The NDP likes to stake out a distinct position as an alternative to the "corporate agenda". But what is this "corporate agenda"? Fundamentally, it is no different today than it was in 1886 when my great grandfather established himself in this country on Vancouver Island. Robber baron Robert Dunsmuir attempted to weaken the bargaining position of the mine workers near Nanaimo by great numbers of cheap foreign labour. Growing the labour pool and creating more consumers is the formula for more profits. And the environment is collateral damage for which no one, until recently, gave a toss.
Until the early seventies, the labour movement across the anglophone world realized that labour markets must be controlled according to national and not globalist interests. Since then, mysteriously, it has bought into the globalist vision. So while the labour pool has grown 13% since 1990 , the wages of educated workers fell by 7%, according to the Stats Can report of May 2007, yet the NDP's answer is only make immigrant workers more aware of their rights. Instead of fighting for a tight labour market, the unions are fighting for a chance of recruiting more dues-paying members and the NDP is fighting for a chance to win more ethnic supporters. No thought is given to the ecological costs of more people in this country. The following is a compendium of articles already found here but grouped together in one theme: the fraud that is the NDP and its claim that it is in any sense an environmentally aware party.
THE CORE BELIEF OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATS, SOCIALISTS AND GREENS
“A commitment to the welfare of human beings takes precedence over a
general devotion to the well being of the earth.”
Kevin Schmiesing, 2005
Economist
Center for Academic Research, Acton Institute
TWO KINDS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATS, TWO DIFFERENT CONTINENTS
Remember Jack Layton, the “Green” city councilor from Toronto? The one who favours windmills and solar panels and retrofits and meeting Kyoto goals and all those good things? The man who leads the party with the “Green Agenda”? Well then you know his wife, Olivia Chow.
After Ottawa had increased its annual immigration target to the highest level in 25 years, and hopes to accept 265,000 immigrants this year, Chow, also an NDP MP, says the target should even be higher. That makes sense. The NDP is on record calling for an immigration rate of 1% of the current population “plus”. Currently that would be 330,000!
Revealing both her economic and environmental IQ she is quoted as parroting, in “Karas and Associates”, the same clichés as the traditional parties use:
“We need more immigrants because of our aging population. We need families and young people for productivity and economic growth.”
Ms. Chow would do well to consult left-wing economist Phil Mullin and his book “The Imaginary Time Bomb”. Immigration will not relieve the aging of our population whom we can support with very modest economic growth of 1%. And the productivity of the older experienced workforce is quite OK thank you very much. The CD Howe Institute will corroborate Mullan’s findings. Immigration would have increase 28 times its present level to maintain the present age structure. Clearly environmentally unsustainable.
Ms. Chow, and her consort, Mr. Layton, are captive of a national myth. That Canada is a vast country with lots of room for lots of people. A huge treasure trove of resources waiting to be opened up without ecological consequence if only there were the human resources available to do so. Therefore our immigration and refugee policy must, to use an NDP phrase, be “welcoming”.
Australia also shares that same myth. But with a difference. Their environmental superstars---Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe---and some politicians have exposed that myth for what it is, a dangerous suicidal fallacy which threatens to bring about a massive die-off of much of the population.
One of these politicians is a social democrat like Olivia Chow and Jack Layton. His name is Bob Carr, recent Labor premier of Australia’s largest state of New South Wales. This is what Carr has to say about the nature of economic growth, population and limits:
“Let’s throw away for all time the notion that Australia is an empty space, just waiting to be filled up. Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation won’t allow that to happen without an enormous cost to us and those who come after us.
We can depend on economic growth that comes in an easy fashion driven by population growth…On the other hand, we can sustain jobs and economic security by using our brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products we produce here—the food and the fibre and the mineral products we produce here. By elaborating transforming manufacturing—we’re beginning to prove as a people that we’re good at that. By promoting our health innovations to the world, by promoting excellence in education to the world, by selling these services. That’s a smart Australia. Giving security to its people by thinking intelligently. It’s not a lazy Australia, that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building houses and shopping malls.”
Carr went on to say that not to choose to have a population policy was in fact choosing not to have a population policy. In other words, we are then making a decision to continue with the present directionless policy “heading for limitless growth”.
Carr, and fellow retired Labor parliamentarian Barry Cohen is among several Australian politicians who know that unlimited growth in a finite country is impossible. They know that population growth thwarts GHG emission reductions, threatens biodiversity and farmland. Pity that their Canadian counterparts do not share this realization.
Tim Murray.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GREEN AND A NEW DEMOCRAT?
Greens favour over 1% population growth for Canada. Their leader talks of bringing in 330,000 immigrants annually to support Canada's "great" Multicultural Project.
The NDP favours "1% plus" population growth for Canada and an immigration rate that will serve that end. They want a dramatic expansion of the definition of family class immigrants.
Greens favour open-ended acceptance of an unlimited number of climate change refugees
The NDP favours open-ended acceptance of an unlimited number of climate change refugees. Neither party grasps the meaning of "carrying capacity".
Greens favour tough hate speech laws and diversity awareness programs for public and private employees.
The NDP favours tough hate speech laws and diversity awareness programs for public and private employees.
Both parties believe Canadians should adapt to the customs and values of immigrants and not the other way around, or that immigrants should attend workshops to made aware of Canadians' sensitivities.
Greens look more to the human rights of migrants than the rights of the environment they damage or the rights of wildlife that the Greens ignore.
The NDP look more to the human rights of migrants than the rights of the environment they damage or the rights of wildlife that the Greens ignore.
Greens advocate greener lifestyles and miracle renewable technologies that don't bear up to scrutiny to prevent climate change
The NDP advocates greener lifestyles and miracle renewable technologies that don't bear up to scrutiny to prevent climate change
Greens ignore immigrant-driven population growth as a factor in climate change or in environmental degradation generally.
The NDP ignores immigrant-driven population growth as a factor in climate change or in environmental degradation generally.
Greens supported the invasion of Afghanistan until it became an unpopular occupation, now they are retroactive peaceniks who have always opposed the war.
The NDP supported the invasion of Afghanistan until it became an unpopular occupation , now they are retroactive peaceniks who have always opposed the war.
Greens opposed the Taliban because of the horrid way they treated women and because people who practiced such a patriarchal culture in their own country should be overthrown
The NDP opposed the Taliban because of the way they treated women and because people who practiced such a patriarchal culture in their own country should be overthrown.
Greens encourage Afghanis who emigrate to Canada to practice their patriarchal culture that oppresses women because they support "cultural diversity".
The NDP encourages Afghanis who emigrate to Canada to practice their patriarchal culture that oppresses women because they support "cultural diversity"
Greens say they stand for "social and economic justice".
The NDP says it has a "Green Agenda".
They look very much like the Bobsy Twins to me. Yet they are always fighting, always claiming they are so different from one another. Freud had the answer. "The Narcissism of Small Differences". When two tribes have so very much in common ----hypocrisy, self-delusion, self-righteousness, schizophrenia, myopia----they highlight their tiny differences and inflate them.
Maybe we should be grateful the two parties don't merge under the transexual leadership of Elizabeth Layton or Jack May wearing big black hiking boots and a green dress
LETTER TO MANITOBA NDP CAUCUS
"We want Manitoba to be a place that promotes SUSTAINABLE GROWTH and a place that recognizes our lakes, rivers, and forests as our greatest assets." "Sustainable growth", what the hell is that? On a finite planet, in a finite nation, how can growth ever be sustained? I see that the NDP has adopted all the public relations cant designed to make us feel better about an agenda that more or less amounts to the same thing.
"Sustainable", "smart", "managed", "deflected", or "steered", growth is still growth and you can't cloak that with one of Lorne Calvert's "Green Strategy" or Jack Layton's "Green Agenda" labels. And BTW, you say you want Matitoba to be a place that recognizes "lakes, rivers and forests as our greatest natural assets." My Collins dictionary defines an asset as "anything valuable or useful". The question is, useful to whom? To logging, mining and hydro-electric companies and property developers? Or to people who value them for themselves, who believe that Canada's natural endowments don't necessarily have to have a human utility?
It is apparent that Canadians live in a one-party state. From coast to coast, all political parties, including the Greens and the NDP, are committed to the ideology of Economic Growth. Attaching a green agenda to that ideology is an exercise in futility, contradiction and hypocrisy. The only issue that divides you is how equitably the economic "pie" is to be divided. All of you want to grow it. You are going to keep shoveling fuel into that runaway train until it runs right off the track.
Tim Murray
GROWTH IS OK IF IT IS SHARED
NDP Premier Lorne Calvert, 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,
PREMIER CALVERT’S BIG LIE
The autopsy on the 17 year reign of Saskatchewan premier Lorne Calvert must conclude the he lived and died his political life 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
FOR SOCIALISTS GROWTH IS STILL OK, SO LONG AS IT IS SHARED
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 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 May 22/2008 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. The government forced penalties on the car manufacturers and revenue went to the development to 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 June 1/08
COMMENTS ON “GROWTH IS STILL OK SO LONG AS IT IS SHARED”
This is a good point to hammer home. Both "Left/Socialists" and "Right/Conservatives" wingers are all growthists. I hate those polarized general terms anyway. They are way overused.
One of the reasons why economic growth has not made people better off is because in addition to ruining people's environment, we are talking about GDP growth, not GDP per capita growth; despite sacrificing more of Canada's resources, each person earns less than before because there are now more people to divide up the GDP among.
So Layton made it clear that his goal is economic growth and the more the better. But while economic growth IS GDP growth, it is NOT GDP per capita growth! Population growth causes GDP growth, but for GDP per capita growth you need population decline. A rapid population decline could facilitate GDP per capita growth at the same time as negative GDP growth.
When the news talks about how well-off/wealthy we are, they always use GDP growth as the yardstick even though GDP per capita is in decline, and even if GDP per capita increased along with the GDP, we'd still be worse off due to unsustainable resource harvesting and worsened environment including loss of species and endangered ecosystems.
GDP is a fuzzy thing. It is money, which changes in value from inflation and resource scarcity. Money has no real value. You can't buy things that nature can no longer produce.
This is why I don't like talking in terms of GDP and other economic concepts.
Brishen Hoff
________________________________________
Dear Tim,
As far as I can see, the ideology of the socialists only differs from that of the capitalists as regards distribution.
Their politics are 'human improved' capital based just like those of the industrialists.
They have no ken of biological underlay of the economy.
Ideologues cannot adjust to reality and circumstances; they just keep churning out the catechism - like the Catholics.
I ran into the same thing with the Georgists: Henry George's 19th century solutions must fit without change to 21century ecological problems.
That is ideology.
And politicians can smell power underwater, so they will never go against the dominant power-holders.
The originators of the political dialectics were thinkers, but their followers refuse to see that the problems have changed. We have used up half of our capital in petroleum and most other fossil fuels
and the water and land is creaking under the strain.
Sheila Newman
Jack Layton chooses Wall Street over Main Street
So Jack Layton ran down to the convention floor in Denver like a teenage groupie and proclaimed that “the Democrats are talking about the same kind of change we’re talking about in Canada…there is a real desire here to put the concern of the kitchen table ahead of the board room table.”
That must be news to Wall Street. Sure the Democrats talk like Robespierre, they always have. But they govern like Louis XIV. Forget the rhetoric and follow the money trail. Check out www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, the financial firms, the corporate law firms and the private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s friends, the Democrats, are their clear favourites, as these examples will show.
The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to the Democrats.
The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.
This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence peddling.
This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million to politician contributions to the two-faced Democrats.
Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its $8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton has been a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as the “Military Industry Complex” as it once was. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.
Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.
Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million form private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By August 28/08 Barack Obama had raised $389,423,102 . This kind of money did not come from cab drivers, hair dressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama this year. And City Group who gave him $389,989 this year. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375 this year.
Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and Congress for even $1billion in political contributions would be a bargain for the IT industry. Ditto for agribusiness and corporate America in general.
Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a so-called progressive party of the down-trodden (albeit led by patricians) the Democratic Party has done pretty well for itself, as has Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act. You have to love their act. “Please Mister, can you spare me a million, I promise if I am elected, I will open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another 5 million middle class jobs, depress the wages of the jobs that remain, expand the visa programs and with the population boom cancel out any climate change strategy.” And Obama is sincere. Just three days after Hilary Clinton pulled out of the race, he declared to CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
Organized labour in America throws what little money it has toward Obama as well, 91% of it. But since 1993, it too has shared the corporate agenda of open borders, in the belief that it can broader its dues-paying membership base by signing up migrant workers. It hasn’t worked out that way. As Labour economist Vernon Briggs has demonstrated, the percentage of foreign born workers and union members in America is inversely proportional. American union workers have simply lost their jobs.
As the Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into the country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.”
Obviously, Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S. Woodsworth, who knew that a tight labour market was a worker’s best friend and favoured restrictive immigration policies throughout his tenure as CCF leader.
So, if Democrats are talking about the same kind of change as New Democrats are, as Jack Layton maintains, then, certainly, they are all about the same kind of change.
Immigrant-fed runaway population growth that will pauperize and decimate the working class, despoil environment and accelerate greenhouse gas emissions. All cloaked in green progressive rhetoric.
JACK LAYTON’S PHONE CALL
At 9pm on Tuesday evening (Sept 8/08) the phone rang. I instantly recognized the automated voice of NDP leader Jack Layton. He spent about 15 seconds telling me that it was time for a change. He used what is becoming a hackneyed phrase. A phrase dreamed up by a speech-writer describing how different Obama’s Democrats were from the Republicans, despite the fact that Wall Street gave more campaign money to the Democrats. The phrase was “listening to the concerns of the kitchen table rather than the board room table.”
But the board room table wants lots of immigration and that is what Jack wants too. The people that Jack claims to be fighting for, the ordinary working people though, don’t want that. But they’re not running the unions that send campaign workers and money to the NDP. Seeing that Harper, Dion, May and Layton are all pulling in the same direction, it seems senseless for them to waste so much money on campaign spending.
Why not have all the parties campaign together under one banner with this slogan: “MORE PEOPLE, MORE GROWTH” That way they can pool their resources and run a cost effective campaign, and clear up this confusion, this charade that there exists some fundamental difference between left, right and centre in this country.
Tim Murray
Left-wing challenge: Read this essay: “Is it reactionary to oppose immigration?” Learn about how socialist, social democratic and trade union leaders in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century in North America and Australia have dealt with this issue. It will open your politically correct eyes and steel-trap mind. http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2240)
Read also what CCF leader J.S.Woodsworth’s attitude to immigration was in the Labour day issue of www.immmigrationwatchcanada.org bulletin
More effective than any union, is a tight labour market.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
WILL MASS IMMIGRATION MEAN MASS STARVATION?
“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….it’s a problem, but curbing immigration is really focusing on the wrong, and rather trivial aspect of the problem.” Elizabeth May, leader, Green Party of Canada, May 17, 2006.
In the game of population growth, land capacity is not as relevant as carrying capacity. Antarctica is a big place with lots of room for lots of people, but how many people can it support? Yet Canadian politicians persist in the assumption that their country is a vast tropical cornucopia that needs ever more injections of people to unlock a hidden bounty of even greater wealth. In fact all four party leaders want to exceed current immigration levels by a third or more, despite the fact Canada already has the fastest growth rate of all G8 nations.
That the broadest sector of Canada is either mountainous, permafrost tundra, wetlands, marsh, bog, lake or boreal forest hostile to human habitation is not our toughest sell. That only says that there is little room at Canada’s Ecological Inn, that rather than be billed as a Big Five Star Hotel we should be marketed as a cheap one room motel. The sad salient fact is that 94% of Canada’s land cannot be farmed. Actually, a more plausible figure is that only 5.2% of Canada’s land base is arable, a ration of 3 acres per citizen. That speaks to our carrying capacity.
What should concern us about that pathetic arable portion is where it is situated, how much of it is being lost, how recently it has been lost, and why.
Of the over 5% of Canada’s land base that is devoted to farming, 40% is found on the prairies, but 51% of the best farmland, the Class 1, is found in Ontario. According to Statistics Canada, in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) more than 2,000 farms and 150,000 acres, or 18% or Ontario’s Class 1 farmland were lost between 1976 and 1996. By comparison, in the London region of Middlesex County between 1996 and 2001, 8500 hectares (21,000 acres) were lost.
Since 1966, over 6 million hectares of land in Canada and over 1.5 million hectares of land in Ontario have been lost from agriculture to development. But the key question is, why? (cf. http://members.becon.org/=pals/canada12.html ) It is interesting to observe how the pace of farmland conversion accelerates after 1990 , when Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall under the guidance of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced a new era of substantial increases in immigration levels. Case in point: In the twenty years before 1996, an average of 7500 acres of Class 1 farmland was lost annually in the GTA, but after 1996, in all of Ontario, which is inclusive of areas not subject to population pressures as intense as Metro Toronto, losses averaging 60,000 occurred----a loss rate eight times greater than before the era of mass immigration.
http://www.ontariofarmlandtrust.ca/issues-and-programs/saving-farmland
To cite another example from Statistics Canada, from page 126 in Human Activity and the Environment . “Approximately 4700 sq. km. of Class 1, 2 and 3 agricultural land or about 1 sq. km. daily was lost between 1981 and 1996.” But the loss rate increased to 1.3 sq km. daily or 33% between 1991 to 1996.
There is quite clearly a correlation between population growth and farmland conversion, and in Canada 70% of population growth is driven by immigration. Undocumented evidence suggests that in Greater Vancouver and Toronto, as many as 85% of the residents in the new subdivisions that sit on former greenbelts are foreign born. Yet the champions of farm protection such as Ontario Farmland Trust, Ontario Smart Growth, Smart Growth BC or the David Suzuki Foundation will not dare to mention the ugly “I” word. For them, as for the Growth Management Industry, the Greens and the NDP, it is all just a matter of “land use management”.
Yet several American studies have revealed that it is not. A Centre for Immigration Studies report of 2003 established that land use management was necessary but not sufficient, to save farmland, as “sprawl”, that great scapegoat of the environmental movement, accounted for only half, on average, of disappearing rural acreage. A US Bureau of Census study of the 100 largest U.S. urbanized areas concluded in the early 90s that land-use restrictions could not win any lasting, sustainable, protection of agricultural land and natural habitats surrounding cities. Census data established that the sprawl rate was twice as high nationally at 51.5% as the per capita increase in the consumption of land at 22.6%. A city like Denver could contain its per capita land consumption to 8.1% but see its overall land consumption rise by 56.7%--seven times as much. Portland, Oregon was trumpeted as the showcase of smart growth, until too many sheep finally burst the pen and the greenbelt outside city limits got developed. Los Angeles, wrongly tagged as the sultan of sprawl, won an award for increasing its density by 8% for two decades until 1990. Then came 3.1 million immigrants with no where to go and 394 square miles of orchards, natural habitat, rural spaces and farmland were lost to urbanization.
In recent years a report by Smart Growth BC painted a rosy picture of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), calling it a success story “in the context of North American regional development”. (That is damning it with faint praise!). It was a patent falsehood that from 1973 to the end of 2003, “there has been no net loss of farmland in B.C.” The key to that statement lay in the definition of “farmland”. If it is defined as good soil, then the ALC has been playing a shell game with the trusting public, exchanging coveted marketable farmland under its protection for relatively poorer land in more remote locations. The telling concession from Smart Growth BC comes in these lines: “However the quality of farmland in the ALR has decreased, with 2.8 hectares of prime farmland excluded for every hectare prime farmland included. Likewise, the ALR has shifted to the northern part of the province, with 90% of the inclusions in the north and 72% of exclusions occurring in the south.” Harold Steves, a former MLA who fought for the ALC at its inception, corroborated that point recently on CBC radio by stating that the ALC was adding very poor “Class 6” land from north east BC and the Cariboo and releasing good land from the Fraser Valley.
The lesson that should be drawn from the ALC experience is that even North America’s poster child of land use planning and farm protection could not stand up to population pressure and political manipulation. B C.’s Lower Mainland is the magnet for immigration, not Williams Lake or Fort St. John. Yes of course Premier Gordon Campbell made a calculated decision to weaken the ALC by turning over the decision making from one provincial panel to six smaller regional panels that would be more vulnerable to “community” commercial interests. Predictably these panels down south have complied with what Campbell’s friends have wanted them to do. But without population growth there would be no demand for new housing and big box commercial developments and potential developers would not be knocking at the door demanding that land locked in the ALR be released. Five hundred acres of farmland in Williams Lake lies unmolested because developers know that the 30,000 New Canadians who will fly into YVR- Van International next year ( statistics courtesy of Regional Development, MetroVan ) have no interest in moving to Williams Lake. Not because it is protected by any land reserve or land use bylaws.
One can only marvel at the naïve confidence that the smart growth coalition of environmentalists, planners, progressive developers, and so forth, place in paper fortresses. Despite historical evidence, they believe that dedicated national parks will forever remain inviolate, that greenbelts will never be encroached, or that the sacred will never be touched. Australian writer Mark O’Connor had this warning about that kind of thinking:
“These parks have supposedly been created in perpetuity: yet there is a risk that further shifts in ideology may leave a future government free to revoke national parks. It would by then be able to plead the housing and resource needs of a much expanded population, plus its need of export earnings from lands that would be otherwise going to waste. Developers constantly agitate for governments to become less sluggish in releasing more land.”
The ALC was a significant achievement, but an anomaly, a product of a unique political culture that likely will never be duplicated. It is interesting that no NDP administration in any of the three other provinces that elected them ever implemented similar freezes on development of farmland. And yet mass immigration apologists who argue that farmland loss to development can be prevented by smart growth won’t even wait until this pie-in-the-sky land-use regime is established before they would wantonly inject more than a quarter of a million people into this society annually when it clearly threatens our ability to feed ourselves. A clear case of criminal irresponsibility. One wonders, would they allow cars to pour onto a newly built highway before traffic controls were in place? The reality is, farmland is not currently protected. It is open season and therefore population growth must be stopped now. Immigration and fertility policies must be fashioned in light of that imperative.
A post-carbon world will be unforgiving of transportation costs. Presently 35 times more is spent in fossil energy in transporting a head of lettuce from the Salinos Valley in California to Toronto than in actually growing it . If all the food that Torontonians ate was grown locally in the acres that are now being sold to developers, it would save enough fossil fuels as to be the equivalent of taking 162,000 cars off Toronto’s streets.
In Food, Land, Population and the US Economy , Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel postulated that to achieve a sustainable food system and national economy the United States must reduce its population by one third “or face disaster”. And their research did not even consider the impact of declining fossil fuel production.
It would be prudent for Canada to factor in imminent resource shortages and worst case scenarios. To be on the HMCS Titanic with a captain who stops to pick up additional passengers with an iceberg visible dead ahead is a surreal experience, especially when he, like so many, believes the ship to be unsinkable and with an unlimited carrying capacity. We need to protect our food source and keep it close at hand. And remember the admonition of Canadian writer Ronald Wright, who, in summarizing the collapse of civilizations, remarked, “Don’t build on agricultural land.”
In reviewing this account, my question is directed to myopic policy makers. “Will mass immigration mean mass starvation in Canada?”
POSTSCRIPT: A GLIMPSE AT OUR POSTCARBON FUTURE?
LONDON,ONTARIO TRYING TO FEED ITSELF BY JR WAKEFIELD
Relocalizeation
This is the romantic notion that we will be able to feed ourselves from a strictly locally grown foods. But this is a quixotic notion. Here is why.
London, Ontario is a mid sized city located in the middle of farm country. If there was any city in a perfect position to relocalize it would be London, but population will prevent this from happening.
London's population is 460,000 and growing by 11.8% per year.
It takes 2 acres of land to feed one person (including unfarmable land of about 25%, which may be too low). That's using modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides and machinery.
That requires 920,000 acres of land. Or 1,437.50 sqr miles. London's size is 166 sqr miles, thus an area of 8.7 times the size of the city will be required. (the internal free farmable space in London is small). That's an area 12 miles in radius including the city itself.
But this does not include the people living in these surrounding areas. That adds an additional 659,329 people, more than doubling the required farmland. Add to that farm animals required that must be fed, of 200,000 (which is really low) and we would need 2,638,658.00 acres to feed this area, or a radius of 20 miles. That means we would need a circle from Strathroy in the west, to the lake on the south, to Ingersol on the east, to almost Stratford to the north (Kirkton). And that area would need to grow by 11.8 percent a year. Thus in 10 years we would need an area of 8,048,090.04 (3 times as much) for a radius of 35 miles. Since there is no more south would have to be made up
with the rest. Thus Paris in the east, Goderich in the north, and almost Sarnia in the west.
This does not include increased land required due to lost crops. If we remove fertilizers and chemicals and mechanized machinery with a power down, the require land per person will skyrocket. It will only require a 25% crop loss to pests to dramatically increase the amount of land required per person. And that does not include storage loss (much of it will need to be kept from freezing) and transportation loss.
This does not include surrounding cities, like Windsor and Sarnia to the west and Kitchener to the east. Thus required farmland would overlap, which is not physically possible for the same land to feed two different cities.
There are other limitations. Thus includes farm labour. Because localized farming will return to more labour intensive, less fuel to run machinery, then those masses of people who need to work the farms will have to live on those farms. This will mean a mass exodus from cities, like London. Such people will likely be highly nomadic, working and living on farms in the summer, but living in the cities in the winter. This brings up whole new problems such as schooling of children.
The other limitation is transportation of the food to the cities. With little or no fuels for trucks to get the food from the farms into the city, they will have to be moved by horse. And that means the 200,000 animals I noted above will fall far short, it could be double that, which means even more farmland to feed them.
The last limitation is storage for the winter. Most of it will have to be kept from freezing, and for a million people in the area (3 million meals a day) for at least a years worth of storage (from one harvest to the next) would require a billion meals. There is not enough storage in a city like London for that much food, let alone keeping it from freezing.
Thus there is no way any city will be able to feed itself with the current population. Thus relocalization is a pipe dream that cannot work. It also means those who are pushing for relocalization are thinking one of two thoughts. They have not thought out the logistics of relocalization, or they know very well it cannot work on this scale and fully expect there to be a major, quick, population crash with them surviving because of the relocalization they have managed to implement.
In the game of population growth, land capacity is not as relevant as carrying capacity. Antarctica is a big place with lots of room for lots of people, but how many people can it support? Yet Canadian politicians persist in the assumption that their country is a vast tropical cornucopia that needs ever more injections of people to unlock a hidden bounty of even greater wealth. In fact all four party leaders want to exceed current immigration levels by a third or more, despite the fact Canada already has the fastest growth rate of all G8 nations.
That the broadest sector of Canada is either mountainous, permafrost tundra, wetlands, marsh, bog, lake or boreal forest hostile to human habitation is not our toughest sell. That only says that there is little room at Canada’s Ecological Inn, that rather than be billed as a Big Five Star Hotel we should be marketed as a cheap one room motel. The sad salient fact is that 94% of Canada’s land cannot be farmed. Actually, a more plausible figure is that only 5.2% of Canada’s land base is arable, a ration of 3 acres per citizen. That speaks to our carrying capacity.
What should concern us about that pathetic arable portion is where it is situated, how much of it is being lost, how recently it has been lost, and why.
Of the over 5% of Canada’s land base that is devoted to farming, 40% is found on the prairies, but 51% of the best farmland, the Class 1, is found in Ontario. According to Statistics Canada, in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) more than 2,000 farms and 150,000 acres, or 18% or Ontario’s Class 1 farmland were lost between 1976 and 1996. By comparison, in the London region of Middlesex County between 1996 and 2001, 8500 hectares (21,000 acres) were lost.
Since 1966, over 6 million hectares of land in Canada and over 1.5 million hectares of land in Ontario have been lost from agriculture to development. But the key question is, why? (cf. http://members.becon.org/=pals/canada12.html ) It is interesting to observe how the pace of farmland conversion accelerates after 1990 , when Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall under the guidance of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced a new era of substantial increases in immigration levels. Case in point: In the twenty years before 1996, an average of 7500 acres of Class 1 farmland was lost annually in the GTA, but after 1996, in all of Ontario, which is inclusive of areas not subject to population pressures as intense as Metro Toronto, losses averaging 60,000 occurred----a loss rate eight times greater than before the era of mass immigration.
http://www.ontariofarmlandtrust.ca/issues-and-programs/saving-farmland
To cite another example from Statistics Canada, from page 126 in Human Activity and the Environment . “Approximately 4700 sq. km. of Class 1, 2 and 3 agricultural land or about 1 sq. km. daily was lost between 1981 and 1996.” But the loss rate increased to 1.3 sq km. daily or 33% between 1991 to 1996.
There is quite clearly a correlation between population growth and farmland conversion, and in Canada 70% of population growth is driven by immigration. Undocumented evidence suggests that in Greater Vancouver and Toronto, as many as 85% of the residents in the new subdivisions that sit on former greenbelts are foreign born. Yet the champions of farm protection such as Ontario Farmland Trust, Ontario Smart Growth, Smart Growth BC or the David Suzuki Foundation will not dare to mention the ugly “I” word. For them, as for the Growth Management Industry, the Greens and the NDP, it is all just a matter of “land use management”.
Yet several American studies have revealed that it is not. A Centre for Immigration Studies report of 2003 established that land use management was necessary but not sufficient, to save farmland, as “sprawl”, that great scapegoat of the environmental movement, accounted for only half, on average, of disappearing rural acreage. A US Bureau of Census study of the 100 largest U.S. urbanized areas concluded in the early 90s that land-use restrictions could not win any lasting, sustainable, protection of agricultural land and natural habitats surrounding cities. Census data established that the sprawl rate was twice as high nationally at 51.5% as the per capita increase in the consumption of land at 22.6%. A city like Denver could contain its per capita land consumption to 8.1% but see its overall land consumption rise by 56.7%--seven times as much. Portland, Oregon was trumpeted as the showcase of smart growth, until too many sheep finally burst the pen and the greenbelt outside city limits got developed. Los Angeles, wrongly tagged as the sultan of sprawl, won an award for increasing its density by 8% for two decades until 1990. Then came 3.1 million immigrants with no where to go and 394 square miles of orchards, natural habitat, rural spaces and farmland were lost to urbanization.
In recent years a report by Smart Growth BC painted a rosy picture of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), calling it a success story “in the context of North American regional development”. (That is damning it with faint praise!). It was a patent falsehood that from 1973 to the end of 2003, “there has been no net loss of farmland in B.C.” The key to that statement lay in the definition of “farmland”. If it is defined as good soil, then the ALC has been playing a shell game with the trusting public, exchanging coveted marketable farmland under its protection for relatively poorer land in more remote locations. The telling concession from Smart Growth BC comes in these lines: “However the quality of farmland in the ALR has decreased, with 2.8 hectares of prime farmland excluded for every hectare prime farmland included. Likewise, the ALR has shifted to the northern part of the province, with 90% of the inclusions in the north and 72% of exclusions occurring in the south.” Harold Steves, a former MLA who fought for the ALC at its inception, corroborated that point recently on CBC radio by stating that the ALC was adding very poor “Class 6” land from north east BC and the Cariboo and releasing good land from the Fraser Valley.
The lesson that should be drawn from the ALC experience is that even North America’s poster child of land use planning and farm protection could not stand up to population pressure and political manipulation. B C.’s Lower Mainland is the magnet for immigration, not Williams Lake or Fort St. John. Yes of course Premier Gordon Campbell made a calculated decision to weaken the ALC by turning over the decision making from one provincial panel to six smaller regional panels that would be more vulnerable to “community” commercial interests. Predictably these panels down south have complied with what Campbell’s friends have wanted them to do. But without population growth there would be no demand for new housing and big box commercial developments and potential developers would not be knocking at the door demanding that land locked in the ALR be released. Five hundred acres of farmland in Williams Lake lies unmolested because developers know that the 30,000 New Canadians who will fly into YVR- Van International next year ( statistics courtesy of Regional Development, MetroVan ) have no interest in moving to Williams Lake. Not because it is protected by any land reserve or land use bylaws.
One can only marvel at the naïve confidence that the smart growth coalition of environmentalists, planners, progressive developers, and so forth, place in paper fortresses. Despite historical evidence, they believe that dedicated national parks will forever remain inviolate, that greenbelts will never be encroached, or that the sacred will never be touched. Australian writer Mark O’Connor had this warning about that kind of thinking:
“These parks have supposedly been created in perpetuity: yet there is a risk that further shifts in ideology may leave a future government free to revoke national parks. It would by then be able to plead the housing and resource needs of a much expanded population, plus its need of export earnings from lands that would be otherwise going to waste. Developers constantly agitate for governments to become less sluggish in releasing more land.”
The ALC was a significant achievement, but an anomaly, a product of a unique political culture that likely will never be duplicated. It is interesting that no NDP administration in any of the three other provinces that elected them ever implemented similar freezes on development of farmland. And yet mass immigration apologists who argue that farmland loss to development can be prevented by smart growth won’t even wait until this pie-in-the-sky land-use regime is established before they would wantonly inject more than a quarter of a million people into this society annually when it clearly threatens our ability to feed ourselves. A clear case of criminal irresponsibility. One wonders, would they allow cars to pour onto a newly built highway before traffic controls were in place? The reality is, farmland is not currently protected. It is open season and therefore population growth must be stopped now. Immigration and fertility policies must be fashioned in light of that imperative.
A post-carbon world will be unforgiving of transportation costs. Presently 35 times more is spent in fossil energy in transporting a head of lettuce from the Salinos Valley in California to Toronto than in actually growing it . If all the food that Torontonians ate was grown locally in the acres that are now being sold to developers, it would save enough fossil fuels as to be the equivalent of taking 162,000 cars off Toronto’s streets.
In Food, Land, Population and the US Economy , Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel postulated that to achieve a sustainable food system and national economy the United States must reduce its population by one third “or face disaster”. And their research did not even consider the impact of declining fossil fuel production.
It would be prudent for Canada to factor in imminent resource shortages and worst case scenarios. To be on the HMCS Titanic with a captain who stops to pick up additional passengers with an iceberg visible dead ahead is a surreal experience, especially when he, like so many, believes the ship to be unsinkable and with an unlimited carrying capacity. We need to protect our food source and keep it close at hand. And remember the admonition of Canadian writer Ronald Wright, who, in summarizing the collapse of civilizations, remarked, “Don’t build on agricultural land.”
In reviewing this account, my question is directed to myopic policy makers. “Will mass immigration mean mass starvation in Canada?”
POSTSCRIPT: A GLIMPSE AT OUR POSTCARBON FUTURE?
LONDON,ONTARIO TRYING TO FEED ITSELF BY JR WAKEFIELD
Relocalizeation
This is the romantic notion that we will be able to feed ourselves from a strictly locally grown foods. But this is a quixotic notion. Here is why.
London, Ontario is a mid sized city located in the middle of farm country. If there was any city in a perfect position to relocalize it would be London, but population will prevent this from happening.
London's population is 460,000 and growing by 11.8% per year.
It takes 2 acres of land to feed one person (including unfarmable land of about 25%, which may be too low). That's using modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides and machinery.
That requires 920,000 acres of land. Or 1,437.50 sqr miles. London's size is 166 sqr miles, thus an area of 8.7 times the size of the city will be required. (the internal free farmable space in London is small). That's an area 12 miles in radius including the city itself.
But this does not include the people living in these surrounding areas. That adds an additional 659,329 people, more than doubling the required farmland. Add to that farm animals required that must be fed, of 200,000 (which is really low) and we would need 2,638,658.00 acres to feed this area, or a radius of 20 miles. That means we would need a circle from Strathroy in the west, to the lake on the south, to Ingersol on the east, to almost Stratford to the north (Kirkton). And that area would need to grow by 11.8 percent a year. Thus in 10 years we would need an area of 8,048,090.04 (3 times as much) for a radius of 35 miles. Since there is no more south would have to be made up
with the rest. Thus Paris in the east, Goderich in the north, and almost Sarnia in the west.
This does not include increased land required due to lost crops. If we remove fertilizers and chemicals and mechanized machinery with a power down, the require land per person will skyrocket. It will only require a 25% crop loss to pests to dramatically increase the amount of land required per person. And that does not include storage loss (much of it will need to be kept from freezing) and transportation loss.
This does not include surrounding cities, like Windsor and Sarnia to the west and Kitchener to the east. Thus required farmland would overlap, which is not physically possible for the same land to feed two different cities.
There are other limitations. Thus includes farm labour. Because localized farming will return to more labour intensive, less fuel to run machinery, then those masses of people who need to work the farms will have to live on those farms. This will mean a mass exodus from cities, like London. Such people will likely be highly nomadic, working and living on farms in the summer, but living in the cities in the winter. This brings up whole new problems such as schooling of children.
The other limitation is transportation of the food to the cities. With little or no fuels for trucks to get the food from the farms into the city, they will have to be moved by horse. And that means the 200,000 animals I noted above will fall far short, it could be double that, which means even more farmland to feed them.
The last limitation is storage for the winter. Most of it will have to be kept from freezing, and for a million people in the area (3 million meals a day) for at least a years worth of storage (from one harvest to the next) would require a billion meals. There is not enough storage in a city like London for that much food, let alone keeping it from freezing.
Thus there is no way any city will be able to feed itself with the current population. Thus relocalization is a pipe dream that cannot work. It also means those who are pushing for relocalization are thinking one of two thoughts. They have not thought out the logistics of relocalization, or they know very well it cannot work on this scale and fully expect there to be a major, quick, population crash with them surviving because of the relocalization they have managed to implement.
IN CANADA SOME HUMAN RIGHTS ARE PRACTICALLY INVISIBLE
Just as we learned in reading Orwell’s Animal Farm that some animals were more equal than others, Canadians learned in April of 2008 from inveterate hypocrites like the United Church of Canada that some Human Rights were so important in the Philippines that others were worth entirely ignoring.
Three members of the Philippino House of Representatives representing a human rights advocacy group called “Stop the Killing” testified before a Canadian House of Commons Subcommittee to argue that Canadian aid to their country should be contingent on their government ending the executions by military and paramilitary units in the countryside.
Now, it must be said that this delegation is to be congratulated for telling Canadians that foreign aid should be conditional on something. Even bank managers don’t give you money without conditions. And as bad as 900 “extra judicial killings” and “180 enforced disappearances” is in one year, losing 1080 bodies does not stack up to the misery of a country where 40% of women who want to use contraceptives do not have access to them and therefore have to resort to abortion due to lack of family planning information and maternal health care.
In the eyes of the Catholic Church, you see, contraceptives like the pill, induce “abortion”, and that is a deadly “sin”. But the real deadly sin is women having three children each in a nation with a food shortage, or “people longage”. Where the annual growth rate is 2.34 per cent and the national population is projected to reach 90 million by year’s end. While Vietnam and Indonesia improved their human development index rating (HDI), the Philippines saw theirs fall seven places. A more telling yardstick is a comparison between Thailand and the Philippines. According to Ernesto Pernia of the University of the Phillippines, “In 1975 both countries had similar population sizes of 41 to 42 million. Then Bangkok launched a major family planning effort. Now Thailand has a population of around 64 million and is the world's top exporter of rice. Meanwhile, the Philippines with a population of 90 million is the world's top importer of the grain. Thailand had a gross annual income per capita of $7,880 in 2007, while in the Philippines it was $3,730.”
Economists at the same university reported that among the poorest 10% of women of reproductive age, 44% of pregancies are unwanted, and 57% of Phillippinno poor had 9 or more children. Not surprisingly, 3.1 pregnancies are unplanned. Why? Poor women cannot afford contraceptives, which amount to half the daily salary of almost half the population, who also lack accurate information and access. Needless to say, the Catholic authorities are not giving it them. And here’s a trick question, do you think CIDA would think to plant any birth control pills or condoms in that 20 plus million annual aid package to the Philippines? I didn’t think so either. Same thing in Haiti and everywhere else where we “can’t do anything about over-population”.
But do Canadian politicians care about those kind of human rights? The rights that are lost when too many mouths consume fewer and fewer resources? No. The NDP voice on the Subcommittee, Wayne Marston, typically made noise about the Canadian mining firms using paramilitary forces for their security and the Arroyo regime using Canada to train officers for their repressive deeds. The Canadian left will never look for Malthusian roots for the political repression and economic inequities that afflict developing countries. It is all a matter of a just redistribution of abundant wealth, you see.
Meanwhile, Canadian taxpayers just robotically dole out the standard $20 million plus to Manila as their annual breeding incentive. Modeled on the one at home, where Canadian parents receive “baby bonuses” or what is officially called “Child Care Benefits”. I prefer to call them a reward for inflicting more ecological footprints on us.
It all flows from that most Canadian of Human Rights, the human right to procreate as many times as I deem fit, have you pay for it, and me take up the space and resources that is due my neighbour. Upon that attitude is built our foreign aid policy.
Three members of the Philippino House of Representatives representing a human rights advocacy group called “Stop the Killing” testified before a Canadian House of Commons Subcommittee to argue that Canadian aid to their country should be contingent on their government ending the executions by military and paramilitary units in the countryside.
Now, it must be said that this delegation is to be congratulated for telling Canadians that foreign aid should be conditional on something. Even bank managers don’t give you money without conditions. And as bad as 900 “extra judicial killings” and “180 enforced disappearances” is in one year, losing 1080 bodies does not stack up to the misery of a country where 40% of women who want to use contraceptives do not have access to them and therefore have to resort to abortion due to lack of family planning information and maternal health care.
In the eyes of the Catholic Church, you see, contraceptives like the pill, induce “abortion”, and that is a deadly “sin”. But the real deadly sin is women having three children each in a nation with a food shortage, or “people longage”. Where the annual growth rate is 2.34 per cent and the national population is projected to reach 90 million by year’s end. While Vietnam and Indonesia improved their human development index rating (HDI), the Philippines saw theirs fall seven places. A more telling yardstick is a comparison between Thailand and the Philippines. According to Ernesto Pernia of the University of the Phillippines, “In 1975 both countries had similar population sizes of 41 to 42 million. Then Bangkok launched a major family planning effort. Now Thailand has a population of around 64 million and is the world's top exporter of rice. Meanwhile, the Philippines with a population of 90 million is the world's top importer of the grain. Thailand had a gross annual income per capita of $7,880 in 2007, while in the Philippines it was $3,730.”
Economists at the same university reported that among the poorest 10% of women of reproductive age, 44% of pregancies are unwanted, and 57% of Phillippinno poor had 9 or more children. Not surprisingly, 3.1 pregnancies are unplanned. Why? Poor women cannot afford contraceptives, which amount to half the daily salary of almost half the population, who also lack accurate information and access. Needless to say, the Catholic authorities are not giving it them. And here’s a trick question, do you think CIDA would think to plant any birth control pills or condoms in that 20 plus million annual aid package to the Philippines? I didn’t think so either. Same thing in Haiti and everywhere else where we “can’t do anything about over-population”.
But do Canadian politicians care about those kind of human rights? The rights that are lost when too many mouths consume fewer and fewer resources? No. The NDP voice on the Subcommittee, Wayne Marston, typically made noise about the Canadian mining firms using paramilitary forces for their security and the Arroyo regime using Canada to train officers for their repressive deeds. The Canadian left will never look for Malthusian roots for the political repression and economic inequities that afflict developing countries. It is all a matter of a just redistribution of abundant wealth, you see.
Meanwhile, Canadian taxpayers just robotically dole out the standard $20 million plus to Manila as their annual breeding incentive. Modeled on the one at home, where Canadian parents receive “baby bonuses” or what is officially called “Child Care Benefits”. I prefer to call them a reward for inflicting more ecological footprints on us.
It all flows from that most Canadian of Human Rights, the human right to procreate as many times as I deem fit, have you pay for it, and me take up the space and resources that is due my neighbour. Upon that attitude is built our foreign aid policy.
Friday, September 19, 2008
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
To: letters@thecitizen.canwest.com
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 3:56 PM
Subject: Re James Bisset's Op-Ed "Truth and Immigration"
Dear Editor:
James Bissett's OP-ED piece, "Truth and Immigration", is superb. Congratulations to him for writing it and to The Citizen for printing it.
Contrary to what some people think, immigration should not be some minor issue in this election or after. Since immigration levels were raised to about 250,000 per year in 1990 for shameless vote-getting reasons, not for anything that made any sense, immigration has had a profound and far-reaching effect on this country. In effect, Canada has taken close to 5 million people, most of whom it did not need.
And contrary to what most of those in our political parties tell Canadians, the effect has been far from positive. In fact. a great amount has been environmentally, culturally and economically negative, yet many politicians refuse to look at the numerous negatives and try to intimidate the rest of us into keeping silent. Instead of mouthing platitudes like "We are all immigrants", "Celebrate diversity" and the like, why have we not heard them tell us about the connection between immigration and the loss of farmland in souther Ontario; the cultural marginalization of many long-term Canadians by a flood of newcomers; the economic hiring preference given to so-called visible minorities over long-term Canadians.
We need more articles like Mr. Bissett's.
The immigration industry has had its way with Canada.
It's time for Canadians to take back control of the country.
Respectfully,
Dan Murray
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 3:56 PM
Subject: Re James Bisset's Op-Ed "Truth and Immigration"
Dear Editor:
James Bissett's OP-ED piece, "Truth and Immigration", is superb. Congratulations to him for writing it and to The Citizen for printing it.
Contrary to what some people think, immigration should not be some minor issue in this election or after. Since immigration levels were raised to about 250,000 per year in 1990 for shameless vote-getting reasons, not for anything that made any sense, immigration has had a profound and far-reaching effect on this country. In effect, Canada has taken close to 5 million people, most of whom it did not need.
And contrary to what most of those in our political parties tell Canadians, the effect has been far from positive. In fact. a great amount has been environmentally, culturally and economically negative, yet many politicians refuse to look at the numerous negatives and try to intimidate the rest of us into keeping silent. Instead of mouthing platitudes like "We are all immigrants", "Celebrate diversity" and the like, why have we not heard them tell us about the connection between immigration and the loss of farmland in souther Ontario; the cultural marginalization of many long-term Canadians by a flood of newcomers; the economic hiring preference given to so-called visible minorities over long-term Canadians.
We need more articles like Mr. Bissett's.
The immigration industry has had its way with Canada.
It's time for Canadians to take back control of the country.
Respectfully,
Dan Murray
TRUTH AND IMMIGRATION
Election 2008 commentary by James Bissett:
Rather than climbing over each other promising to increase the number of immigrants to Canada, party leaders should acknowledge that levels are already too high
James Bissett
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, September 18, 2008
We sometimes complain about politicians who don't do what they promise to do after they get elected. Ironically, it is sometimes much better for the country when some of these promises are broken.
Let's hope, for example, that the promises made by our political leaders to raise immigration levels and provide more money for immigrant organizations are not kept.
Either our political leaders do not know that Canada is facing an immigration crisis or they care more about gaining a few more so-called "ethnic voters" than they do about telling the truth about immigration.
Canada is taking far too many immigrants and the leaders of all the parties are promising to take even more.
There are already close to a million immigrants waiting in the backlog to come here. They have all met the requirements and by law must be admitted. There is also a backlog of 62,000 asylum seekers before the refugee board and even if these are not found to be genuine refugees most will be allowed to stay. In addition, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 temporary workers now in the country and here again it is unlikely many of them will ever go home.
Despite these extraordinary numbers, the Harper government wants to raise the immigration intake next year to 265,000. The Liberals and the New Democrats have said they want even more, as much as one per cent of our population, or 333,000 each year.
These are enormous numbers and even in the best of times would place a serious burden on the economy and on the already strained infrastructure of the three major urban centres where most of them would end up.
Let's face the facts -- when there is a turndown in the world economy and dire predictions of serious recession or worse this is not the time to be bringing thousands of newcomers to Canada. In July of this year Ontario alone lost 55,000 jobs -- so what is the rationale for more immigration? The fact is there is no valid rationale. There is only one reason why our political parties push for high immigration intake and that is they see every new immigrant as a potential vote for their party. This is not only irresponsible; it borders on culpable negligence.
There are few economists today who argue that immigration helps the economy in any significant way. Studies in Canada since the mid-1980s have pointed out that immigration has little impact on the economic welfare of the receiving country and similar studies in the United States and Britain have reached the same conclusion. Comprehensive studies by George Borjas, the world's most renowned immigration economist at Harvard have shown that immigration's only significant impact is to reduce the wages of native workers.
Our politicians justify their desire for more immigrants by raising the spectre of an aging population and tell us immigration is the only answer to this dilemma, and yet there is not a shred of truth to this argument. Immigration does not provide the answer to population aging and there is a multiplicity of studies done in Canada and elsewhere that proves this.
Moreover, there is no evidence that a larger labour force necessarily leads to economic progress. Many countries whose labour forces are shrinking are still enjoying economic buoyancy. Finland, Switzerland and Japan are only a few examples of countries that do not rely on massive immigration to succeed.
Productivity is the answer to economic success, not a larger population.
Most Canadians assume that our immigrants are selected because they have skills, training and education that will enable them to enhance our labour force but only about 18 to 20 per cent of our immigrants are selected for economic factors. By far the bulk of the immigrants we receive come here because they are sponsored by relatives or because of so-called humanitarian reasons and none of these have to meet the "points system" of selection.
This is why over 50 per cent of recent immigrants are living below the poverty line and why they are not earning nearly the wages paid to equivalent Canadian workers.
It also explains why a study published this year by professor Herbert Grubel of Simon Fraser University revealed that the 2.5 million immigrants who came to Canada between 1990 and 2002 received $18.3 billion more in government services and benefits in 2002 than they paid in taxes. As Prof. Grubel points out, this amount is more than the federal government spent on health care and twice what was spent on defence in the fiscal year of 2000/2001. Isn't it time our party leaders were made aware of this study?
In the discussions about immigration we never hear from our political leaders about the serious environmental problems caused by the addition of over a quarter of a million immigrants each year. Most of our immigrants are coming from developing countries of Asia where their "ecological footprint" is tiny compared to the average Canadian but within months of arrival here the immigrant's footprint has increased to our giant size.
We have already experienced the impact mass migration has had on the health, education, traffic, social services and crime rates of our three major urban centres. It may be that cutting the immigration flow in half would do more than any gas tax to help reduce our environmental pollution.
If immigration is to be an issue in the election campaign then let us insist that the real issues be discussed and that our politicians contribute more to the debate than promising higher levels and more money to immigrant groups. Canadians and immigrants deserve better.
James Bissett is a former executive director of the Canadian Immigration Service.
Rather than climbing over each other promising to increase the number of immigrants to Canada, party leaders should acknowledge that levels are already too high
James Bissett
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, September 18, 2008
We sometimes complain about politicians who don't do what they promise to do after they get elected. Ironically, it is sometimes much better for the country when some of these promises are broken.
Let's hope, for example, that the promises made by our political leaders to raise immigration levels and provide more money for immigrant organizations are not kept.
Either our political leaders do not know that Canada is facing an immigration crisis or they care more about gaining a few more so-called "ethnic voters" than they do about telling the truth about immigration.
Canada is taking far too many immigrants and the leaders of all the parties are promising to take even more.
There are already close to a million immigrants waiting in the backlog to come here. They have all met the requirements and by law must be admitted. There is also a backlog of 62,000 asylum seekers before the refugee board and even if these are not found to be genuine refugees most will be allowed to stay. In addition, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 temporary workers now in the country and here again it is unlikely many of them will ever go home.
Despite these extraordinary numbers, the Harper government wants to raise the immigration intake next year to 265,000. The Liberals and the New Democrats have said they want even more, as much as one per cent of our population, or 333,000 each year.
These are enormous numbers and even in the best of times would place a serious burden on the economy and on the already strained infrastructure of the three major urban centres where most of them would end up.
Let's face the facts -- when there is a turndown in the world economy and dire predictions of serious recession or worse this is not the time to be bringing thousands of newcomers to Canada. In July of this year Ontario alone lost 55,000 jobs -- so what is the rationale for more immigration? The fact is there is no valid rationale. There is only one reason why our political parties push for high immigration intake and that is they see every new immigrant as a potential vote for their party. This is not only irresponsible; it borders on culpable negligence.
There are few economists today who argue that immigration helps the economy in any significant way. Studies in Canada since the mid-1980s have pointed out that immigration has little impact on the economic welfare of the receiving country and similar studies in the United States and Britain have reached the same conclusion. Comprehensive studies by George Borjas, the world's most renowned immigration economist at Harvard have shown that immigration's only significant impact is to reduce the wages of native workers.
Our politicians justify their desire for more immigrants by raising the spectre of an aging population and tell us immigration is the only answer to this dilemma, and yet there is not a shred of truth to this argument. Immigration does not provide the answer to population aging and there is a multiplicity of studies done in Canada and elsewhere that proves this.
Moreover, there is no evidence that a larger labour force necessarily leads to economic progress. Many countries whose labour forces are shrinking are still enjoying economic buoyancy. Finland, Switzerland and Japan are only a few examples of countries that do not rely on massive immigration to succeed.
Productivity is the answer to economic success, not a larger population.
Most Canadians assume that our immigrants are selected because they have skills, training and education that will enable them to enhance our labour force but only about 18 to 20 per cent of our immigrants are selected for economic factors. By far the bulk of the immigrants we receive come here because they are sponsored by relatives or because of so-called humanitarian reasons and none of these have to meet the "points system" of selection.
This is why over 50 per cent of recent immigrants are living below the poverty line and why they are not earning nearly the wages paid to equivalent Canadian workers.
It also explains why a study published this year by professor Herbert Grubel of Simon Fraser University revealed that the 2.5 million immigrants who came to Canada between 1990 and 2002 received $18.3 billion more in government services and benefits in 2002 than they paid in taxes. As Prof. Grubel points out, this amount is more than the federal government spent on health care and twice what was spent on defence in the fiscal year of 2000/2001. Isn't it time our party leaders were made aware of this study?
In the discussions about immigration we never hear from our political leaders about the serious environmental problems caused by the addition of over a quarter of a million immigrants each year. Most of our immigrants are coming from developing countries of Asia where their "ecological footprint" is tiny compared to the average Canadian but within months of arrival here the immigrant's footprint has increased to our giant size.
We have already experienced the impact mass migration has had on the health, education, traffic, social services and crime rates of our three major urban centres. It may be that cutting the immigration flow in half would do more than any gas tax to help reduce our environmental pollution.
If immigration is to be an issue in the election campaign then let us insist that the real issues be discussed and that our politicians contribute more to the debate than promising higher levels and more money to immigrant groups. Canadians and immigrants deserve better.
James Bissett is a former executive director of the Canadian Immigration Service.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
IMMIGRATION MUST BE AN ELECTION ISSUE
Immigration must be an election issue by
Ambassador James Bissett
In his September 6 column in the National Post, Robert Fulford wrote that the forthcoming election was one that was “going nowhere.” One of the reasons it may be going nowhere is because some of the most important issues facing Canada are not going to be discussed. One of the most critical of these is immigration. Canada is facing an immigration crisis but immigration policy will not be on the agenda of any of the political parties.
In the so-called “ethnic ridings” each of the parties will promise to keep immigration levels high and will repeat the myth that we need immigration to combat our aging population and keep the economy growing by supplying desperately needed skilled workers for our labour force. Most economists in Canada and elsewhere have concluded that immigration does little to enhance the economy and that immigrants cost more in the benefits they receive than in the taxes they contribute. However, our politicians are not concerned about facts – they are concerned about votes and see every new immigrant as a potential voter. What counts for our politicians is numbers.
There are now almost one million people waiting in the immigration backlog. All of them have met the requirements and by law must eventually be issued a visa to come here. Most of these immigrants are coming from Asian countries: China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Iran. Many of them are the parents or grand parents of people already living here. Furthermore, the Conservatives have promised that next year they plan to raise the annual immigration intake to 265,000. The Liberals and the New Democrats want even more. They believe we should be accepting 1% of our population, or in other words, 330,000 newcomers annually.
These are high numbers and added to them are thousands of so-called temporary workers who are brought here by employers to fill temporary needs. Many of these workers are unskilled and few will go home when their visa expires.
Canadians are led to believe that most of the immigrants and temporary workers are selected because they have skills, education and training that will enable them to contribute to our (and their) economic welfare. The fact is that only about 17% of our immigration intake is selected for economic reasons. The remaining 83% come to Canada because they have been sponsored by their relatives or because they are refugees, or there are humanitarian reasons for admitting them. It’s little wonder then that 51% of those immigrants who have landed since the early 1990’s are living below the poverty line.
Few Canadians would oppose uniting immigrant families or would reject genuine refugees, but it is unlikely they would approve a policy that resulted in over 80% of the immigration flow consisting of unselected family, refugees and humanitarian cases. If this is the rationale for our immigration policy then it is wrong headed - and worse - it is ineffectual.
There are more effective ways of helping resolve global refugee and humanitarian problems than by immigration. Augmented developmental assistance and increased financial contributions to international refugee organizations would be more useful. More to the point, our politicians do not justify the high numbers on humanitarian grounds but tell us immigration is for the benefit of our economy and our labour force - and this is simply not true.
It is likely the coming election will focus on the state of the Canadian economy and possibly on the environment, but although immigration impacts adversely on both of these issues immigration will not be raised as a subject of debate or discussed at all.
There seems little question that we are headed for a recession or worse. Already Ontario has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs and is slipping into the unenviable ranks of the “have not” provinces but no one is suggesting that perhaps it would be a wise course to slow down the enormous intake of immigrants. Every study about the impact of immigration on the labour force demonstrates that it lowers the wage rate of native workers but has insignificant effect on overall economic prosperity.
Canadians are known to have one of the largest ecological footprints of any country in the world and every immigrant who enters Canada from Asia within several months acquires a similar size footprint as the average Canadian. The extraordinary high levels of immigration since the early 1990’s destined to Canada’s three major urban centres of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, have caused serious environmental problems: traffic congestion, garbage disposal, escalating health, education and social welfare costs, as well as rising crime rates. Sadly, the stress on an already eroding infrastructure caused by massive immigration is a subject that cannot be discussed because of an ideological hang up about multiculturalism and diversity which for some reason now symbolizes the twin pillars of the new Canadian identity.
Time is running out for Canada and unless immigration becomes an issue that can be openly and vigorously debated as an important issue of public policy we will find that without knowing it our country has been radically changed. There are those who might believe this change to be necessary and beneficial and they may be right, but surely it is important enough to be discussed at the political level during an election campaign.
-----------------------
James Bissett is a Distinguished Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies. He is the former head of Immigration Services in Canada and was Canada's ambassador to a number of countries, including its last in Yugoslavia
Ambassador James Bissett
In his September 6 column in the National Post, Robert Fulford wrote that the forthcoming election was one that was “going nowhere.” One of the reasons it may be going nowhere is because some of the most important issues facing Canada are not going to be discussed. One of the most critical of these is immigration. Canada is facing an immigration crisis but immigration policy will not be on the agenda of any of the political parties.
In the so-called “ethnic ridings” each of the parties will promise to keep immigration levels high and will repeat the myth that we need immigration to combat our aging population and keep the economy growing by supplying desperately needed skilled workers for our labour force. Most economists in Canada and elsewhere have concluded that immigration does little to enhance the economy and that immigrants cost more in the benefits they receive than in the taxes they contribute. However, our politicians are not concerned about facts – they are concerned about votes and see every new immigrant as a potential voter. What counts for our politicians is numbers.
There are now almost one million people waiting in the immigration backlog. All of them have met the requirements and by law must eventually be issued a visa to come here. Most of these immigrants are coming from Asian countries: China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Iran. Many of them are the parents or grand parents of people already living here. Furthermore, the Conservatives have promised that next year they plan to raise the annual immigration intake to 265,000. The Liberals and the New Democrats want even more. They believe we should be accepting 1% of our population, or in other words, 330,000 newcomers annually.
These are high numbers and added to them are thousands of so-called temporary workers who are brought here by employers to fill temporary needs. Many of these workers are unskilled and few will go home when their visa expires.
Canadians are led to believe that most of the immigrants and temporary workers are selected because they have skills, education and training that will enable them to contribute to our (and their) economic welfare. The fact is that only about 17% of our immigration intake is selected for economic reasons. The remaining 83% come to Canada because they have been sponsored by their relatives or because they are refugees, or there are humanitarian reasons for admitting them. It’s little wonder then that 51% of those immigrants who have landed since the early 1990’s are living below the poverty line.
Few Canadians would oppose uniting immigrant families or would reject genuine refugees, but it is unlikely they would approve a policy that resulted in over 80% of the immigration flow consisting of unselected family, refugees and humanitarian cases. If this is the rationale for our immigration policy then it is wrong headed - and worse - it is ineffectual.
There are more effective ways of helping resolve global refugee and humanitarian problems than by immigration. Augmented developmental assistance and increased financial contributions to international refugee organizations would be more useful. More to the point, our politicians do not justify the high numbers on humanitarian grounds but tell us immigration is for the benefit of our economy and our labour force - and this is simply not true.
It is likely the coming election will focus on the state of the Canadian economy and possibly on the environment, but although immigration impacts adversely on both of these issues immigration will not be raised as a subject of debate or discussed at all.
There seems little question that we are headed for a recession or worse. Already Ontario has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs and is slipping into the unenviable ranks of the “have not” provinces but no one is suggesting that perhaps it would be a wise course to slow down the enormous intake of immigrants. Every study about the impact of immigration on the labour force demonstrates that it lowers the wage rate of native workers but has insignificant effect on overall economic prosperity.
Canadians are known to have one of the largest ecological footprints of any country in the world and every immigrant who enters Canada from Asia within several months acquires a similar size footprint as the average Canadian. The extraordinary high levels of immigration since the early 1990’s destined to Canada’s three major urban centres of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, have caused serious environmental problems: traffic congestion, garbage disposal, escalating health, education and social welfare costs, as well as rising crime rates. Sadly, the stress on an already eroding infrastructure caused by massive immigration is a subject that cannot be discussed because of an ideological hang up about multiculturalism and diversity which for some reason now symbolizes the twin pillars of the new Canadian identity.
Time is running out for Canada and unless immigration becomes an issue that can be openly and vigorously debated as an important issue of public policy we will find that without knowing it our country has been radically changed. There are those who might believe this change to be necessary and beneficial and they may be right, but surely it is important enough to be discussed at the political level during an election campaign.
-----------------------
James Bissett is a Distinguished Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies. He is the former head of Immigration Services in Canada and was Canada's ambassador to a number of countries, including its last in Yugoslavia
IS THERE INTELLIGENT LIFE ON PLANET GREEN?
Each night at the observatory I have spent countless hours pointing my telescope in the direction of Green party and environmentalist galaxies in the forelorn hope that one night, just one night in my life, I might record a signal of intelligent life.
Imagine my exhilaration when earlier this week a signal bounced back from Esquimalt B.C. and another from Guelph, Ontario. Two carbon-based life forms by the name of Brian Gordon and Bill Hulet are running for the Green Party of Canada in the federal election of 2008. And can you believe this. They both believe that immigrant-driven population growth has a major role to play in the environmental degradation of our country. The mantra of reducing consumption and "Living like Ghandhi" is not the only song in the Green playbook after all----at least not for everyone.
The big question is, how marginal are their voices? Their views are radically misaligned with those of leader Elizabeth May, the population myopic. As scornful as I am of the Green Party, if you follow the debate in the link provided, you must agree with me, no other party would even entertain the questions discussed here. Certainly not the NDP, for whom the words "carrying capacity" are not even in their dictionary. Brian Gordon deserves credit for putting this issue forward. Read on.
http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/4058
Imagine my exhilaration when earlier this week a signal bounced back from Esquimalt B.C. and another from Guelph, Ontario. Two carbon-based life forms by the name of Brian Gordon and Bill Hulet are running for the Green Party of Canada in the federal election of 2008. And can you believe this. They both believe that immigrant-driven population growth has a major role to play in the environmental degradation of our country. The mantra of reducing consumption and "Living like Ghandhi" is not the only song in the Green playbook after all----at least not for everyone.
The big question is, how marginal are their voices? Their views are radically misaligned with those of leader Elizabeth May, the population myopic. As scornful as I am of the Green Party, if you follow the debate in the link provided, you must agree with me, no other party would even entertain the questions discussed here. Certainly not the NDP, for whom the words "carrying capacity" are not even in their dictionary. Brian Gordon deserves credit for putting this issue forward. Read on.
http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/4058
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
JACK LAYTON'S PHONE CALL
At 9pm on Tuesday evening (Sept 8/08) the phone rang. I instantly recognized the automated voice of NDP leader Jack Layton. He spent about 15 seconds telling me that it was time for a change. He used what is becoming a hackneyed phrase. A phrase dreamed up by a speech-writer describing how different Obama’s Democrats were from the Republicans, despite the fact that Wall Street gave more campaign money to the Democrats. The phrase was “listening to the concerns of the kitchen table rather than the board room table.”
But the board room table wants lots of immigration and that is what Jack wants too. The people that Jack claims to be fighting for, the ordinary working people though, don’t want that. But they’re not running the unions that send campaign workers and money to the NDP. Seeing that Harper, Dion, May and Layton are all pulling in the same direction, it seems senseless for them to waste so much money on campaign spending.
Why not have all the parties campaign together under one banner with this slogan: “MORE PEOPLE, MORE GROWTH” That way they can pool their resources and run a cost effective campaign, and clear up this confusion, this charade that there exists some fundamental difference between left, right and centre in this country
But the board room table wants lots of immigration and that is what Jack wants too. The people that Jack claims to be fighting for, the ordinary working people though, don’t want that. But they’re not running the unions that send campaign workers and money to the NDP. Seeing that Harper, Dion, May and Layton are all pulling in the same direction, it seems senseless for them to waste so much money on campaign spending.
Why not have all the parties campaign together under one banner with this slogan: “MORE PEOPLE, MORE GROWTH” That way they can pool their resources and run a cost effective campaign, and clear up this confusion, this charade that there exists some fundamental difference between left, right and centre in this country
Sunday, September 7, 2008
THE GREEN PARTY NEWS CONFERENCE
So the Green Party of Canada held a TV news press conference in response to Prime Minister Harper’s election call. Did you see it? There stood party leader Elizabeth May at the mike, flanked on either side by perhaps thirty other men and women, all lily white Caucasians. Had they been uniformly male, you would have thought that it was a press conference called by the Reform party 25 years ago. This is a party that, more than any other, continually parrots the line of “cultural diversity”, which Elizabeth May has called Canada’s great project and the major rationale, in her mind, for a high immigration target.
But here is the delicious irony and the contradiction in her objective. She knows that immigration is now drawn from “non-traditional” sources. From those countries where people have skin pigmentation of the kind that is apparently missing from her Party or at least from her headquarters for a photo op, which any campaign manager would have killed for. So this New Canada of hers, the Canada of cheap labour which has through mass immigration driven down the incomes of educated workers by 7% by increasing the labour pool by 13% in less than two decades, this “great project”, is actually narrowing her natural constituency. Immigrants of colour don’t like green living. They have been watching syndicated episodes of Dallas on their tiny TV sets in a tenement in Manilla or New Delhi or Hong Kong and now finally they have a chance at the North American dream so, uh, uh, Elizabeth. “ Now it's OUR turn.”
In its great enthusiasm for mass immigration, greater than any other party, The Green Party of Canada is a disease that carries its own cure. For that, at least, I am grateful.
But here is the delicious irony and the contradiction in her objective. She knows that immigration is now drawn from “non-traditional” sources. From those countries where people have skin pigmentation of the kind that is apparently missing from her Party or at least from her headquarters for a photo op, which any campaign manager would have killed for. So this New Canada of hers, the Canada of cheap labour which has through mass immigration driven down the incomes of educated workers by 7% by increasing the labour pool by 13% in less than two decades, this “great project”, is actually narrowing her natural constituency. Immigrants of colour don’t like green living. They have been watching syndicated episodes of Dallas on their tiny TV sets in a tenement in Manilla or New Delhi or Hong Kong and now finally they have a chance at the North American dream so, uh, uh, Elizabeth. “ Now it's OUR turn.”
In its great enthusiasm for mass immigration, greater than any other party, The Green Party of Canada is a disease that carries its own cure. For that, at least, I am grateful.
GETTING OUR ACT TOGETHER ON REFUGEES
If you had a hard time figuring out Dr.William Rees, who confessed to us that Canada had an immigration level that was too high “under present circumstances”, yet is in favour of a wide open door for tens of millions of climate change refugees that would blow the door right off our carrying capacity as a nation and will not publicly state his stance on immigration, then go figure these contradictory statements in the Daily Mail by James Lovelock: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=541748&in_page_id=1770
"At some point, we are going to have to say Britain is a lifeboat. If any more people come on board then we will sink.
That is great. Lovelock is using the lifeboat analogy. Finally the top environmentalist in the UK notices that 61 million people is too many for an island of 61 million acres. But then he pulls a Dr. Rees. He says this:
However, immigration is also a natural form of selection, he argues. Those who are prepared to travel will be the survivors.
"We should be selective and those brave, enterprising healthy people coming over in cockle boats from Africa should be the first we let in.
So James Lovelock, like William Rees, speaks with a forked tongue. We have a carrying capacity for immigrants, but a wide open door for refugees. A lifeboat with limited seated capacity for regular passengers, that somehow morphs into an aircraft carrier when tens of millions of third world swimmers turn up.
If environmental leaders are not clear about our carrying capacity, how can we expect those in government to be clear about it? How can we expect those in government to repel a foreign invasion of human locusts who would come in their tens and twenties of millions to descend upon us and pick our environment clean, consuming everything left that might sustain us, aided and abetted by self-loathing fifth columnists who place the survival of foreigners over the survival of their own countrymen and the remnants of biodiversity left here? If we do not form a population plan now, and a steely resolve to defend it, a future Canadian government may be stampeded into dropping our borders and surrendering our birthright due to a misguided mixture of defeatism and misplaced compassion. Lovelock-ism and Rees-ism must be replaced by Garrett Hardinism. Soppy Buddhism and soft Christianity must be replaced by Lifeboat Ethics.
My Prescription? Take the money that is spent on Canadian Foreign Aid, that is, on promoting third world misery through higher fertility rates, and the money spent on pro-growth propaganda, that is the CBC, through slanted coverage of Multiculturalism and immigration issues, and instead deploy that money toward rebuilding the Canadian Navy to World War II levels, which when it finished the war as the world’s third largest navy. Once at that point, quadruple it, and arm the Coast Guard while you are at. Then issue a Shoot To Kill order.
So far the rest of the world has had the impression, a correct one, that we are a soft touch. Just jump in a rusty freighter, run it aground off the west coast of BC, and our Coast Guard and naval vessels will do nothing but help you. They will help you aboard , give you blankets and mugs of tea and we will spend months processing your claims as refugees on shore at taxpayers expense. Too bad for Hitler that policy wasn’t in effect in 1939. The whole Wehrmacht could have come in rusty freighters and been given mugs of tea by naïve Canadians. Imagine what it is going to be like in several decades under Gore’s or Lovelock’s scenario with just 40 million refugees from the city of Shanghai alone, or 300 million across the hemisphere. No, the Canadian Navy should greet these refugees the way passengers in the lifeboats from the Titanic greeted swimmers who threatened to capsize them by climbing aboard. They should club them. If they won’t turn back shoot them down like ducks in the water. The Canadian Navy in those circumstances should greet them no differently than the English Navy greeted the Spanish Armada. As invaders. Do our pacifist friends in the Green party have an alternative? Perhaps we should meet them with tambourines, Buddhist chants and quotes from the Delai Lama. Or wait for the Second Coming of Christ to provide loaves and fishes for the 10-12 billion people here after are oceans are all stipped mined, our water depleted and soils exhausted.
Callousness? Cruelty? To whom? When there is not enough to go around, letting everyone through the door is cruelty to everyone. Read Jean Raspail and his Camp of The Saints That is my nightmare. If Lifeboat Ethics is cruel, so is triage medicine. If you don’t have the stomach for it, pity. My parents generation did. Not only were my uncles ready for a Japanese invasion while in the forces, but so was my mother. She carried a rifle and would have shot anyone who stepped on the beach to threaten her family or her country. She was not a globalist. Neither I am. Go ahead and play the race card. But 40 million White refugees would sink us just as surely and just as surely I would resist them.
It may seem hyperbolic to speak of these things now in the context of 2008. But the RCMP has secretly composed contingency plans for the mass accommodation of climate change refugees. That the Canadian public is assumed to be agreeable to any such accommodation is outrageous. As with immigration issues, they have never been consulted. Tens of thousands of Canadians died to ensure that this country was not invaded in the last war. Why would the authorities believe that this generation would want to lie down and surrender this country to the rest of the world or to listen to voices who sing the same tune as those in the 1930s, that we can’t defend ourselves, so we might as well give up?
Look at countries who have their backs to the wall now. Third world countries face resource shortages and population pressures that North Americans, Australians and Britons seem destined to face in the not too distant future. Mexican border guards routinely shoot Central Americans who illegally attempt to cross the border into Mexico and inflict the same damage on their society that the Mexican exodus has on the United States. India has spent almost two billion dollars on a fence to prevent Bangledeshis from migrating into northern India and putting pressure on that precious hinterland. Stopping massive migrant flows has nothing to do with racism, with white oppression over people of colour. It has every thing to do with the interdiction of a human monoculture across the globe that would wipe out the last pockets of bio-rich territory on planet earth.
The two things we now about refugees is that today they are just a trickle, but soon they will be a tsunami. If not from climate change then from resource shortages and wars. And secondly, they have an ecological footprint. To pretend as progressives and environmentalists do that they should be treated as some special class of people apart from other migrants is a fiction. The biosphere makes no distinction between refugees, skilled migrants, unskilled migrants, illegal migrants, legal migrants, English or non-English speaking migrants. To say as some in SPA do that business class migrants spur economic growth and are more ecologically damaging is false. Unskilled refugees incur more social costs which governments try to recover through economic growth rather than politically unpopular tax hikes.
If one reads the post-mortems on the Fall of France, what one concludes is not that the Germans defeated the French by superior force of arms. Indeed , the French and the British out-numbered Hitler’s forces in many areas. No. What defeated France was the attitude of defeatism which preceded the outbreak of the conflict. The French believed in the inferiority of their society and culture. They felt they were weak and adrift. Germany was strong and had a purpose. The France of 1940 describes us. As Raspail described the West. Full of self-loathing. We feel we don’t have a right to survive. So let’s turn over our nation to them. That is what is this xenophilia all about. It is not about compassion. It is not about having the moral high ground. It is about where we choose to direct our compassion. For like oil or water, there is only so much to go around. The idea that the love of untold millions of strangers should supersede the love for our own land and the species both human and non-human that require it in better repair than it currently is violates common sense and even the basic tenets of Christianity (1st Timothy 5:8). And we pay university professors to indoctrinate our children with this garbage and subsidize our state media to spread it.
"At some point, we are going to have to say Britain is a lifeboat. If any more people come on board then we will sink.
That is great. Lovelock is using the lifeboat analogy. Finally the top environmentalist in the UK notices that 61 million people is too many for an island of 61 million acres. But then he pulls a Dr. Rees. He says this:
However, immigration is also a natural form of selection, he argues. Those who are prepared to travel will be the survivors.
"We should be selective and those brave, enterprising healthy people coming over in cockle boats from Africa should be the first we let in.
So James Lovelock, like William Rees, speaks with a forked tongue. We have a carrying capacity for immigrants, but a wide open door for refugees. A lifeboat with limited seated capacity for regular passengers, that somehow morphs into an aircraft carrier when tens of millions of third world swimmers turn up.
If environmental leaders are not clear about our carrying capacity, how can we expect those in government to be clear about it? How can we expect those in government to repel a foreign invasion of human locusts who would come in their tens and twenties of millions to descend upon us and pick our environment clean, consuming everything left that might sustain us, aided and abetted by self-loathing fifth columnists who place the survival of foreigners over the survival of their own countrymen and the remnants of biodiversity left here? If we do not form a population plan now, and a steely resolve to defend it, a future Canadian government may be stampeded into dropping our borders and surrendering our birthright due to a misguided mixture of defeatism and misplaced compassion. Lovelock-ism and Rees-ism must be replaced by Garrett Hardinism. Soppy Buddhism and soft Christianity must be replaced by Lifeboat Ethics.
My Prescription? Take the money that is spent on Canadian Foreign Aid, that is, on promoting third world misery through higher fertility rates, and the money spent on pro-growth propaganda, that is the CBC, through slanted coverage of Multiculturalism and immigration issues, and instead deploy that money toward rebuilding the Canadian Navy to World War II levels, which when it finished the war as the world’s third largest navy. Once at that point, quadruple it, and arm the Coast Guard while you are at. Then issue a Shoot To Kill order.
So far the rest of the world has had the impression, a correct one, that we are a soft touch. Just jump in a rusty freighter, run it aground off the west coast of BC, and our Coast Guard and naval vessels will do nothing but help you. They will help you aboard , give you blankets and mugs of tea and we will spend months processing your claims as refugees on shore at taxpayers expense. Too bad for Hitler that policy wasn’t in effect in 1939. The whole Wehrmacht could have come in rusty freighters and been given mugs of tea by naïve Canadians. Imagine what it is going to be like in several decades under Gore’s or Lovelock’s scenario with just 40 million refugees from the city of Shanghai alone, or 300 million across the hemisphere. No, the Canadian Navy should greet these refugees the way passengers in the lifeboats from the Titanic greeted swimmers who threatened to capsize them by climbing aboard. They should club them. If they won’t turn back shoot them down like ducks in the water. The Canadian Navy in those circumstances should greet them no differently than the English Navy greeted the Spanish Armada. As invaders. Do our pacifist friends in the Green party have an alternative? Perhaps we should meet them with tambourines, Buddhist chants and quotes from the Delai Lama. Or wait for the Second Coming of Christ to provide loaves and fishes for the 10-12 billion people here after are oceans are all stipped mined, our water depleted and soils exhausted.
Callousness? Cruelty? To whom? When there is not enough to go around, letting everyone through the door is cruelty to everyone. Read Jean Raspail and his Camp of The Saints That is my nightmare. If Lifeboat Ethics is cruel, so is triage medicine. If you don’t have the stomach for it, pity. My parents generation did. Not only were my uncles ready for a Japanese invasion while in the forces, but so was my mother. She carried a rifle and would have shot anyone who stepped on the beach to threaten her family or her country. She was not a globalist. Neither I am. Go ahead and play the race card. But 40 million White refugees would sink us just as surely and just as surely I would resist them.
It may seem hyperbolic to speak of these things now in the context of 2008. But the RCMP has secretly composed contingency plans for the mass accommodation of climate change refugees. That the Canadian public is assumed to be agreeable to any such accommodation is outrageous. As with immigration issues, they have never been consulted. Tens of thousands of Canadians died to ensure that this country was not invaded in the last war. Why would the authorities believe that this generation would want to lie down and surrender this country to the rest of the world or to listen to voices who sing the same tune as those in the 1930s, that we can’t defend ourselves, so we might as well give up?
Look at countries who have their backs to the wall now. Third world countries face resource shortages and population pressures that North Americans, Australians and Britons seem destined to face in the not too distant future. Mexican border guards routinely shoot Central Americans who illegally attempt to cross the border into Mexico and inflict the same damage on their society that the Mexican exodus has on the United States. India has spent almost two billion dollars on a fence to prevent Bangledeshis from migrating into northern India and putting pressure on that precious hinterland. Stopping massive migrant flows has nothing to do with racism, with white oppression over people of colour. It has every thing to do with the interdiction of a human monoculture across the globe that would wipe out the last pockets of bio-rich territory on planet earth.
The two things we now about refugees is that today they are just a trickle, but soon they will be a tsunami. If not from climate change then from resource shortages and wars. And secondly, they have an ecological footprint. To pretend as progressives and environmentalists do that they should be treated as some special class of people apart from other migrants is a fiction. The biosphere makes no distinction between refugees, skilled migrants, unskilled migrants, illegal migrants, legal migrants, English or non-English speaking migrants. To say as some in SPA do that business class migrants spur economic growth and are more ecologically damaging is false. Unskilled refugees incur more social costs which governments try to recover through economic growth rather than politically unpopular tax hikes.
If one reads the post-mortems on the Fall of France, what one concludes is not that the Germans defeated the French by superior force of arms. Indeed , the French and the British out-numbered Hitler’s forces in many areas. No. What defeated France was the attitude of defeatism which preceded the outbreak of the conflict. The French believed in the inferiority of their society and culture. They felt they were weak and adrift. Germany was strong and had a purpose. The France of 1940 describes us. As Raspail described the West. Full of self-loathing. We feel we don’t have a right to survive. So let’s turn over our nation to them. That is what is this xenophilia all about. It is not about compassion. It is not about having the moral high ground. It is about where we choose to direct our compassion. For like oil or water, there is only so much to go around. The idea that the love of untold millions of strangers should supersede the love for our own land and the species both human and non-human that require it in better repair than it currently is violates common sense and even the basic tenets of Christianity (1st Timothy 5:8). And we pay university professors to indoctrinate our children with this garbage and subsidize our state media to spread it.
PARABLE OF THE CO-DEPENDENT GREEN WIFE
There once was a Canadian couple who lived in denial.
They believed they could live the Californian dream with a Green conscience too, retro-fitted with snug windows and thick insulation and equipped with solar panels and air conditioners positioned at high settings.
He was a developer, but a “progressive” developer if you must know. He had learned that he could push through almost any development if he tacked the word “sustainable” in front of it. So he was closing deals all the time. Attending meetings all the time. Meeting with local and regional politicians all the time. So it was important to make a good impression. To be smart, he must look smart.
That is where his “suit” fetish came in. He made a habit of buying a new suit almost every day. Soon the closets of home filled up with suits so that there was no space left over for anything else but his suits.
What was his wife’s response? As a member of the Sierra Club, it was congenitally impossible for her to tell him to simply stop growing his wardrobe. Growth is inevitable.
Her philosophy was “growth management”. So she went out and bought closet organizers. Again and again. She would buy them to compress the inventory of her husband’s suits, and then weeks later, more compression was called for, and the cycle would be repeated. Voila! Smart growth. Alas, it was evident her strategy would not work ad infinitum. Her stress level was rising. Eventually she was ripping out the R50 insulation, sending it to the dump and replacing it with some of her husband’s suits.
Sensing her frustration, her husband proposed that they buy a bigger house in a better neigbourhood. One with more closet space. She countered that as an environmentalist, she would have no part of it. The energy problems we have today, she argued, issued out of the fact that very large homes were being occupied by too few people. So she was going to proceed with her plans of having a third and fourth child. After all, as far as the environment is concerned, it is as Ontario Green Party leader Frank de Jong said, “population is a red herring”, because as his federal leader, Elizabeth May remarked, it is not how many people that live in Canada that is important, “but whether they live like Bill Gates or Ghandhi.”
So just keep them comin’. More and more suits. More and more babies, more and more immigrants, lets just find smarter ways to pack them all in like the men with white gloves who push commuters into Japanese subway trains. Green living habits of conserve, recycle and reduce feed the obsessive compulsive disorders of those who feel the need to fixate on the trivial in order to avoid the facing the truly lethal dangers of over-population in our society.
This neurotic wife of the pack rat forms the template for urban planners across the continent.
They believed they could live the Californian dream with a Green conscience too, retro-fitted with snug windows and thick insulation and equipped with solar panels and air conditioners positioned at high settings.
He was a developer, but a “progressive” developer if you must know. He had learned that he could push through almost any development if he tacked the word “sustainable” in front of it. So he was closing deals all the time. Attending meetings all the time. Meeting with local and regional politicians all the time. So it was important to make a good impression. To be smart, he must look smart.
That is where his “suit” fetish came in. He made a habit of buying a new suit almost every day. Soon the closets of home filled up with suits so that there was no space left over for anything else but his suits.
What was his wife’s response? As a member of the Sierra Club, it was congenitally impossible for her to tell him to simply stop growing his wardrobe. Growth is inevitable.
Her philosophy was “growth management”. So she went out and bought closet organizers. Again and again. She would buy them to compress the inventory of her husband’s suits, and then weeks later, more compression was called for, and the cycle would be repeated. Voila! Smart growth. Alas, it was evident her strategy would not work ad infinitum. Her stress level was rising. Eventually she was ripping out the R50 insulation, sending it to the dump and replacing it with some of her husband’s suits.
Sensing her frustration, her husband proposed that they buy a bigger house in a better neigbourhood. One with more closet space. She countered that as an environmentalist, she would have no part of it. The energy problems we have today, she argued, issued out of the fact that very large homes were being occupied by too few people. So she was going to proceed with her plans of having a third and fourth child. After all, as far as the environment is concerned, it is as Ontario Green Party leader Frank de Jong said, “population is a red herring”, because as his federal leader, Elizabeth May remarked, it is not how many people that live in Canada that is important, “but whether they live like Bill Gates or Ghandhi.”
So just keep them comin’. More and more suits. More and more babies, more and more immigrants, lets just find smarter ways to pack them all in like the men with white gloves who push commuters into Japanese subway trains. Green living habits of conserve, recycle and reduce feed the obsessive compulsive disorders of those who feel the need to fixate on the trivial in order to avoid the facing the truly lethal dangers of over-population in our society.
This neurotic wife of the pack rat forms the template for urban planners across the continent.
JACK LAYTON CHOOSES WALL STREET OVER MAIN STREET
So Jack Layton ran down to the convention floor in Denver like a teenage groupie and proclaimed that “the Democrats are talking about the same kind of change we’re talking about in Canada…there is a real desire here to put the concern of the kitchen table ahead of the board room table.”
That must be news to Wall Street. Sure the Democrats talk like Robespierre, they always have. But they govern like Louis XIV. Forget the rhetoric and follow the money trail. Check out www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, the financial firms, the corporate law firms and the private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s friends, the Democrats, are their clear favourites, as these examples will show.
The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to the Democrats.
The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.
This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence peddling.
This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million to politician contributions to the two-faced Democrats.
Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its $8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton has been a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as the “Military Industry Complex” as it once was. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.
Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.
Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million form private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By August 28/08 Barack Obama had raised $389,423,102 . This kind of money did not come from cab drivers, hair dressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama this year. And City Group who gave him $389,989 this year. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375 this year.
Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and Congress for even $1billion in political contributions would be a bargain for the IT industry. Ditto for agribusiness and corporate America in general.
Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a so-called progressive party of the down-trodden (albeit led by patricians) the Democratic Party has done pretty well for itself, as has Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act. You have to love their act. “Please Mister, can you spare me a million, I promise if I am elected, I will open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another 5 million middle class jobs, depress the wages of the jobs that remain, expand the visa programs and with the population boom cancel out any climate change strategy.” And Obama is sincere. Just three days after Hilary Clinton pulled out of the race, he declared to CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
Organized labour in America throws what little money it has toward Obama as well, 91% of it. But since 1993, it too has shared the corporate agenda of open borders, in the belief that it can broader its dues-paying membership base by signing up migrant workers. It hasn’t worked out that way. As Labour economist Vernon Briggs has demonstrated, the percentage of foreign born workers and union members in America is inversely proportional. American union workers have simply lost their jobs.
As the Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into the country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.”
Obviously, Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S. Woodsworth, who knew that a tight labour market was a worker’s best friend and favoured restrictive immigration policies throughout his tenure as CCF leader.
So, if Democrats are talking about the same kind of change as New Democrats are, as Jack Layton maintains, then, certainly, they are all about the same kind of change.
Immigrant-fed runaway population growth that will pauperize and decimate the working class, despoil environment and accelerate greenhouse gas emissions. All cloaked in green progressive rhetoric.
That must be news to Wall Street. Sure the Democrats talk like Robespierre, they always have. But they govern like Louis XIV. Forget the rhetoric and follow the money trail. Check out www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, the financial firms, the corporate law firms and the private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s friends, the Democrats, are their clear favourites, as these examples will show.
The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to the Democrats.
The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.
This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence peddling.
This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million to politician contributions to the two-faced Democrats.
Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its $8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton has been a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as the “Military Industry Complex” as it once was. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.
Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.
Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million form private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By August 28/08 Barack Obama had raised $389,423,102 . This kind of money did not come from cab drivers, hair dressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama this year. And City Group who gave him $389,989 this year. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375 this year.
Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and Congress for even $1billion in political contributions would be a bargain for the IT industry. Ditto for agribusiness and corporate America in general.
Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a so-called progressive party of the down-trodden (albeit led by patricians) the Democratic Party has done pretty well for itself, as has Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act. You have to love their act. “Please Mister, can you spare me a million, I promise if I am elected, I will open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another 5 million middle class jobs, depress the wages of the jobs that remain, expand the visa programs and with the population boom cancel out any climate change strategy.” And Obama is sincere. Just three days after Hilary Clinton pulled out of the race, he declared to CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
Organized labour in America throws what little money it has toward Obama as well, 91% of it. But since 1993, it too has shared the corporate agenda of open borders, in the belief that it can broader its dues-paying membership base by signing up migrant workers. It hasn’t worked out that way. As Labour economist Vernon Briggs has demonstrated, the percentage of foreign born workers and union members in America is inversely proportional. American union workers have simply lost their jobs.
As the Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into the country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.”
Obviously, Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S. Woodsworth, who knew that a tight labour market was a worker’s best friend and favoured restrictive immigration policies throughout his tenure as CCF leader.
So, if Democrats are talking about the same kind of change as New Democrats are, as Jack Layton maintains, then, certainly, they are all about the same kind of change.
Immigrant-fed runaway population growth that will pauperize and decimate the working class, despoil environment and accelerate greenhouse gas emissions. All cloaked in green progressive rhetoric.
COULD THIS BE THE SECOND BOSTON TEA PARTY?
Could this be the Boston Tea Party of the Second Millenium? When the first of 595 suspected illegal immigrants were taken into custody on August of 2008 in Laurel, Mississippi by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, union workers broke into applause. They were employees of “Howard Industries”, a producer of products ranging from electrical transformers to medical supplies in the state’s Pine Belt region, known for chicken-processing , commercial timber and over 6% unemployment. The members, largely African-Americans, resented the fact that immigrants, mostly Mexican, were able to work 40 hours of work of overtime per week but they were unable to do so. The vacancies left by the raid are being met by African-American job applicants on the street.
The raid was historic in that it was the biggest in U.S. history and issued from friction from the shop-floor level. Laws to combat illegal immigration have always existed under the Bush administration, the only thing lacking has been the will to enforce them.
Following the Mississippi story is instructive. Robert Schaffer, the head of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, acknowledged that “Union members have long complained in southern Mississippi that companies hire illegal immigrants. Jackson, Hattiesburg, Laurel and all the areas along the coast, it is a little Mexico.” So at the state level, here is an instance of a union bureaucrat affiliated to a nation-wide union evidencing some awareness and empathy for the problems of workers at a grassroots level. But not so fast.
At the same time Schaffer is ambivalent. He is not black like his dues-paying members in Laurel, nor are his bosses in Washington, D.C. either, one can wager. As for the illegal Mexicans, Schaffer says, “I’m not against people trying to make a living. I have a compassion for those folks.” Compassion for lawbreakers who take American jobs? Send this man a membership form in the Green party.
Schaffer’s compassion for illegal immigrants is shared by the AFL-CIO’s national leadership. In a watershed resolution in 1993 they attacked the critics of illegal immigration, and three years later they joined a coalition of business, agri-business and Christian conservative groups to kill provisions of a bill to limit refugee admissions and verify Social Security numbers of newly-hired workers to discourage illegal workers. And, “in February 2000, the executive council of the AFL-CIO announced it was changing its historic position and would now support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration laws and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups.” In 2007 the AFL-CIO sued the Justice Department on behalf of illegal aliens and stopped a judge from preventing employers from hiring illegals with fraudulent social security numbers. Why?
The motive is clear. Clear as the motive of the Sierra Club was in abandoning its long-time opposition to an open-borders immigration policy. The flagship of organized labour in America like the flagship of organized environmentalism in America was prepared to throw its traditional constituency to the wolves in order to court and pursue a yet to be organized growing, potential immigrant membership.
The greed for a larger dues-paying membership base trumps the desperate need the workers of America have to hold on to the decent jobs that are threatened daily by out-sourcing and illegal and legal immigration, which pours in at a rate of four million per year. According to the Democratic Socialist Senator for Vermont, Bernie Sanders, five million of these jobs have been lost under the Bush administration from these factors.
Will the union strategy of dropping the American bird in your hand to chase the two Hispanic birds in the bush pay off? Not according to the research of labour economist Vernon Briggs. He has demonstrated a disturbing correlation. In the United States, at least, the percentage of foreign born people is inversely proportional to the percentage of union membership. “In the 1930s and the World War II in the 1940s, immigration levels fell dramatically while union membership levels soared to unprecedented levels.” In 1965 the foreign-born population was 4.4% of the US total, but union membership was 30.1% of the non-agricultural sector. By 2006, 12.1% of the population was foreign-born while union membership was only 12% of the non-agricultural sector.”
Unfortunately the Canadian Labour Congress is infected with the same cosmopolitan attitude as its American brothers, and is apparently unimpressed with such findings as the Statistics Canada study of May 2007 which showed that immigration was implicated in a 7% drop in the real wages of educated workers between 1980 to 2000. Rather than suggest a tightening of immigration, which by growing the workforce by 13% had weakened workers’ bargaining power over that period, they merely demanded that immigrants be informed of their workplace rights. Joining the AFL-CIO chorus, the CLC also calls for a moratorium on all deportation and detention of “undocumented” workers whose skills are in need and “who have been contributing to the economy.” (Contributing by depressing the wages of competing workers or displacing their jobs?)
The British Trade Union Congress, meanwhile, one notices, is on the same globalist bandwagon, calling for “regularization” of all undocumented workers, or to skip the Newspeak, the legalization of illegals. A move that Migration Watch UK found in a 2007 study would cost British taxpayers a cool 1.8 billion pounds, and the British working man, I dare say, a good deal more than that. But what do the trade union bureaucrats care? The further removed they are from the shop floor, the less they care about their own native born workers. One must be grateful, I suppose, that their head offices are not located on Jupiter, or not a single local would have a union card.
The zeitgeist that animates the environmental movement and its parliamentary wing also works its through the labour movement and its parliamentary wing as well. It is a spirit of naked greed cloaked in a guise of compassionate outreach. The union establishment of Anglo-America has made its allegiance obvious. It is captive to the globalist agenda and will willingly sacrifice its own children to Moloch. If only the workers everywhere would react as they did in Laurel. First with the tip-off, then with the applause. If only they would react like they did in Boston harbour 225 years ago. Toss their Union reps overboard, the scumbag Benedict Arnolds of Big Labour.
The raid was historic in that it was the biggest in U.S. history and issued from friction from the shop-floor level. Laws to combat illegal immigration have always existed under the Bush administration, the only thing lacking has been the will to enforce them.
Following the Mississippi story is instructive. Robert Schaffer, the head of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, acknowledged that “Union members have long complained in southern Mississippi that companies hire illegal immigrants. Jackson, Hattiesburg, Laurel and all the areas along the coast, it is a little Mexico.” So at the state level, here is an instance of a union bureaucrat affiliated to a nation-wide union evidencing some awareness and empathy for the problems of workers at a grassroots level. But not so fast.
At the same time Schaffer is ambivalent. He is not black like his dues-paying members in Laurel, nor are his bosses in Washington, D.C. either, one can wager. As for the illegal Mexicans, Schaffer says, “I’m not against people trying to make a living. I have a compassion for those folks.” Compassion for lawbreakers who take American jobs? Send this man a membership form in the Green party.
Schaffer’s compassion for illegal immigrants is shared by the AFL-CIO’s national leadership. In a watershed resolution in 1993 they attacked the critics of illegal immigration, and three years later they joined a coalition of business, agri-business and Christian conservative groups to kill provisions of a bill to limit refugee admissions and verify Social Security numbers of newly-hired workers to discourage illegal workers. And, “in February 2000, the executive council of the AFL-CIO announced it was changing its historic position and would now support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration laws and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups.” In 2007 the AFL-CIO sued the Justice Department on behalf of illegal aliens and stopped a judge from preventing employers from hiring illegals with fraudulent social security numbers. Why?
The motive is clear. Clear as the motive of the Sierra Club was in abandoning its long-time opposition to an open-borders immigration policy. The flagship of organized labour in America like the flagship of organized environmentalism in America was prepared to throw its traditional constituency to the wolves in order to court and pursue a yet to be organized growing, potential immigrant membership.
The greed for a larger dues-paying membership base trumps the desperate need the workers of America have to hold on to the decent jobs that are threatened daily by out-sourcing and illegal and legal immigration, which pours in at a rate of four million per year. According to the Democratic Socialist Senator for Vermont, Bernie Sanders, five million of these jobs have been lost under the Bush administration from these factors.
Will the union strategy of dropping the American bird in your hand to chase the two Hispanic birds in the bush pay off? Not according to the research of labour economist Vernon Briggs. He has demonstrated a disturbing correlation. In the United States, at least, the percentage of foreign born people is inversely proportional to the percentage of union membership. “In the 1930s and the World War II in the 1940s, immigration levels fell dramatically while union membership levels soared to unprecedented levels.” In 1965 the foreign-born population was 4.4% of the US total, but union membership was 30.1% of the non-agricultural sector. By 2006, 12.1% of the population was foreign-born while union membership was only 12% of the non-agricultural sector.”
Unfortunately the Canadian Labour Congress is infected with the same cosmopolitan attitude as its American brothers, and is apparently unimpressed with such findings as the Statistics Canada study of May 2007 which showed that immigration was implicated in a 7% drop in the real wages of educated workers between 1980 to 2000. Rather than suggest a tightening of immigration, which by growing the workforce by 13% had weakened workers’ bargaining power over that period, they merely demanded that immigrants be informed of their workplace rights. Joining the AFL-CIO chorus, the CLC also calls for a moratorium on all deportation and detention of “undocumented” workers whose skills are in need and “who have been contributing to the economy.” (Contributing by depressing the wages of competing workers or displacing their jobs?)
The British Trade Union Congress, meanwhile, one notices, is on the same globalist bandwagon, calling for “regularization” of all undocumented workers, or to skip the Newspeak, the legalization of illegals. A move that Migration Watch UK found in a 2007 study would cost British taxpayers a cool 1.8 billion pounds, and the British working man, I dare say, a good deal more than that. But what do the trade union bureaucrats care? The further removed they are from the shop floor, the less they care about their own native born workers. One must be grateful, I suppose, that their head offices are not located on Jupiter, or not a single local would have a union card.
The zeitgeist that animates the environmental movement and its parliamentary wing also works its through the labour movement and its parliamentary wing as well. It is a spirit of naked greed cloaked in a guise of compassionate outreach. The union establishment of Anglo-America has made its allegiance obvious. It is captive to the globalist agenda and will willingly sacrifice its own children to Moloch. If only the workers everywhere would react as they did in Laurel. First with the tip-off, then with the applause. If only they would react like they did in Boston harbour 225 years ago. Toss their Union reps overboard, the scumbag Benedict Arnolds of Big Labour.
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 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.
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 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.
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