are "even worse". When comments like these go by the board on the national broadcasting network, it is little wonder that so many politically correct bigots feel able to complain openly that their particular town is too "whitebread".

I am a native-born Canadian of European ancestry and I am sick and tired of being made to feel that I am some kind of disease who should be made to feel perpetually guilty for my white skin and for the multitude of sins allegedly committed generations ago, a disease that needs to be cured by a massive foreign influx.

Insults directed at the national whipping boy, Canadians of white pigmentation, are not the way to build the harmony you claim to seek.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
Canada V0P 1N0
January 28/08

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.