According to the US Census Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security, in 2007, 59% of illegal aliens, 43.8% of foreign-born non-citizens and 33.2% of the foreign-born population as a whole, lacked medical insurance. This has led the Hispanic lobby, “La Raza”, to demand that illegal immigrants be included in upcoming health care reform. But given the fiscal constraints necessarily imposed on a government which President Obama concedes is essentially “broke”, it is questionable whether generosity of this scale is affordable. The experience of a number of states who have born the brunt of medical treatment for undocumented residents reveals the tip of the approaching iceberg.
In California close to 3 million illegal residents, comprising 7% of the state’s population, incurred between $4-6 billion in costs, primarily for prisons, jails, schools and the emergency wards which must treat them.
A survey conducted by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission estimated that $677 million was spent on health care for illegal aliens, of which $597 was spent in the fiscal year before August 31/2006.
In Florida, where 51% of births are to Medicaid recipients, an illegal immigrant involved in a car accident cost a local hospital $1,000,000 to care for him. He was not insured and could not claim Medicaid. While he qualified for earlier release, the hospital simply could not find a place to send him to, until finally he was shipped by plane back to Guatemala. Naturally this kind of desperate action always provokes the violin players in the media, who fan the staged human rights protests at the airport while the illegal health consumer is being forcibly repatriated. British Columbians have witnessed that laughable scene several times.
What is interesting is that the authorities are always depicted as callous and cruel in this melodrama, while, in Canada, protesters always trot out our "sacred" values of decency and compassion that the heartless government is supposedly tarnishing on the world stage by such actions. Do these protestors vigorously protest the lack of decency and compassion to people like my mother who suffered in agony on a gurney in a hospital Emergency room overnight while those seemingly freshly arrived in the country were safely in bed in the same hospital?
My mother spent 88 years working to build this “welfare” state, and when it came time to collect, the state had become an international relief agency for those who had paid hardly a nickel in taxes to support it. Hers was a generation that was ashamed to collect social benefits that were due to them. Third world immigrants appear to have no such shame. But this impression cannot be substantiated by data, because, like ethnic crime statistics, the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil PC government would ensure that such statistics were never collected. Nevertheless, an article featured in the London Free Press entitled “Hospitals forecast deficits” (Thursday, March 13/2008), recognized population growth as one principal reason why the Canadian health system was on the brink of deficit financing, with half of Ontario’s hospitals facing severe cuts to meet the legal requirement for a balanced budget. Seventy percent of Canada’s population growth is driven by immigration. We may never know if the foreign-born, omnipresent in major urban hospitals disproportionate to their numbers, consume a larger portion of our health-care dollar than their numbers would warrant. After all, ethnic harmony must come before truth.
Yet some truth was revealed by a glance at the signs in my mother’s emergency ward. I saw four translations (Spanish, Vietnamese, Hindi and Chinese) below each notice that appeared in English. Our other “official” language---French---was nowhere to be seen. If Vancouver is a guide, nurses here need to take a Berlitz course just to have some patients swallow their pills and make their relatives understand that the whole village is not entitled to visit their sick compatriot at once.
Is this the Canada that Trudeau was elected to inaugurate when he campaigned across the country to make francophones feel at home from coast to coast in their own land? It cannot be disputed that since 1990, when the era of mass immigration in Canada began in earnest, the crisis in Canadian health care has walked in lock step with it. Of course, the politically-correct always retort that money is available to treat everyone if only spending priorities were right, and if the “rich” or the “corporations” were made to pay their fair share. In any discussion of shortages, their reflexive response is that there is “enough to go around”. It is never a problem of scarce resources. It is always a problem of maldistribution. Nationally and globally.
The fact is, however, that societies like Canada facing severe economic and ecological challenges cannot be an unlocked candy store to the poor and huddled masses of the world. When asked by Lou Dobbs if there was a point at which, in his words, “We (the U.S.) will have to make a decision between taking care of citizens and making a decision about illegal immigrants”, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr., senior pastor of Hope Christian Church outside of Washington, DC, answered, “There is a point. There should be a line of demarcation. I agree with that statement.” (June 22/09). Obviously some Christian clerics have become aware that there are fiscal limits to compassion, and God forbid, there are left-of-centre governments that have reached that conclusion as well. In the face of strong immigration even Nordic countries have had to tighten the rules and turn foreigners away from medical treatment. They have discovered two politically incorrect truths.
One is that there are limits to social spending. Push the marginal tax rate high enough, and revenues fall. The “rich” have a tolerance threshold, as do the middle class, and the money from both has wings. Sanctuary is just a mouse click away for beleaguered investments. In short, the social democratic world has come up against its own “Berlin” wall and has had to find economies in the way health care is delivered rather than blindly following the path of chucking more and more money down a rat hole with little observable effect. Inefficiency is an insatiable addict for endless subsidies.
Research in countries with Nordic backgrounds have found similar attitudes to social spending. Harvard’s Robert Putnam found that in states that had a more or less homogeneous ethnic profile like Minnesota, electors voted for higher income transfers to the poor. But those states with ethnically or racially diverse populations favoured substantially less universal and generous poverty, health and education programs. Why? In a nutshell, people are more apt to want to share with groups whom they trust. And they trust people with whom they relate. Research in Australia by Frank Salter and by three professors at Monash University (Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Bob Kinnaird) seem to harmonize with Putnam's conclusions. When diversity increases, trust/volunteerism/philanthropy decreases.
The cant about “strength” or “enrichment” in diversity that is pumped out relentlessly by public and private media, the immigration industry and the politicians who do its bidding, does not stand up to these studies. Rather than confront the reality that redistributive policies like medicare are inversely correlated to cultural diversity and that the appetite for care is voracious in the context of rising numbers, Canadian leftists demand yet more financial IV injections into the morbid body of the health care system. New technology, abuse and the insatiable demands of an ever expanding clientele of elderly relatives sponsored by Third World immigrants is breaking the bank. It has been calculated that each sponsored immigrant in that age group will cost the Australian medical system $250,000. Since roughly 80% of Canadian immigrants and refugees, drawn largely from “non-traditional” sources, in fact consist of their unskilled children, a terrifying portrait of the toll that Canadian immigration policy is taking on medicare could no doubt be drawn. But no more terrifying than the prospect of amnesty locking some 12-20 million illegal aliens into the proposed U.S. national health plan.
Multiculturalists and green-left globalists can’t face the truth. We are a species of tribes, and have, as Salter termed it, “genetic interests”. Xenophilia is a rare and exceptional disease, as it should be. The perverse love of the stranger cannot come at the expense of empathy for those close at hand--¬an injunction found in 1st Timothy 5:8 where believers are warned that anyone who does not first attend to the needs of his own family is “no better than a heathen”.
The second truth that Nordic countries have discovered is that even the late and hated Milton Friedman, the poster boy of everything thought evil by the left, was completely right in at least one of his observations. Friedman concluded that mass immigration was incompatible with the welfare state. A government could afford one, but not both. His choice was to promote mass immigration at the expense of the latter. My choice would be the welfare state, with sensible limitations on the use of our health care system.
Universal and free access to a two-year waiting list (a byproduct of mass immigration) was not the initial promise of Canadian medicare.
Charity must begin at home.
Tim Murray
July 14/09
Monday, July 27, 2009
THE FRAUD OF FREEDOM 55
One of the many benefits of this recession is the deafening silence that I hear from the financial planning industry. For decades they have promoted the fraud of “Freedom 55”---the notion that if you work hard and persistently at the job you hate, save and invest your money, on your 55th birthday you can “retire” to live as you have dreamed of living. You would have all the toys and the money finally enjoy living. Sounds like a good deal, eh? Sacrifice your youth and happiness so as to reap the rewards of delayed gratification. Of course, at 55 you will feel the same vigor and good health you did at 25, and will be guaranteed to feel that way for another 30 years. Or at least, that is the assumption that we are induced to make by the dour puritanical certainties that the industry hawks. Trouble is, there are no guarantees of healthy longevity.
Cases in point: My friend Bob was svelt and fit, ran 5 miles a day at the Y, skied and biked. He died of cancer of the bone marrow at 50. Cousin Pete was similarly strong and slim. He retired at 55 and then became extremely forgetful some 3 months later. Encroaching Alzeheimer’s? No, an inoperable brain tumour. He fell into a coma and died months after that. My brother Al was a non-drinker and non-smoker. He was robust and active, and ate well too. His cancer appeared when he was 56. He was dead 18 months later. But Al was different. He was one of those rare people who quit his well-paying job and promising career to live his dream at age 28. He built a 42 foot boat on his property, launched it a half mile from his home, moved his family to it, and sailed it to BC’s North Gulf Islands, where lived rent free moored in quiet inlets. He fished, and did odd carpentry work, and most everything he wanted to do---for three decades—until he died so prematurely. No savings, no pension, no excuses. Just a life of doing it “his way”. That was his “Freedom 28”. Moral of the story? Read this:
A Mexican village
A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. A tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.
"Not very long," answered the Mexican.
"But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the tourist.
The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.
"But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I have a full life."
"Now listen," the tourist interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."
And after that?" asked the Mexican.
"With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even London! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise."
"How long would that take?" asked the Mexican.
"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the tourist.
"And after that?"
"Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting,"
answered the tourist, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!"
"Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the Mexican.
"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends."
Tim Murray
May 9/09
Cases in point: My friend Bob was svelt and fit, ran 5 miles a day at the Y, skied and biked. He died of cancer of the bone marrow at 50. Cousin Pete was similarly strong and slim. He retired at 55 and then became extremely forgetful some 3 months later. Encroaching Alzeheimer’s? No, an inoperable brain tumour. He fell into a coma and died months after that. My brother Al was a non-drinker and non-smoker. He was robust and active, and ate well too. His cancer appeared when he was 56. He was dead 18 months later. But Al was different. He was one of those rare people who quit his well-paying job and promising career to live his dream at age 28. He built a 42 foot boat on his property, launched it a half mile from his home, moved his family to it, and sailed it to BC’s North Gulf Islands, where lived rent free moored in quiet inlets. He fished, and did odd carpentry work, and most everything he wanted to do---for three decades—until he died so prematurely. No savings, no pension, no excuses. Just a life of doing it “his way”. That was his “Freedom 28”. Moral of the story? Read this:
A Mexican village
A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. A tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.
"Not very long," answered the Mexican.
"But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the tourist.
The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.
"But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I have a full life."
"Now listen," the tourist interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."
And after that?" asked the Mexican.
"With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even London! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise."
"How long would that take?" asked the Mexican.
"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the tourist.
"And after that?"
"Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting,"
answered the tourist, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!"
"Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the Mexican.
"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends."
Tim Murray
May 9/09
Sunday, July 26, 2009
ITS NOT ONLY ABOUT NUMBERS---Four Reasons Why Malthusians Should Oppose Cultural Diversity
News Item: President Sarkosy, with left-wing support, declared that the burka is not welcome in French secular society http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090622/world/france_politics_islam_women_rights
What should be the attitude of Malthusians to cultural diversity?
So called “environmentalists” as represented by the paid mouthpieces in the Sierra Club and the Green Party, for example, are fond of trotting out their tired analogy between “cultural” diversity and “biological” diversity. They argue that an environmentalist appreciates that a diversity of flora and fauna is essential to ecological balance and resilience. Therefore, “cultural diversity” must be beneficial to the balance and resilience of human society. This reasoning is flawed on several counts.
1.Dr. William Rees has argued that in order to meet the challenges of the Long Emergency ahead, of resource shortages and ecological degradation, a people must develop a consensus in dealing with it. This is very improbable in a society riven by tribal rivalries. According to Rees, tribe “can be defined by many disparate characteristics ranging from skin color and facial features among races to ideology, religion and language even within racial groups.” (Globalization, Trade and Migration). The appearance of harmony may prevail in tranquil times, but a crisis can reveal the subterranean antipathy and rivalry between tribes in times of crisis. “The modern world is replete with examples of tribal strife at least partly rooted in land or resource shortages ranging from spectacular episodes like the 1994 Rwanda genocide to the long-running Irish Protestant-Catholic and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.” He therefore favours a more “integrative” model for Canadian multiculturalism. That is a tactful way of saying that our politicians should not be promoting differences with our tax money. Forced assimilation is one thing. But resisting the pull of assimilation by lavish pork barrel handouts to ethnic power blocs is quite another. Canadians must be allowed to assimilate into a cohesive society over a generation.
2. Garrett Hardin argued that a culturally homogeneous society like Japan is far more able to achieve the consensus and political fortitude needed to reduce its population than a multicultural, multi ethnic society like the United States. Why? In America, contending ethnic groups are determined that their profile not be reduced by a loss in their relative share of the demographic pie. The more people affiliated to an ethnic lobby, the more its political clout. Therefore politicians tend to be enticed into a bidding war for ethnic voters who demand that immigration quotas be high enough to allow their compatriots to emigrate to the United States. Population stabilization and reduction thus becomes politically daunting. World-famous wildlife artist and environmentalist Robert Bateman made a similar observation about Canada. He offered the possibility that we soon may pass an ethnic “tipping point” whereby no political party or politician can ever get elected with an immigration policy that would deny an ethnic group the possibility of bolstering its numbers. Without a restrictive immigration policy, containing population growth in Canada is impossible. And the environment cannot be salvaged without such a policy. The game of ethnic one-upmanship is not the stuff that Population Plans are made of. Ethnic rivalry breeds breeding wars. Look at Quebec’s birth incentives. Or Palestinian fertility rates and Israeli angst over them. Ditto Northern Ireland with Catholic population growth and Protestant unease and rising Hispanic birth rates in America, especially among teens. Rather than focus on the dangerous overload of passengers in the lifeboat and the urgent need to reduce it, tribalists instead campaign to add more of their own tribe to it to restore their prominence. A suicidal preoccupation. White nationalists are mad. We don’t need more “White Anglo Saxon Protestants” in Canada or Euro-Americans in the US, but fundamentally, a lot fewer of everyone. Us and “them”.
3. Population growth threatens biodiversity and food security, as well as make GHG emission reductions very unlikely. Since population growth through immigration is touted as a key to “cultural diversity”, even serving as the main rationale for immigration by Green Party leader Elizabeth May and others, then “cultural diversity” clearly comes at the cost of “biological diversity”. Smart growth and strict land use planning are unproven and failed nostrums. There is no practical example that these dirt-under-the-carpet methods of sweeping population growth away to protect Greenfield and wildlife acreage working in the long term. In the real world of Canadian political culture, the kind of zoning required for these measures are controlled by local governments, which are under the virtual control of developers. Therefore, those who hold out smart growth as an excuse for mass immigration are either ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
4.Environmentalists are supposed to be guided by what nature’s dictates. What is natural? A more precise question would be, since man is part of nature, what is man’s nature? Again, Dr. Rees puts it best: “A final sustainability-oriented argument against uncontrolled large-scale migration is a sensitive (eco)behavioral one. It starts from the evidence that humanity is “a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning” (Wilson 2005). One inherited pattern that biases our learning is the near universal human tendency to identify more with like than with dissimilar individuals. In short, humans have a predisposition for what we might call tribal affiliation.”
Biologist Richard Dawkins has maintained that humans were predisposed to make clear demarcations between “in-group” and “out-group” from the beginning, and social psychologists concur that this discriminating perception is inherent. The need to associate with others like ourselves is an immutable feature of human nature and so ethnic identity refuses to die. It is interesting that despite so much multicultural propaganda, a British poll found that 31% of the population still confessed to being racially prejudiced, while another study showed that most Britons harboured feelings of suspicion toward outsiders. Frank Salter in his On Genetic Interests has made a strong case for a genetic basis for this kind of ethnic, national and racial favouritism. Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt and Pierre van den Berghe have shown that the more ethnically diverse populations are, the more resistant they are to redistributive policies. A Harvard Institute study in 2000 confirmed this conclusion when it found that U. S. states that were more ethnically fragmented than average spent less on social services. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explained why. “The more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others.
Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some areas, lower investment in public goods.” More recently, a study done by three academics from Australia’s Monash University—Bob Birrell, Earnest Healey and Bob Kinnaird---seems to harmonize with Putnam’s findings. They established a correlation between the an increased degree of cultural diversity and falling volunteerism. The implication is that when citizens do not identify with the civil society at large, they are less apt to participate in its support.
Taken collectively, these conclusions by Salter, Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt, Pierrie van den Berghe, Robert Putnam, Bob Birrell, Earnest Healey and Bob Kinnaird seem to effectively demolish the cant served up by the multicultural and immigration industry and its bootlicking political servants in parliament that cultural diversity is self-evidently “good”, and that oxymoronic slogans like “Strength through diversity” or “Unity through diversity” are hollow clichés without empirical foundation. Variety may be “the spice of life”, but like arsenic, too much of it will kill civil society and militate against the consensus needed to face down runaway population growth.
One would think that North American conservation groups would note the stark under-representation of ethnic minorities in their ranks despite determined outreach programs and their very low visitation rates in National Parks as a warning sign that the Northern European conservation ethic will diminish with the decline in the proportion of citizens of European origin. Ed Rubenstein in his study published in Volume XIX, No. 2 of the Social Contract, pp 29-32, 2009, entitled “Immigration and Hazardous Waste Removal Infrastructure”, found sharp ethnic differences on environmental issues. As the reviewer observed, “Rubenstein shows today that 68 percent of whites, 49 percent blacks, 42 percent Hispanics and 38 percent Asians support environmental regulations. However, by 2042, minorities will become the majority.” Rubenstein concluded, “Demographic changes stemming from immigration will put nearly 40 years of U.S. environmental progress at risk.”
There are not many John Muirs from Hong Kong or Mexico and not many backpackers of Asian or Hispanic origin. The deficiency is not genetic and can be remedied. Multiculturalism has little to do with multiracialism, which is, by contrast, of proven value. But newcomers must accommodate to our values, not the reverse. Assimilation cannot proceed when mass immigration works in combination with government fostered cultural fragmentation. Canada is currently suffering from ethnic indigestion. Too many too quickly. Twenty per cent of our citizenry is foreign born---while Germany and the UK have 8% and the United States 12% as immigrants. Is it reasonable to believe that any nation state can survive a severe test with that size of a Trojan horse inside its walls? How could they hope to pull up the drawbridge with a constituency of that magnitude wanting to keep it down, even when we are at the brink of collapse? Is it reasonable that 7 of the 11 MPs belonging to the Canadian parliamentary committee on Immigration policy are of foreign origin? Newcomers as gate-keepers? Is there not a reason that the US Constitution requires an American president to be American-born? How far will Canada’s politicians push the envelope?
Many would argue that to take on our state religion of Official Multiculturalism and the ideology of cultural relativism and diversity that underpins it is to risk unnecessary division when we must build bridges and fashion coalitions among all ethnic and cultural groups. That is like being accused of fomenting chaos by yelling “Fire” in a crowded auditorium when it is the fire that will truly render the scene chaotic. It is not the call for integration that is divisive, but the government policy that promotes cultural division. And division, as explained, has ecological consequences. Given time, the natural trend is toward assimilation. That has always been the historical preference of second generation Canadians. What compelling reason can possibly be advanced to thwart that trend and preference? Children should be given the right, as young adults, to reject the imported values of their parents and embrace those of the adopted land.
Headscarves in themselves are not important. What is important is the surrender of our natural heritage to a demographic avalanche.
Tim Murray
June 27/09
What should be the attitude of Malthusians to cultural diversity?
So called “environmentalists” as represented by the paid mouthpieces in the Sierra Club and the Green Party, for example, are fond of trotting out their tired analogy between “cultural” diversity and “biological” diversity. They argue that an environmentalist appreciates that a diversity of flora and fauna is essential to ecological balance and resilience. Therefore, “cultural diversity” must be beneficial to the balance and resilience of human society. This reasoning is flawed on several counts.
1.Dr. William Rees has argued that in order to meet the challenges of the Long Emergency ahead, of resource shortages and ecological degradation, a people must develop a consensus in dealing with it. This is very improbable in a society riven by tribal rivalries. According to Rees, tribe “can be defined by many disparate characteristics ranging from skin color and facial features among races to ideology, religion and language even within racial groups.” (Globalization, Trade and Migration). The appearance of harmony may prevail in tranquil times, but a crisis can reveal the subterranean antipathy and rivalry between tribes in times of crisis. “The modern world is replete with examples of tribal strife at least partly rooted in land or resource shortages ranging from spectacular episodes like the 1994 Rwanda genocide to the long-running Irish Protestant-Catholic and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.” He therefore favours a more “integrative” model for Canadian multiculturalism. That is a tactful way of saying that our politicians should not be promoting differences with our tax money. Forced assimilation is one thing. But resisting the pull of assimilation by lavish pork barrel handouts to ethnic power blocs is quite another. Canadians must be allowed to assimilate into a cohesive society over a generation.
2. Garrett Hardin argued that a culturally homogeneous society like Japan is far more able to achieve the consensus and political fortitude needed to reduce its population than a multicultural, multi ethnic society like the United States. Why? In America, contending ethnic groups are determined that their profile not be reduced by a loss in their relative share of the demographic pie. The more people affiliated to an ethnic lobby, the more its political clout. Therefore politicians tend to be enticed into a bidding war for ethnic voters who demand that immigration quotas be high enough to allow their compatriots to emigrate to the United States. Population stabilization and reduction thus becomes politically daunting. World-famous wildlife artist and environmentalist Robert Bateman made a similar observation about Canada. He offered the possibility that we soon may pass an ethnic “tipping point” whereby no political party or politician can ever get elected with an immigration policy that would deny an ethnic group the possibility of bolstering its numbers. Without a restrictive immigration policy, containing population growth in Canada is impossible. And the environment cannot be salvaged without such a policy. The game of ethnic one-upmanship is not the stuff that Population Plans are made of. Ethnic rivalry breeds breeding wars. Look at Quebec’s birth incentives. Or Palestinian fertility rates and Israeli angst over them. Ditto Northern Ireland with Catholic population growth and Protestant unease and rising Hispanic birth rates in America, especially among teens. Rather than focus on the dangerous overload of passengers in the lifeboat and the urgent need to reduce it, tribalists instead campaign to add more of their own tribe to it to restore their prominence. A suicidal preoccupation. White nationalists are mad. We don’t need more “White Anglo Saxon Protestants” in Canada or Euro-Americans in the US, but fundamentally, a lot fewer of everyone. Us and “them”.
3. Population growth threatens biodiversity and food security, as well as make GHG emission reductions very unlikely. Since population growth through immigration is touted as a key to “cultural diversity”, even serving as the main rationale for immigration by Green Party leader Elizabeth May and others, then “cultural diversity” clearly comes at the cost of “biological diversity”. Smart growth and strict land use planning are unproven and failed nostrums. There is no practical example that these dirt-under-the-carpet methods of sweeping population growth away to protect Greenfield and wildlife acreage working in the long term. In the real world of Canadian political culture, the kind of zoning required for these measures are controlled by local governments, which are under the virtual control of developers. Therefore, those who hold out smart growth as an excuse for mass immigration are either ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
4.Environmentalists are supposed to be guided by what nature’s dictates. What is natural? A more precise question would be, since man is part of nature, what is man’s nature? Again, Dr. Rees puts it best: “A final sustainability-oriented argument against uncontrolled large-scale migration is a sensitive (eco)behavioral one. It starts from the evidence that humanity is “a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning” (Wilson 2005). One inherited pattern that biases our learning is the near universal human tendency to identify more with like than with dissimilar individuals. In short, humans have a predisposition for what we might call tribal affiliation.”
Biologist Richard Dawkins has maintained that humans were predisposed to make clear demarcations between “in-group” and “out-group” from the beginning, and social psychologists concur that this discriminating perception is inherent. The need to associate with others like ourselves is an immutable feature of human nature and so ethnic identity refuses to die. It is interesting that despite so much multicultural propaganda, a British poll found that 31% of the population still confessed to being racially prejudiced, while another study showed that most Britons harboured feelings of suspicion toward outsiders. Frank Salter in his On Genetic Interests has made a strong case for a genetic basis for this kind of ethnic, national and racial favouritism. Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt and Pierre van den Berghe have shown that the more ethnically diverse populations are, the more resistant they are to redistributive policies. A Harvard Institute study in 2000 confirmed this conclusion when it found that U. S. states that were more ethnically fragmented than average spent less on social services. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explained why. “The more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others.
Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some areas, lower investment in public goods.” More recently, a study done by three academics from Australia’s Monash University—Bob Birrell, Earnest Healey and Bob Kinnaird---seems to harmonize with Putnam’s findings. They established a correlation between the an increased degree of cultural diversity and falling volunteerism. The implication is that when citizens do not identify with the civil society at large, they are less apt to participate in its support.
Taken collectively, these conclusions by Salter, Irenaus Eibi-Eibesfeldt, Pierrie van den Berghe, Robert Putnam, Bob Birrell, Earnest Healey and Bob Kinnaird seem to effectively demolish the cant served up by the multicultural and immigration industry and its bootlicking political servants in parliament that cultural diversity is self-evidently “good”, and that oxymoronic slogans like “Strength through diversity” or “Unity through diversity” are hollow clichés without empirical foundation. Variety may be “the spice of life”, but like arsenic, too much of it will kill civil society and militate against the consensus needed to face down runaway population growth.
One would think that North American conservation groups would note the stark under-representation of ethnic minorities in their ranks despite determined outreach programs and their very low visitation rates in National Parks as a warning sign that the Northern European conservation ethic will diminish with the decline in the proportion of citizens of European origin. Ed Rubenstein in his study published in Volume XIX, No. 2 of the Social Contract, pp 29-32, 2009, entitled “Immigration and Hazardous Waste Removal Infrastructure”, found sharp ethnic differences on environmental issues. As the reviewer observed, “Rubenstein shows today that 68 percent of whites, 49 percent blacks, 42 percent Hispanics and 38 percent Asians support environmental regulations. However, by 2042, minorities will become the majority.” Rubenstein concluded, “Demographic changes stemming from immigration will put nearly 40 years of U.S. environmental progress at risk.”
There are not many John Muirs from Hong Kong or Mexico and not many backpackers of Asian or Hispanic origin. The deficiency is not genetic and can be remedied. Multiculturalism has little to do with multiracialism, which is, by contrast, of proven value. But newcomers must accommodate to our values, not the reverse. Assimilation cannot proceed when mass immigration works in combination with government fostered cultural fragmentation. Canada is currently suffering from ethnic indigestion. Too many too quickly. Twenty per cent of our citizenry is foreign born---while Germany and the UK have 8% and the United States 12% as immigrants. Is it reasonable to believe that any nation state can survive a severe test with that size of a Trojan horse inside its walls? How could they hope to pull up the drawbridge with a constituency of that magnitude wanting to keep it down, even when we are at the brink of collapse? Is it reasonable that 7 of the 11 MPs belonging to the Canadian parliamentary committee on Immigration policy are of foreign origin? Newcomers as gate-keepers? Is there not a reason that the US Constitution requires an American president to be American-born? How far will Canada’s politicians push the envelope?
Many would argue that to take on our state religion of Official Multiculturalism and the ideology of cultural relativism and diversity that underpins it is to risk unnecessary division when we must build bridges and fashion coalitions among all ethnic and cultural groups. That is like being accused of fomenting chaos by yelling “Fire” in a crowded auditorium when it is the fire that will truly render the scene chaotic. It is not the call for integration that is divisive, but the government policy that promotes cultural division. And division, as explained, has ecological consequences. Given time, the natural trend is toward assimilation. That has always been the historical preference of second generation Canadians. What compelling reason can possibly be advanced to thwart that trend and preference? Children should be given the right, as young adults, to reject the imported values of their parents and embrace those of the adopted land.
Headscarves in themselves are not important. What is important is the surrender of our natural heritage to a demographic avalanche.
Tim Murray
June 27/09
THE BOGEYMAN OF RACISM A USEFUL DECOY FOR THE GROWTH LOBBY
The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man in Courtenay, BC by three young white thugs was predictably amplified by a media eager to sound the siren of politically correct paranoia. There was racism under every bed! White racism that is. The other kind, of “black on white” assaults, which statistically is much the more common event in America, is not the subject of polite conversation. It is, after all, socially outrageous to speak the truth in Canada. Best to ban the publication of ethnic crime data to smother bigotry in its cradle. Then again, statistical profiling may very well do the opposite by revealing that crime is not the trademark of any ethnic community but only of a tiny and troubled minority within it. And that culture, not skin pigmentation, is a relevant factor, among many.
When the Mayor of Courtenay, Greg Phelps, failed to comply with a PC injunction to support a “feel good” anti-discriminaton ‘protocol’ he found substantially meaningless, to address a problem too over-blown to warrant panic, an activist of self-righteous disgust raised the specter of rampant subterranean racism. You may not see it, but trust me, it’s here, there and everywhere! Courtenay may project the image of placid tolerance, but scratch the surface, and it’s a town in the Jim Crow South. The mayor, he said, was “just the tip of the iceberg. And its not about the three young white men either. There’s got to be a large peer group who shares their racist views. And don’t forget racism begins at home. These men obviously have parents. And these parents have peers too…” Implication? Let’s find them and root them out! I wonder if Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is included by the school board in the canon of student texts, along with the slogans of intolerant tolerance that the Ministry of Education mandates.
How inconvenient it was then, when it was later learned that apparently, the three aggressors subsequently attacked a Caucasian man. One wonders would words they applied to taunt him. Was it “fatso”, “gimp”, “four eyes”, “baldy” or “fag”? If so, would it indicate that they were motivated by a hatred of obese, handicapped, bespectacled, hairless or gay people? Or would it reveal that their despicable aggression was more accurately the result of 16 athree young punks spoiling for a fight and looking for any handle or epithet to goad their victim and get under his skin?
This media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury recalls the outrageous claim made by the then Minister for Multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, that racism had reached such a fever pitch that ‘they were burning crosses in Prince George (BC).” That too was a ridiculous hyperbole and a blatant lie. Prince George was no more a racist hotbed than Courtenay is today. Nevertheless, these kind of charges serve a purpose. And what purpose do they serve? They stoke up a hyper-sensitivity not only about racism, but issues about that are peripheral to it, but not necessarily connected.
The bogeyman of rampant white racism creates an atmosphere of social intimidation that already greets anyone who dares to criticize the state policies of mass immigration and official multiculturalism. And as we have seen here and elsewhere, racial vilification laws and the revision of history are the logical complement to it. The need to suppress and punish odious views are thought necessary to smother any nascent challenge to the corporate agenda of growing the economy by growing the population. Hysteria inflates the constituency for more restrictions on contrarian speech and the ethnic cleansing of textbooks. Since Canada’s immigration selection criteria, in tandem with the second highest per capita immigration intake in the world, ensures that the country will evolve as Courtenay is evolving, into “a growing community increasing in diversity”, ethnic harmony must come at any cost.
Given that imperative, free speech can no longer be regarded as the very condition and pre-requisite of all other rights, but in the classic Canadian light, of merely one right to be weighed against others in determining the public interest.
“Cultural diversity” is the clarion call of the liberal-left, but it is also the mask of the corporate elite, a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed---and the environmental degradation that comes with it. Big banks, developers and cheap labour employers fly its banner as a smokescreen to obscure their efforts to widen the labour pool and recruit more homebuyers. Immigration is openly promoted as a life-preserver for the shipwrecked home mortgage and home building industry by the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank and other credit institutions. Cultural diversity is the flavour of the month for an agenda that has no sincere interest in ethnic folk dances and exotic cuisines, but only in the making of money, and the fragmentation of a once cohesive society so that united opposition to its aims become less and less likely as the process unfolds. It is a kind of diversity that comes at the cost of both biological diversity---the staggering loss of species from human population growth in Canada----and intellectual diversity. A nation where people of different origins and hues can co-exist only if they sing the same tune, and the old slogans of “white” nationalism are supplanted by the cant of fake “diversity”. It is the ideology of current convenience, like the “Manifest Destiny” or “White Australia” of times past, to camoflauge and disguise the continuing quest to dispossess whom ever happens to be the native population of its share of the economic pie.
For good measure, school textbooks, and history itself, has been revised to advance the new state religion of “Multiculturalism”—Canada’s Ingsoc. The falsehoods of the past have been replaced with politically correct falsehoods of the present. The Chinese head tax and the Exclusion Act, together with the Komagata Maru incident, now form the centerpiece of White Guilt 101, which never looks at the historical context of these events, but assigns retroactive blame on working people and politicians whose main objective was simply to defend wages and living standards from cheap imported labour. No mention is made, for example, that “Chinese exclusion” did not apply to students, diplomats or Chinese business men and their families. Some kind of ‘racism’ that.
But making the foregoing case plays right into the PC game-plan. That is, draw us into a verbal maelstrom on race, away from the critical issue of sustainability. Away from what should be our primary concern, which is not about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon. The relationship between humans is secondary to the relationship of humans to nature and the resources it provides. HMCS Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier. It is not a vast and boundless land begging for more people to unlock a treasure trove of limitless resources, but a big “little’ land in ecological terms. A nation of frozen tundra, short growing seasons, mined out and marginal soil where 20% of its best farmland is paved over and the rest is under threat from continuing sprawl and the impending loss of oil-based fertilizers. A ship hurtling toward the iceberg of overshoot with politicians on the bridge who want to stop to pick up more passengers and encourage those already on board to have more children.
It is in this context that the crusade of “anti-racism” must be seen. It is the sand that is thrown in our face to get us off our game----stopping growth. And growth is no bogeyman. It is here and it is killing us.
Tim Murray
July 14/09
When the Mayor of Courtenay, Greg Phelps, failed to comply with a PC injunction to support a “feel good” anti-discriminaton ‘protocol’ he found substantially meaningless, to address a problem too over-blown to warrant panic, an activist of self-righteous disgust raised the specter of rampant subterranean racism. You may not see it, but trust me, it’s here, there and everywhere! Courtenay may project the image of placid tolerance, but scratch the surface, and it’s a town in the Jim Crow South. The mayor, he said, was “just the tip of the iceberg. And its not about the three young white men either. There’s got to be a large peer group who shares their racist views. And don’t forget racism begins at home. These men obviously have parents. And these parents have peers too…” Implication? Let’s find them and root them out! I wonder if Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is included by the school board in the canon of student texts, along with the slogans of intolerant tolerance that the Ministry of Education mandates.
How inconvenient it was then, when it was later learned that apparently, the three aggressors subsequently attacked a Caucasian man. One wonders would words they applied to taunt him. Was it “fatso”, “gimp”, “four eyes”, “baldy” or “fag”? If so, would it indicate that they were motivated by a hatred of obese, handicapped, bespectacled, hairless or gay people? Or would it reveal that their despicable aggression was more accurately the result of 16 athree young punks spoiling for a fight and looking for any handle or epithet to goad their victim and get under his skin?
This media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury recalls the outrageous claim made by the then Minister for Multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, that racism had reached such a fever pitch that ‘they were burning crosses in Prince George (BC).” That too was a ridiculous hyperbole and a blatant lie. Prince George was no more a racist hotbed than Courtenay is today. Nevertheless, these kind of charges serve a purpose. And what purpose do they serve? They stoke up a hyper-sensitivity not only about racism, but issues about that are peripheral to it, but not necessarily connected.
The bogeyman of rampant white racism creates an atmosphere of social intimidation that already greets anyone who dares to criticize the state policies of mass immigration and official multiculturalism. And as we have seen here and elsewhere, racial vilification laws and the revision of history are the logical complement to it. The need to suppress and punish odious views are thought necessary to smother any nascent challenge to the corporate agenda of growing the economy by growing the population. Hysteria inflates the constituency for more restrictions on contrarian speech and the ethnic cleansing of textbooks. Since Canada’s immigration selection criteria, in tandem with the second highest per capita immigration intake in the world, ensures that the country will evolve as Courtenay is evolving, into “a growing community increasing in diversity”, ethnic harmony must come at any cost.
Given that imperative, free speech can no longer be regarded as the very condition and pre-requisite of all other rights, but in the classic Canadian light, of merely one right to be weighed against others in determining the public interest.
“Cultural diversity” is the clarion call of the liberal-left, but it is also the mask of the corporate elite, a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed---and the environmental degradation that comes with it. Big banks, developers and cheap labour employers fly its banner as a smokescreen to obscure their efforts to widen the labour pool and recruit more homebuyers. Immigration is openly promoted as a life-preserver for the shipwrecked home mortgage and home building industry by the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank and other credit institutions. Cultural diversity is the flavour of the month for an agenda that has no sincere interest in ethnic folk dances and exotic cuisines, but only in the making of money, and the fragmentation of a once cohesive society so that united opposition to its aims become less and less likely as the process unfolds. It is a kind of diversity that comes at the cost of both biological diversity---the staggering loss of species from human population growth in Canada----and intellectual diversity. A nation where people of different origins and hues can co-exist only if they sing the same tune, and the old slogans of “white” nationalism are supplanted by the cant of fake “diversity”. It is the ideology of current convenience, like the “Manifest Destiny” or “White Australia” of times past, to camoflauge and disguise the continuing quest to dispossess whom ever happens to be the native population of its share of the economic pie.
For good measure, school textbooks, and history itself, has been revised to advance the new state religion of “Multiculturalism”—Canada’s Ingsoc. The falsehoods of the past have been replaced with politically correct falsehoods of the present. The Chinese head tax and the Exclusion Act, together with the Komagata Maru incident, now form the centerpiece of White Guilt 101, which never looks at the historical context of these events, but assigns retroactive blame on working people and politicians whose main objective was simply to defend wages and living standards from cheap imported labour. No mention is made, for example, that “Chinese exclusion” did not apply to students, diplomats or Chinese business men and their families. Some kind of ‘racism’ that.
But making the foregoing case plays right into the PC game-plan. That is, draw us into a verbal maelstrom on race, away from the critical issue of sustainability. Away from what should be our primary concern, which is not about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon. The relationship between humans is secondary to the relationship of humans to nature and the resources it provides. HMCS Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier. It is not a vast and boundless land begging for more people to unlock a treasure trove of limitless resources, but a big “little’ land in ecological terms. A nation of frozen tundra, short growing seasons, mined out and marginal soil where 20% of its best farmland is paved over and the rest is under threat from continuing sprawl and the impending loss of oil-based fertilizers. A ship hurtling toward the iceberg of overshoot with politicians on the bridge who want to stop to pick up more passengers and encourage those already on board to have more children.
It is in this context that the crusade of “anti-racism” must be seen. It is the sand that is thrown in our face to get us off our game----stopping growth. And growth is no bogeyman. It is here and it is killing us.
Tim Murray
July 14/09
THE OPIATE OF THE INTELLECTUALS
I must confess that I love Central Europeans. Especially Hungarians. Why? The motto I composed on my business card, the one that encapsulates my philosophy, explains why. It reads, “Candor before tact, honesty before diplomacy.” Ever since I was introduced to my uncle Jack’s Hungarian wife, my aunt Marion, and her family in Calgary, Alberta, I was impressed by their typically blunt, direct and candid speech, and a refreshing honesty that underpinned the close friendships which they formed. The quality of conversation and personal relationships which they enjoyed was beyond that which most Canadians experience. The Hungarian belief seemed to be that durable harmony between people cannot be achieved with a superficial truce. Reserved inhibitions and dissembling pretence are the enemy of truth. The apostles of chaos are superior souls to the apostles of order. Only by venting differences with frank discourse can ultimate reconciliation be achieved. Hungarian dialogue appeared to me to be prototypical Gestalt therapy. It is the very antithesis of contemporary CBC doctrine and the Canadian “peace keeping” persona.
How my Hungarian relatives must have chafed at the student Marxism of the late sixties. They fought Russian tanks with Molotov cocktails in 1956, and when the revolution was crushed, fled to Canada, as did George Jonas. Like me, they came to regard free speech not as Canadians now do, as simply one “right” to be balanced off against other “rights”, but the very condition of all rights. In an interview given some years ago, Jonas explained that it is only when you have lived in a country that is not free, that you realize that, as he put it, “liberty is a bargain at any price”.
The tragedy was that Jonas, and my Hungarian relatives, jumped from the frying pan into a fire that did not ignite until it was too late to see the smoke. When he arrived in 1956, or soon after he became conversant in English, he noted that two sayings were popular in Canada. Whenever someone disagreed with your statements, he or she would add, “Oh, it’s a free country. Everyone is entitled to an opinion.” But eventually, Jonas observed, that saying virtually disappeared, to be replaced by another: “There ought to be a law”. And within 15 years, there was a law, he said with emphasis. (I would nominate a final expression as the latest mutation in Canadian speech. “I am offended.”) He compared Canada to a moody woman that you courted. “The moment she says she likes something, she tells you the next day that she loathes it.” No sooner did he come to know Canada as a free society, it changed into something else---a regulated society. “If we lose the qualities that made Canada free, the Canada that I knew 50 years ago, we will eventually resemble the countries that refugees escaped from.” I am afraid that has already come to pass. The laws against “hate speech”, and the kangaroo courts of Human Rights Tribunals and workplace adjudications, have chilled discussion and debate in Canada to the point that self-censorship now does the dirty work for the kind of quasi-judicial censorship outlined by law. One can only concur with Jonas that yes, “it is possible to live in a society that is not free---it is just terribly restrictive.”
Jonas was somewhat scathing in his characterization of intellectuals and their double standard toward “the two totalitarianisms” of Nazism and Communism. Just as Marxists described religion as “the opiate of the masses”, Jonas described Marxism as the opiate of the intelligentsia. Even those who were not presently Marxists, embraced Marxism as a right of passage, and were retroactively tolerant of their past affliction. They remained in a kind of “quasi-Marxist” fog, and never thought it permissible to have gone through a “Nazi” phase. Hungarian refugees were puzzled by the reaction of some Canadian intellectuals who believed that while experience was an advantage in any of life’s endeavours, somehow if you experienced communism, that detracted from your credibility as anti-Communist. The truth about Marxist Leninism was not permitted to challenge the intellectuals’ world view. “They did not want the facts to interfere with their ideas”, Jonas explained. Sound familiar?
Have things changed since then? Not in your life. Canada’s high priests of soft totalitarianism, the Secular Multicultural Growthist Theocracy, “those who know better”, the mouthpieces of the chattering classes, “the herd of independent thinkers” who find a ready podium at Mother Corp, CBC Pravda, are in as much of a stupor as those whom Jonas met as a recent refugee. It is Official Multiculturalism, and the cant of “cultural diversity”, not Marxism, which is now the opiate of the intellectuals. Cultural relativism has replaced Christianity as the state religion. Its first commandment: All Cultures are Equal---except THEIRS is more equal than ours, which actually, never existed to begin with, according to the Party line. Canada is no longer the true north strong and free, but merely “Home to the World”, a vast and empty warehouse for a steady stream of migrants and refugees from safe areas, half of whom file fraudulent claims.
Australian sociologist Katherine Betts has examined this phenomenon. She uses the term "new class" (a group similar to what former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts") to describe the intelligentsia, professionally-educated internationalists and cosmopolitans, lawyers, academics, journalists, teachers, artists, activists, and globetrotting business people and travelers. Her cogent analysis of why the new class has eschewed the cause of limiting immigration in Australia is germane to the case of U. S. environmental leaders: "The concept of immigration control has become contaminated in the minds of the new class by the ideas of racism, narrow self-seeking nationalism, and a bigoted preference for cultural homogeneity....Their enthusiasm for anti-racism and international humanitarianism is often sincere but there are also social pressures supporting this sincere commitment and making apostasy difficult." And later: "Ideologically correct attitudes to immigration have offered the warmth of in-group acceptance to supporters and the cold face of exclusion to dissenters." It is "politically incorrect" to talk of reducing immigration, or indeed of population stabilization and reduction anywhere. It is significant that Bett’s “new class” was just the term that the expelled and imprisoned Yugolavian Communist, Milovan Djilas, used as the title of his book that vivisected Tito’s ruling clique so well. Totalitarian mentality appears in many ideological guises, and intellectuals are most commonly afflicted. In the post war Eastern Europe the ideology was Communism. It has another name here.
In Canada, as in many other places, it is all about economic growth, and preparing a climate of intellectual terrorism that makes it impossible to question it. Multiculturalism is just a flag of convenience, a banner to cloak naked corporate greed. Perhaps it is best to ignore the trailer, and aim our guns at the plane itself---growth.
Jonas survived the CBC gauntlet of advancing political correctness for 23 years as a script editor and producer, until he left in 1985. One wonders, would the CBC hire a man like him today? I rather doubt it as well.
Tim Murray,
July 26/09
How my Hungarian relatives must have chafed at the student Marxism of the late sixties. They fought Russian tanks with Molotov cocktails in 1956, and when the revolution was crushed, fled to Canada, as did George Jonas. Like me, they came to regard free speech not as Canadians now do, as simply one “right” to be balanced off against other “rights”, but the very condition of all rights. In an interview given some years ago, Jonas explained that it is only when you have lived in a country that is not free, that you realize that, as he put it, “liberty is a bargain at any price”.
The tragedy was that Jonas, and my Hungarian relatives, jumped from the frying pan into a fire that did not ignite until it was too late to see the smoke. When he arrived in 1956, or soon after he became conversant in English, he noted that two sayings were popular in Canada. Whenever someone disagreed with your statements, he or she would add, “Oh, it’s a free country. Everyone is entitled to an opinion.” But eventually, Jonas observed, that saying virtually disappeared, to be replaced by another: “There ought to be a law”. And within 15 years, there was a law, he said with emphasis. (I would nominate a final expression as the latest mutation in Canadian speech. “I am offended.”) He compared Canada to a moody woman that you courted. “The moment she says she likes something, she tells you the next day that she loathes it.” No sooner did he come to know Canada as a free society, it changed into something else---a regulated society. “If we lose the qualities that made Canada free, the Canada that I knew 50 years ago, we will eventually resemble the countries that refugees escaped from.” I am afraid that has already come to pass. The laws against “hate speech”, and the kangaroo courts of Human Rights Tribunals and workplace adjudications, have chilled discussion and debate in Canada to the point that self-censorship now does the dirty work for the kind of quasi-judicial censorship outlined by law. One can only concur with Jonas that yes, “it is possible to live in a society that is not free---it is just terribly restrictive.”
Jonas was somewhat scathing in his characterization of intellectuals and their double standard toward “the two totalitarianisms” of Nazism and Communism. Just as Marxists described religion as “the opiate of the masses”, Jonas described Marxism as the opiate of the intelligentsia. Even those who were not presently Marxists, embraced Marxism as a right of passage, and were retroactively tolerant of their past affliction. They remained in a kind of “quasi-Marxist” fog, and never thought it permissible to have gone through a “Nazi” phase. Hungarian refugees were puzzled by the reaction of some Canadian intellectuals who believed that while experience was an advantage in any of life’s endeavours, somehow if you experienced communism, that detracted from your credibility as anti-Communist. The truth about Marxist Leninism was not permitted to challenge the intellectuals’ world view. “They did not want the facts to interfere with their ideas”, Jonas explained. Sound familiar?
Have things changed since then? Not in your life. Canada’s high priests of soft totalitarianism, the Secular Multicultural Growthist Theocracy, “those who know better”, the mouthpieces of the chattering classes, “the herd of independent thinkers” who find a ready podium at Mother Corp, CBC Pravda, are in as much of a stupor as those whom Jonas met as a recent refugee. It is Official Multiculturalism, and the cant of “cultural diversity”, not Marxism, which is now the opiate of the intellectuals. Cultural relativism has replaced Christianity as the state religion. Its first commandment: All Cultures are Equal---except THEIRS is more equal than ours, which actually, never existed to begin with, according to the Party line. Canada is no longer the true north strong and free, but merely “Home to the World”, a vast and empty warehouse for a steady stream of migrants and refugees from safe areas, half of whom file fraudulent claims.
Australian sociologist Katherine Betts has examined this phenomenon. She uses the term "new class" (a group similar to what former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts") to describe the intelligentsia, professionally-educated internationalists and cosmopolitans, lawyers, academics, journalists, teachers, artists, activists, and globetrotting business people and travelers. Her cogent analysis of why the new class has eschewed the cause of limiting immigration in Australia is germane to the case of U. S. environmental leaders: "The concept of immigration control has become contaminated in the minds of the new class by the ideas of racism, narrow self-seeking nationalism, and a bigoted preference for cultural homogeneity....Their enthusiasm for anti-racism and international humanitarianism is often sincere but there are also social pressures supporting this sincere commitment and making apostasy difficult." And later: "Ideologically correct attitudes to immigration have offered the warmth of in-group acceptance to supporters and the cold face of exclusion to dissenters." It is "politically incorrect" to talk of reducing immigration, or indeed of population stabilization and reduction anywhere. It is significant that Bett’s “new class” was just the term that the expelled and imprisoned Yugolavian Communist, Milovan Djilas, used as the title of his book that vivisected Tito’s ruling clique so well. Totalitarian mentality appears in many ideological guises, and intellectuals are most commonly afflicted. In the post war Eastern Europe the ideology was Communism. It has another name here.
In Canada, as in many other places, it is all about economic growth, and preparing a climate of intellectual terrorism that makes it impossible to question it. Multiculturalism is just a flag of convenience, a banner to cloak naked corporate greed. Perhaps it is best to ignore the trailer, and aim our guns at the plane itself---growth.
Jonas survived the CBC gauntlet of advancing political correctness for 23 years as a script editor and producer, until he left in 1985. One wonders, would the CBC hire a man like him today? I rather doubt it as well.
Tim Murray,
July 26/09
CONSUMING OUR WAY TO SUSTAINABILITY--Who do Greens Think They are Fooling?
Like mushrooms in a moist dark forest, the apostles of “Green Living” continue to sprout up all over the Canadian landscape. Green guides, green tips, green “solutions”, green home builders, green businesses---the menu is replete with advice on how we can save the planet by effecting “lifestyle changes” that allow us to carry on with hyper-consumerism and feel good about it.
Yet another classic example of this kind of green delusion was afforded by a program called “At Issue” on the “I” Channel on July 22/09. It presented “Canada’s Clean Air Crew” as another of its “Heroes of the Environment”---the “Clean Air Foundation”. Moderator Arlene Bynon interviewed the CAF’s Acting Executive Director, Fatima Dharsee and its “Mercury Program Manager”, Krista Friesen, but did so not exactly in the probing style of a Barbara Frum but rather like the president of their fan club.
Ms. Fatima explained that the Clean Air Foundation is providing “solutions” by promoting “information”, “awareness”, more investment in renewable energy, more innovation, better technology, and a change in mentality. Its interest is making people feel “positive” and good about the seven programs the CAF is offering.
“Car Heaven”, for example, encourages Canadians to give up their clunkers for a charitable tax receipt, discounts on bicycles, transit passes and $300. The old cars are towed free of charge to one of some 200 auto-recyclers across the country. Fatima pointed out that cars built before 1995 generate 20 times the smog that new cars do---“which are pollution-free”. The program was touted as a success because, after all, in just eight years 88,000 Canadians have taken up the offer. This matches the achievement of the CBC’s “Million Acts of Green” campaign, which boasted that its green living participants took the equivalent of 10,000 cars off the road in one year in terms of reducing green house gas emissions. Problem is, it would take 13 days of reclaiming old cars at the CAF rate of 30 a day, to wipe out the number of cars added to the national fleet by one typical day of immigration to Canada, assuming that the rate of car ownership among immigrants is the same as other citizens. Together with the CBC “success”, these efforts would counter-balance only about 15% of the extra vehicular use by New Canadians. And if old cars are exchanged for new ones, what of the environmental costs of constructing the most efficient replacements? Other ‘green’ programs prompt similar questions and comparisons.
The CAF’s “Keep Cool” campaign may have collected over 8,000 old air conditioning units from Ontario locations in 2007, saving almost 6 MW---enough to power 1,500 homes. But how many new homes did population growth add in Ontario that year? Legal permanent immigration alone to that province, using Canadian averages of 2.6 people per house, would demand the construction of 48,000 extra housing units per year. And another 20,000 homes would be needed each year to accommodate Canadian-born residents in that province. So while HMCS Titanic is taking on water by thousands of gallons per minute, the Clean Air Crew is bailing it out one cup at a time. Valiant effort, but quite futile. Much like the Californian achievement of tripling the efficiency of refrigerators since 1948 but seeing its population quadruple in the same period. And green technological euphoria continues to ignore efficiency paradoxes. Cheaper and more efficient appliances provoke more consumption. When air conditioners became 17% more cost efficient, their number doubled.
The same critique can be applied to other CAF programs. Ms. Fatima alerted viewers to the fact that operating a two-stroke lawn mower for just one hour was as damaging to the atmosphere as driving a car for 500 km., a frightening statistic considering that 3 million Canadians mow lawns (9%). But the 2009 projected cohort of 265,000 legal permanent immigrants will expand the national housing stock by over 100,000 units, and therefore, applying the same ratio of lawn mowing to homes for the country, over one in four, or approximately 25,000 more lawn-mowers, would be added to the country that year. 390,000 of the 3 million lawn-mower operators Fatima cites are foreign-born. It is in that context that the retirement of 5,700 gas lawnmowers in 2007 must be seen. 18,000 lawn mowers have been surrendered since the program’s inception, removing 406 tonnes of GHG. But one year of immigration generates ten million tonnes of GHG, or 25% of the emissions from the whole Alberta Tar Sands development. The CAF is also focused on intercepting the mercury found in old thermostats and 10 million mercury car switches before they find their way to the landfill. But there is not even a hint that the number of land-fillers should be reduced as well.
Nevertheless, Arlene Bynon was effusive in her laudatory summation of the CAF’s approach. “By making the right decisions we can drastically reduce our footprint”. Essentially it is the soft green Gospel according to Gore, preached at the conclusion of his famed documentary on global warming, that each of us can, as smart and conscientious consumers, make a difference, for the sum total of our choices will add up to decisive change. Unfortunately, one of those small individual choices apparently does not include the mere writing of a letter to a Member of Parliament urging that our governments do not increase the number of national consumers by open immigration, child benefits and birth incentives, and global consumers through foreign aid not made conditional on family planning. As 200,000 new consumers are born in the world each day, our “decisions” are apparently going to have to get smarter every day ad infinitum. Eventually, one might suppose, we’ll have to become “breatharians” living only on a diet of oxygen. With the highest population growth rate in the G8, Canadians may become the first guinea pigs in this latest New Age “lifestyle” option. If that sounds fantastic, it is no less so that the belief of contemporary environmentalists that there is no necessary connection between population growth and environmental degradation.
Ms. Fatima, who is described as having “an avid, entrepreneurial spirit” on the CAF website, defined the CAF approach as “marketing on a mission.” It attempts to shift production to environmentally benign products by educating consumers to create an irresistible demand for eco-friendly products, an objective which encouraged interviewer Bynon to declare that “business is not the enemy of the environment.”
That is an interesting concept considering that each and every construction, even of the smartest car, the most energy efficient air conditioner or refrigerator, or the greenest building, requires more non-renewable resources for its construction and operation. And the people who engage in that production are paid dollars to do so, and consume more products with that money. Greens are apt to maintain that one can reduce “throughput” but grow the economy at the same time. Nonsense. We cannot support a growing population on an “economy” of musicians, poets and professors. Any service sector requires secondary and primary industry to feed it. If not in its own country, but through the “appropriated capacity” of countries which supply those needs through imports. We can’t live without someone somewhere getting their hands dirty on our behalf.
In other words, the CAF strategy firmly vested in the growth economy, as reflected by the fact that among the six directors on the board of the CAF are the retired Vice President of External Relations at the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, a managing partner of an investment management firm, and a director of business development with the Canadian Diabetes Association. But one must ask, can there really be “Green Growth”? Can there be an authentically “green stimulus package”—other than a lethal injection into the heart of growthism? Can we consume our way to sustainability?
In “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Economy”, Ted Trainer argues compellingly that we cannot. We cannot shift our use from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources while maintaining our high energy use at the same time. Renewables could never meet our present demands, never mind our projected future “needs”. “Few people seem to recognize,” Trainer observes, “the absurdly impossible consequences of unlimited economic growth. If we have a 3% per annum increase in output, by 2070 our economy will be producing eight times as much every year.” If the consumers of the developing world were to match our consumption, the global economic output would need to be 60 times greater than it is now. “Yet the present level is unsustainable”, he adds. And only a delusional Canadian, of whom there are many, could believe that we could double our economy in the next 25 years and have an environment left over. Or can more “prosperity” buy us a new one?
The only “solution” is one not offered by the Clean Air Foundation or any of its numerous clones. It is a zero-growth economy. One as Trainer defines it, that is “geared to the needs of people and ecosystems and is therefore not driven (primarily) by market forces or the profit motive…an economy operating with the minimal levels of production and consumption necessary for a high quality of life, with a much lower GDP than the present economy, and without any growth.” In actuality, the greenest building, the greenest car or the greenest appliance, is one never built, while the greenest choice is the one not to conceive another consumer. The condom remains the most cost-effective weapon against climate change and air pollution yet designed.
The steady-state economy is not a technological nostrum or a new consumerism, but a rebuke of consumption, a paradigm shift that does not require the more efficient production of greener goodies but fewer goodies, green or otherwise. It is about ecological sustainability, not the sustainability of the bottom line. And a steady state economy must involve a sustainable population level. We don’t need green consumers so much as fewer consumers who will consume less. That is the kind of “awareness” the CAF needs to promote. And it is the kind of perspective that the media, as in the “I” channel, needs to permit at the discussion table.
Tim Murray
July 26/09.
Yet another classic example of this kind of green delusion was afforded by a program called “At Issue” on the “I” Channel on July 22/09. It presented “Canada’s Clean Air Crew” as another of its “Heroes of the Environment”---the “Clean Air Foundation”. Moderator Arlene Bynon interviewed the CAF’s Acting Executive Director, Fatima Dharsee and its “Mercury Program Manager”, Krista Friesen, but did so not exactly in the probing style of a Barbara Frum but rather like the president of their fan club.
Ms. Fatima explained that the Clean Air Foundation is providing “solutions” by promoting “information”, “awareness”, more investment in renewable energy, more innovation, better technology, and a change in mentality. Its interest is making people feel “positive” and good about the seven programs the CAF is offering.
“Car Heaven”, for example, encourages Canadians to give up their clunkers for a charitable tax receipt, discounts on bicycles, transit passes and $300. The old cars are towed free of charge to one of some 200 auto-recyclers across the country. Fatima pointed out that cars built before 1995 generate 20 times the smog that new cars do---“which are pollution-free”. The program was touted as a success because, after all, in just eight years 88,000 Canadians have taken up the offer. This matches the achievement of the CBC’s “Million Acts of Green” campaign, which boasted that its green living participants took the equivalent of 10,000 cars off the road in one year in terms of reducing green house gas emissions. Problem is, it would take 13 days of reclaiming old cars at the CAF rate of 30 a day, to wipe out the number of cars added to the national fleet by one typical day of immigration to Canada, assuming that the rate of car ownership among immigrants is the same as other citizens. Together with the CBC “success”, these efforts would counter-balance only about 15% of the extra vehicular use by New Canadians. And if old cars are exchanged for new ones, what of the environmental costs of constructing the most efficient replacements? Other ‘green’ programs prompt similar questions and comparisons.
The CAF’s “Keep Cool” campaign may have collected over 8,000 old air conditioning units from Ontario locations in 2007, saving almost 6 MW---enough to power 1,500 homes. But how many new homes did population growth add in Ontario that year? Legal permanent immigration alone to that province, using Canadian averages of 2.6 people per house, would demand the construction of 48,000 extra housing units per year. And another 20,000 homes would be needed each year to accommodate Canadian-born residents in that province. So while HMCS Titanic is taking on water by thousands of gallons per minute, the Clean Air Crew is bailing it out one cup at a time. Valiant effort, but quite futile. Much like the Californian achievement of tripling the efficiency of refrigerators since 1948 but seeing its population quadruple in the same period. And green technological euphoria continues to ignore efficiency paradoxes. Cheaper and more efficient appliances provoke more consumption. When air conditioners became 17% more cost efficient, their number doubled.
The same critique can be applied to other CAF programs. Ms. Fatima alerted viewers to the fact that operating a two-stroke lawn mower for just one hour was as damaging to the atmosphere as driving a car for 500 km., a frightening statistic considering that 3 million Canadians mow lawns (9%). But the 2009 projected cohort of 265,000 legal permanent immigrants will expand the national housing stock by over 100,000 units, and therefore, applying the same ratio of lawn mowing to homes for the country, over one in four, or approximately 25,000 more lawn-mowers, would be added to the country that year. 390,000 of the 3 million lawn-mower operators Fatima cites are foreign-born. It is in that context that the retirement of 5,700 gas lawnmowers in 2007 must be seen. 18,000 lawn mowers have been surrendered since the program’s inception, removing 406 tonnes of GHG. But one year of immigration generates ten million tonnes of GHG, or 25% of the emissions from the whole Alberta Tar Sands development. The CAF is also focused on intercepting the mercury found in old thermostats and 10 million mercury car switches before they find their way to the landfill. But there is not even a hint that the number of land-fillers should be reduced as well.
Nevertheless, Arlene Bynon was effusive in her laudatory summation of the CAF’s approach. “By making the right decisions we can drastically reduce our footprint”. Essentially it is the soft green Gospel according to Gore, preached at the conclusion of his famed documentary on global warming, that each of us can, as smart and conscientious consumers, make a difference, for the sum total of our choices will add up to decisive change. Unfortunately, one of those small individual choices apparently does not include the mere writing of a letter to a Member of Parliament urging that our governments do not increase the number of national consumers by open immigration, child benefits and birth incentives, and global consumers through foreign aid not made conditional on family planning. As 200,000 new consumers are born in the world each day, our “decisions” are apparently going to have to get smarter every day ad infinitum. Eventually, one might suppose, we’ll have to become “breatharians” living only on a diet of oxygen. With the highest population growth rate in the G8, Canadians may become the first guinea pigs in this latest New Age “lifestyle” option. If that sounds fantastic, it is no less so that the belief of contemporary environmentalists that there is no necessary connection between population growth and environmental degradation.
Ms. Fatima, who is described as having “an avid, entrepreneurial spirit” on the CAF website, defined the CAF approach as “marketing on a mission.” It attempts to shift production to environmentally benign products by educating consumers to create an irresistible demand for eco-friendly products, an objective which encouraged interviewer Bynon to declare that “business is not the enemy of the environment.”
That is an interesting concept considering that each and every construction, even of the smartest car, the most energy efficient air conditioner or refrigerator, or the greenest building, requires more non-renewable resources for its construction and operation. And the people who engage in that production are paid dollars to do so, and consume more products with that money. Greens are apt to maintain that one can reduce “throughput” but grow the economy at the same time. Nonsense. We cannot support a growing population on an “economy” of musicians, poets and professors. Any service sector requires secondary and primary industry to feed it. If not in its own country, but through the “appropriated capacity” of countries which supply those needs through imports. We can’t live without someone somewhere getting their hands dirty on our behalf.
In other words, the CAF strategy firmly vested in the growth economy, as reflected by the fact that among the six directors on the board of the CAF are the retired Vice President of External Relations at the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, a managing partner of an investment management firm, and a director of business development with the Canadian Diabetes Association. But one must ask, can there really be “Green Growth”? Can there be an authentically “green stimulus package”—other than a lethal injection into the heart of growthism? Can we consume our way to sustainability?
In “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Economy”, Ted Trainer argues compellingly that we cannot. We cannot shift our use from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources while maintaining our high energy use at the same time. Renewables could never meet our present demands, never mind our projected future “needs”. “Few people seem to recognize,” Trainer observes, “the absurdly impossible consequences of unlimited economic growth. If we have a 3% per annum increase in output, by 2070 our economy will be producing eight times as much every year.” If the consumers of the developing world were to match our consumption, the global economic output would need to be 60 times greater than it is now. “Yet the present level is unsustainable”, he adds. And only a delusional Canadian, of whom there are many, could believe that we could double our economy in the next 25 years and have an environment left over. Or can more “prosperity” buy us a new one?
The only “solution” is one not offered by the Clean Air Foundation or any of its numerous clones. It is a zero-growth economy. One as Trainer defines it, that is “geared to the needs of people and ecosystems and is therefore not driven (primarily) by market forces or the profit motive…an economy operating with the minimal levels of production and consumption necessary for a high quality of life, with a much lower GDP than the present economy, and without any growth.” In actuality, the greenest building, the greenest car or the greenest appliance, is one never built, while the greenest choice is the one not to conceive another consumer. The condom remains the most cost-effective weapon against climate change and air pollution yet designed.
The steady-state economy is not a technological nostrum or a new consumerism, but a rebuke of consumption, a paradigm shift that does not require the more efficient production of greener goodies but fewer goodies, green or otherwise. It is about ecological sustainability, not the sustainability of the bottom line. And a steady state economy must involve a sustainable population level. We don’t need green consumers so much as fewer consumers who will consume less. That is the kind of “awareness” the CAF needs to promote. And it is the kind of perspective that the media, as in the “I” channel, needs to permit at the discussion table.
Tim Murray
July 26/09.
SENATOR STONEWALL
After receiving the following letter, Senator Larry Campbell’s personal secretary contacted me for further clarification. I responded to her satisfaction. Yet the good Senator has chosen not to reply. Why would he? His standard reply is “I don’t like racists”. That was his last brilliant salvo. His first was “It is always nice to hear from the racists”. I wonder if he would take that approach if his doctor tried to persuade him to change his living habits by producing a lab report that indicated that his cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar levels were at levels dangerous to his health?
“I don’t like lab technicians”.
From: Tim Murray [mailto:gloomndoom@telus.net]
Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 3:48 AM
To: 'info@larrycampbell.ca'
Subject: Two questions
Dear Senator Campbell,
A few questions, sir.
It has come to my attention that you dismissed a $2.4 million federally commissioned report conducted by 23 UBC academics because, “it’s ten years old”. The report in question found that the Fraser River Basin had almost three times as many people as sustainable, and if nothing changes, things will worsen. The principal investigator, Dr. Michael Healey of the Institute for Resources and Environment, concluded that since many other Canadian urban centres were suffering a similar fate, the development of a Population Plan was necessary for the country.
How can such a finding be dated? Are you suggesting that there are less people in the Fraser Basin now than when the report was released almost 12 years ago? Has the addition of another three million Canadians since that time made the kind of environmental degradation described in the report less serious?
My second question is this. Suppose the author of this report, or any report or conclusion like it, is discovered to be a racist. Suppose he hates people of colour, children, puppies, kittens and little old ladies. Suppose he is just an all-round nasty guy. How does that discredit his findings? What bearing would his motives have on the data he presented or the methodology by which was collected and analyzed? Suppose your favourite mechanic concluded that your car needed an engine rebuild. Would you reject his diagnosis because you learned that he was a member of the KKK? Even if a compression check vindicated his assessment? The UBC academic team said that there were too many people in the Fraser Basin, and by extrapolation, the rest of Canada---a conclusion that the Science Council reached in 1976. At the very least, they cautioned, we should develop a plan that establishes Canada’s optimum number of people. Is there something inherently ‘racist’ in that? If it was “racist”, would that mean that any discussion about Canada’s carrying capacity or criticism of immigration policy is racist?
You have stated that you don’t like “racists”. I would be interested to know what your definition of a racist is. There are a lot of people I don’t like either. But I nevertheless concede that my disliking them does not have much to do with whether they are right or wrong.
Sincerely,
Tim Murray
Quathiaski Cove, BC
Conclusion: Why do we bother trying to educate politicians? Their very vocation is to play to the gallery. To seek popularity rather than truth. Ten percent of the critical swing seats in parliament are won and lost by appealing to the powerful, well-organized ethnic lobby, who have the ear and sympathy of the media. Why would they risk their chances of securing that vote by listening to the shrill but uncommon voices of anti-immigrationists? To them we are the looney fringe. Senator Campbell needs to get 10,000 letters like this one, not two or three. And even then, it would likely not be enough. Tim
“I don’t like lab technicians”.
From: Tim Murray [mailto:gloomndoom@telus.net]
Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 3:48 AM
To: 'info@larrycampbell.ca'
Subject: Two questions
Dear Senator Campbell,
A few questions, sir.
It has come to my attention that you dismissed a $2.4 million federally commissioned report conducted by 23 UBC academics because, “it’s ten years old”. The report in question found that the Fraser River Basin had almost three times as many people as sustainable, and if nothing changes, things will worsen. The principal investigator, Dr. Michael Healey of the Institute for Resources and Environment, concluded that since many other Canadian urban centres were suffering a similar fate, the development of a Population Plan was necessary for the country.
How can such a finding be dated? Are you suggesting that there are less people in the Fraser Basin now than when the report was released almost 12 years ago? Has the addition of another three million Canadians since that time made the kind of environmental degradation described in the report less serious?
My second question is this. Suppose the author of this report, or any report or conclusion like it, is discovered to be a racist. Suppose he hates people of colour, children, puppies, kittens and little old ladies. Suppose he is just an all-round nasty guy. How does that discredit his findings? What bearing would his motives have on the data he presented or the methodology by which was collected and analyzed? Suppose your favourite mechanic concluded that your car needed an engine rebuild. Would you reject his diagnosis because you learned that he was a member of the KKK? Even if a compression check vindicated his assessment? The UBC academic team said that there were too many people in the Fraser Basin, and by extrapolation, the rest of Canada---a conclusion that the Science Council reached in 1976. At the very least, they cautioned, we should develop a plan that establishes Canada’s optimum number of people. Is there something inherently ‘racist’ in that? If it was “racist”, would that mean that any discussion about Canada’s carrying capacity or criticism of immigration policy is racist?
You have stated that you don’t like “racists”. I would be interested to know what your definition of a racist is. There are a lot of people I don’t like either. But I nevertheless concede that my disliking them does not have much to do with whether they are right or wrong.
Sincerely,
Tim Murray
Quathiaski Cove, BC
Conclusion: Why do we bother trying to educate politicians? Their very vocation is to play to the gallery. To seek popularity rather than truth. Ten percent of the critical swing seats in parliament are won and lost by appealing to the powerful, well-organized ethnic lobby, who have the ear and sympathy of the media. Why would they risk their chances of securing that vote by listening to the shrill but uncommon voices of anti-immigrationists? To them we are the looney fringe. Senator Campbell needs to get 10,000 letters like this one, not two or three. And even then, it would likely not be enough. Tim
WHAT ARE CAN-ELEONS?
What are “can-eleons”? According to my Malthusian Dictionary “can-eleons” are Canadian environmentalists. They are rather myopic, and can’t, like 51% of Canadians polled in the mid-nineties, see a connection between immigrant-driven population growth and environmental degradation in Canada. We can have infinite growth because it can be steered, deflected or “managed” by the failed nostrums of smart growth planning. They can’t admit that nature reserves and greenbelts enjoy no durable sanctuary from human population growth and the growth-economy, that with a mere stroke of the pen, commericial interests have and will undo any legistlative protection they have. They argue that increasing human numbers can be sequestered from Greenfield acreage but won’t notice that land use planning in Canada is largely in the hands of developers who control local councils by financing three-quarters of civic election campaigns. Nor will they acknowledge the correlation between population growth and Green House Gas emissions, or the fact that mass immigration since 1990 has been responsible for four times the GHG emissions as the entire Alberta Tar Sands development, which is their obsession. They fail to understand that the housing developments in urban sprawl, half of which is generated by population growth, are occupied by foreign-born citizens in proportions of 70-85% depending on the locality. Or that urban sprawl in the last two decades has taken up an area equivalent to three Torontos---three times the area of boreal forest destroyed by the Tar Sands.
These creatures are defined as “can-elons” are so-called because they have the amazing capability of turning from green to brown the moment they see a corporate donor coming. And when they see a Canadian census report or a story about a couple having their 14th child ----they become invisible!
As human lizards, they require warm temperatures to activate their metabolism, so in their Canadian habitat, they appear paralytic for most of the year, especially when so many other introduced species are flooding in to share their space. The only time they make a noise is when they cry poor. And that seems to be the case more and more often. Unfortunately when Canadians respond with material assistance, “Can-eleons” just get fatter, top-heavy and mute about demographic issues. It is not recommended that we feed them. There are more cost-effective options available from animals like ourselves.
Tim Murray
July4/09
These creatures are defined as “can-elons” are so-called because they have the amazing capability of turning from green to brown the moment they see a corporate donor coming. And when they see a Canadian census report or a story about a couple having their 14th child ----they become invisible!
As human lizards, they require warm temperatures to activate their metabolism, so in their Canadian habitat, they appear paralytic for most of the year, especially when so many other introduced species are flooding in to share their space. The only time they make a noise is when they cry poor. And that seems to be the case more and more often. Unfortunately when Canadians respond with material assistance, “Can-eleons” just get fatter, top-heavy and mute about demographic issues. It is not recommended that we feed them. There are more cost-effective options available from animals like ourselves.
Tim Murray
July4/09
A STEADY-STATE ECONOMY REQUIRES A STEADY STATE POPULATION
A Sustainable Steady State Economy Requires A Sustainable Steady State Population. Amen.
Life inside a closed system is finite...
So limiting yourself to economic growth is ... limiting yourself.
Just as the economy cannot grow without limit, no matter what Ponzi scheme is cooked up with CEO's and the like, humanity cannot grow without limit as long as we're trapped on this single planet. We're already outstripping our planet's ability to supply us with resources, using resources that were created and laid down over hundreds of millions of years in a few short thousands of years.
The only way to attain a sustainable, steady state economy is to attain a steady state global population. If humanity doesn't figure out how to do this intentionally, nature will do it for us, as plagues and famines and wars over scarce resources do it for us.
Steady state or boom-bust cycles. It's all we've got available, option-wise.
by Ezekial 23 20 on Tue Jul 07, 2009 at 04:48:00 PM PDT
Life inside a closed system is finite...
So limiting yourself to economic growth is ... limiting yourself.
Just as the economy cannot grow without limit, no matter what Ponzi scheme is cooked up with CEO's and the like, humanity cannot grow without limit as long as we're trapped on this single planet. We're already outstripping our planet's ability to supply us with resources, using resources that were created and laid down over hundreds of millions of years in a few short thousands of years.
The only way to attain a sustainable, steady state economy is to attain a steady state global population. If humanity doesn't figure out how to do this intentionally, nature will do it for us, as plagues and famines and wars over scarce resources do it for us.
Steady state or boom-bust cycles. It's all we've got available, option-wise.
by Ezekial 23 20 on Tue Jul 07, 2009 at 04:48:00 PM PDT
SOUNDS OF MEDIA SILENCE---With Apologies to Simon and Garfunkel
Hello ignorant greed my old friend
I’ve come to talk to you again
Because a Malthusian vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And an apocalyptic vision was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of CBC silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of Ehrlich’s lamp
I turned my attention from the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of steady (state) light
That split the night
And broke the sound---of CBC silence
And in that naked light I saw
Canada’s population growth rate highest in the G8
Captive of a catastrophic fate
Yet I heard---the deafening Sound--- of Silence
Environmentalists talking without speaking
Hearing without listening
People writing articles that editors never share
Because no one dare
Disturb the Sound of Media Silence
Jack Parsons was right on
The population taboo has not gone
Journalists give the damn of tinkers
And the CBC is a herd of independent thinkers
“Fools”, said I, “You do not know
Silence like the cancer of growth grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Give me air time that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the well
Of media shunning
So the Canadian people bowed and prayed
To the Consumer God the Growth Lobby made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of Hardin and Kunstler are written on the subway walls and tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of Media Silence
Tim Murray
June11/09
©
I’ve come to talk to you again
Because a Malthusian vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And an apocalyptic vision was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of CBC silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of Ehrlich’s lamp
I turned my attention from the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of steady (state) light
That split the night
And broke the sound---of CBC silence
And in that naked light I saw
Canada’s population growth rate highest in the G8
Captive of a catastrophic fate
Yet I heard---the deafening Sound--- of Silence
Environmentalists talking without speaking
Hearing without listening
People writing articles that editors never share
Because no one dare
Disturb the Sound of Media Silence
Jack Parsons was right on
The population taboo has not gone
Journalists give the damn of tinkers
And the CBC is a herd of independent thinkers
“Fools”, said I, “You do not know
Silence like the cancer of growth grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Give me air time that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the well
Of media shunning
So the Canadian people bowed and prayed
To the Consumer God the Growth Lobby made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of Hardin and Kunstler are written on the subway walls and tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of Media Silence
Tim Murray
June11/09
©
I HAVE A DREAM---THE SPEECH THAT DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. WOULD MAKE TODAY
I have a dream deeply rooted in the American dream---of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King , Richard Heinberg, James Kunstler, and Californian taxpayers.
I have a dream that one day this nation will fall down and own up to the true meaning of its greed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal in their right to sire too many consumers, to overshoot their limits, to live beyond their means, and as Americans, appropriate the capacity of weaker nations through iniquitous trade agreements, resource exploitation and military intrusions.”
I have a dream that one day the descendants of former slaves and former slave owners will sit down at the table of brotherhood and find nothing on the menu----when the collapse of oil-based agriculture will permit them to starve in harmony together.
I have a dream that one day that blacks and whites will drink from the cup of freedom and fraternity and find it empty from the exhaustion of our aquifers.
I have a dream that one day little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers in their adulthood on the bread line, as their jobs have been outsourced to continents with lower labor and environmental standards or lost to the competition of cheap imported labor.
I have a dream that one day every hill and every mountain shall be laid low by the hyperinflation of quantitative easing and crushing taxation, that scandals will be made plain and crooked people made solvent by more bailouts.
I have a dream that one day we will live in a nation where we will be judged not by the color our skins but by the content of our bank accounts flush with worthless currency and by negative credit ratings that will never be erased.
I have this dream today. It is a nightmare.
Now all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing, “We’re screwed at last! For God sake we’re screwed at last!”
And in the words of an old commandment, sing, “Thou shalt not exceed carrying capacity.”
Tim Murray
July 7/09
PS Altogether now, please join me in singing the theme song of our coming struggle: “We shall all succumb ah um, we shall all succumb ah um, someday eh eh eh (Canadian version obviously)….Deep in my heart, I do believe…. we shall all succumb, someday.”
I have a dream that one day this nation will fall down and own up to the true meaning of its greed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal in their right to sire too many consumers, to overshoot their limits, to live beyond their means, and as Americans, appropriate the capacity of weaker nations through iniquitous trade agreements, resource exploitation and military intrusions.”
I have a dream that one day the descendants of former slaves and former slave owners will sit down at the table of brotherhood and find nothing on the menu----when the collapse of oil-based agriculture will permit them to starve in harmony together.
I have a dream that one day that blacks and whites will drink from the cup of freedom and fraternity and find it empty from the exhaustion of our aquifers.
I have a dream that one day little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers in their adulthood on the bread line, as their jobs have been outsourced to continents with lower labor and environmental standards or lost to the competition of cheap imported labor.
I have a dream that one day every hill and every mountain shall be laid low by the hyperinflation of quantitative easing and crushing taxation, that scandals will be made plain and crooked people made solvent by more bailouts.
I have a dream that one day we will live in a nation where we will be judged not by the color our skins but by the content of our bank accounts flush with worthless currency and by negative credit ratings that will never be erased.
I have this dream today. It is a nightmare.
Now all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing, “We’re screwed at last! For God sake we’re screwed at last!”
And in the words of an old commandment, sing, “Thou shalt not exceed carrying capacity.”
Tim Murray
July 7/09
PS Altogether now, please join me in singing the theme song of our coming struggle: “We shall all succumb ah um, we shall all succumb ah um, someday eh eh eh (Canadian version obviously)….Deep in my heart, I do believe…. we shall all succumb, someday.”
CD HOWE INSTITUTE GETS IT HALF-RIGHT
The basic question is unasked. Why do we need to grow our population at all. From immigration OR fertility? The pat answer of needing to support the aged doesn't address ecological concerns.
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Immigration no substitute for babies, late retirement: C.D. Howe
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News ServiceJuly 2, 2009 http://www.canada.com/Life/Immigration+substitute+babies+late+retirement+Howe/1753509/story.html
Canadians need to have more babies, and delay their retirement, to stave off a crisis in the country's aging workforce, warns the C.D. Howe Institute, which finds immigration is not the "elixir for youth" many think it is.
From government talking points to casual conversation, immigration is often discussed as a solution to the challenges presented by the country's aging workforce, says CEO William Robson. But when the economic and social policy research institute conducted population simulations, even vastly increased numbers of immigrants had "startlingly little effect" on the overall age structure in Canada, he says.
As it stands now, Canada's population, faced with longer life expectancies and low fertility rates, is producing fewer young people to replace the older people leaving the workforce, the report says. That, in turn, means a smaller population of working-age people to make money, pay taxes and support the pension and health-care needs of a burgeoning older population.
"I was surprised by how weak immigration is, on its own, as a tool to affect these things," Robson says. "People in Canada generally feel very positively about immigration, so it would be nice if something that we like turned out to be the answer to some of these things that otherwise can look a little threatening."
Immigrants are younger, on average, than the rest of the population, but not by much, Robson says, so exerting any real impact on the overall age structure would require unrealistically high numbers of immigrants.
The C.D. Howe report is "emphatically not" anti-immigration, Robson says but, rather, suggests other factors that could have a greater effect on the problem of the aging workforce:
- Postponing the expected retirement age from 65 to 70. This shift has already started, he says, most recently, because people whose savings have "taken a hammering" found themselves unable to retire for financial reasons.
- Raising the fertility rate. It's a thorny issue to build policy around, Robson says, but Quebec saw some birthrate increases between 1988 and 1997 with a government "allowance for newborn children" that paid families up to $8,000 for each child born.
- Boosting productivity. The factors that affect this — and why Canada lags — are "mysterious," he says, but productivity improvements are a "free lunch," in the sense that they give societies more output with the same number of workers.
"Immigration helps but, on its own, it will not do the trick," says Robson. "My concern is that a lot of people who talk about immigration as a way of dealing with these things might think that, therefore, we can let some of these other things slip.
"If nothing else changes, the rapid increase in the share of the population that's over 65 does mean a real pinch on the working-age population," Robson says. "If we consciously work on all those fronts, then chances are, we'll get old and we'll be wondering, 'What was all the fuss about?' "
COMMENT:
Robson is able to understand that productivity improvements “give societies more output with the same number of workers”. But why doesn’t he understand that the fiscal burden of mass immigration--- the difference between what the largely unskilled annual cohort of immigrants consume in social services vs. the taxes they are able to pay to reimburse us for that consumption---robs us of the money to upgrade productivity? And why doesn’t he understand that the cost of providing for the young exceeds the cost of providing for the aged? But the really big $64,000 questions are “Why doesn’t the CD Howe Institute understand the ecological consequences of growing our population? Why don’t they grasp the concept of limited carrying capacity? Why don’t they understand the principle of a pyramid scam? If more people are needed to support the apex of our population, how many more people will be needed to support the people who were originally required to support the aged? Ad infinitum? When is the CD Howe Institute going to talk about the urgent need for a Population Plan in this country? “ Tim Murray
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Immigration no substitute for babies, late retirement: C.D. Howe
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News ServiceJuly 2, 2009 http://www.canada.com/Life/Immigration+substitute+babies+late+retirement+Howe/1753509/story.html
Canadians need to have more babies, and delay their retirement, to stave off a crisis in the country's aging workforce, warns the C.D. Howe Institute, which finds immigration is not the "elixir for youth" many think it is.
From government talking points to casual conversation, immigration is often discussed as a solution to the challenges presented by the country's aging workforce, says CEO William Robson. But when the economic and social policy research institute conducted population simulations, even vastly increased numbers of immigrants had "startlingly little effect" on the overall age structure in Canada, he says.
As it stands now, Canada's population, faced with longer life expectancies and low fertility rates, is producing fewer young people to replace the older people leaving the workforce, the report says. That, in turn, means a smaller population of working-age people to make money, pay taxes and support the pension and health-care needs of a burgeoning older population.
"I was surprised by how weak immigration is, on its own, as a tool to affect these things," Robson says. "People in Canada generally feel very positively about immigration, so it would be nice if something that we like turned out to be the answer to some of these things that otherwise can look a little threatening."
Immigrants are younger, on average, than the rest of the population, but not by much, Robson says, so exerting any real impact on the overall age structure would require unrealistically high numbers of immigrants.
The C.D. Howe report is "emphatically not" anti-immigration, Robson says but, rather, suggests other factors that could have a greater effect on the problem of the aging workforce:
- Postponing the expected retirement age from 65 to 70. This shift has already started, he says, most recently, because people whose savings have "taken a hammering" found themselves unable to retire for financial reasons.
- Raising the fertility rate. It's a thorny issue to build policy around, Robson says, but Quebec saw some birthrate increases between 1988 and 1997 with a government "allowance for newborn children" that paid families up to $8,000 for each child born.
- Boosting productivity. The factors that affect this — and why Canada lags — are "mysterious," he says, but productivity improvements are a "free lunch," in the sense that they give societies more output with the same number of workers.
"Immigration helps but, on its own, it will not do the trick," says Robson. "My concern is that a lot of people who talk about immigration as a way of dealing with these things might think that, therefore, we can let some of these other things slip.
"If nothing else changes, the rapid increase in the share of the population that's over 65 does mean a real pinch on the working-age population," Robson says. "If we consciously work on all those fronts, then chances are, we'll get old and we'll be wondering, 'What was all the fuss about?' "
COMMENT:
Robson is able to understand that productivity improvements “give societies more output with the same number of workers”. But why doesn’t he understand that the fiscal burden of mass immigration--- the difference between what the largely unskilled annual cohort of immigrants consume in social services vs. the taxes they are able to pay to reimburse us for that consumption---robs us of the money to upgrade productivity? And why doesn’t he understand that the cost of providing for the young exceeds the cost of providing for the aged? But the really big $64,000 questions are “Why doesn’t the CD Howe Institute understand the ecological consequences of growing our population? Why don’t they grasp the concept of limited carrying capacity? Why don’t they understand the principle of a pyramid scam? If more people are needed to support the apex of our population, how many more people will be needed to support the people who were originally required to support the aged? Ad infinitum? When is the CD Howe Institute going to talk about the urgent need for a Population Plan in this country? “ Tim Murray
Hen Fei-tzu Spoke a Truth That Modern Economists Still Don't Know
Twenty-five centuries ago a Chinese philospher spoke a truth that economists today still don't understand.
“People at present think that 5 sons are not too many and each son has five sons also, and before the death of the grandfather there are already 25 descendants. Therefore people are more and wealth is less; they work hard and receive little.”Han Fei-tzu c.500B.C.
I’ll bet that Han Fei-tzu made that argument as many times as I have, but like now, the mainstream media in his day wouldn’t print it on parchment. The Emperor believed that if he grew the population, he would grow more power and prosperity. I wonder if he offered Child Benefits? Was there an Emperor Layton back then?
Tim Murray
“People at present think that 5 sons are not too many and each son has five sons also, and before the death of the grandfather there are already 25 descendants. Therefore people are more and wealth is less; they work hard and receive little.”Han Fei-tzu c.500B.C.
I’ll bet that Han Fei-tzu made that argument as many times as I have, but like now, the mainstream media in his day wouldn’t print it on parchment. The Emperor believed that if he grew the population, he would grow more power and prosperity. I wonder if he offered Child Benefits? Was there an Emperor Layton back then?
Tim Murray
Rank and File Left Support Cuts to Immigration
WASHINGTON, June 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A nationwide poll of 600 self-indentified liberals and progressives shows that liberals are concerned about the current levels of immigration into the United States and the harmful effect that current immigration policies are having on U.S. population growth, the environment, and the availability of jobs. The poll was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC in April 2009.
Key findings of the poll revealed:
Sixty seven percent of liberals and progressives felt the level of population growth caused by immigration negatively impacts the quality of life in the United States.
Fifty eight percent felt that the current levels of immigration are harmful to the environment.
Sixty three percent said that current levels of immigration hurts job prospects for American workers.
With regard to undocumented workers already here, the poll revealed that self-identified liberals are split over whether illegal immigrants should be offered an amnesty. Fifty three percent were in support of a pathway to citizenship and forty five percent were opposed.
"The results of this poll demonstrate what many on the political left have known for some time. Immigration is not a partisan issue. There are many progressives and liberals that are concerned about the unintended consequences that large scale immigration has on the environment, economy, and other issues that many liberals are concerned about," says Leah Durant, Executive Director of Progressives for Immigration Reform. "It is time to take this issue off the back burner. We need to talk frankly about the effects of immigration and find solutions that benefit both Americans and the global community."
For more information about this poll please contact: Leah Durant at (202) 543-5325 or info@progressivesforimmigrationreform.org
Recent Poll by Progressives for Immigration Reform Shows Concern Among Liberals and Progressives Over Current Immigration Levels
This new group for immigration reform, together with Yeh Ling Ling’s diversity coalition for reduced immigration, is a dagger in the hearts of politically correct stereotyping. Ethnics and liberal progressives in America are, at the grass roots level, for the most part, in agreement with us. It is their “spokesmen”, the leadership, which in their name, opposes our goals.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, among others, likes to portray anti-immigrationists as “right wing” nativists, xenophobes, bigots and white nationalists. This is the straw man which they beat up over and over again in their attempt to shut down debate about population numbers.
One wonders, what would be the results if the supporters of Canada’s NDP, Britain’s New Labour Party or Australia’s Labor party were similarly polled about their feelings about mass immigration? My bet is that the MAJORITY of centre-left voters favour a cut back in immigration and a lower population level for their respective countries. The elites who run those parties, however, will never conduct such a survey. And if the results were as I suspect, their answer would not be to pay it heed and revisit their policies. Oh no, it would instead be a resolution to work even harder at “educating” the masses on their misplaced anxiety about immigration. It would never occur to them that ordinary people might be in possession of wisdom that politicians should follow. This elitist attitude on the left was presaged by the Marxist attitude of a century and a half ago that if the working class didn’t accept the world view of the socialist intelligentsia, they were guilty of “false consciousness”, and their opinions need not be respected.
Tonight I was canvassed once again by an NDP fundraiser on the phone. I let her have it, ventilating my views about her party’s growthist ideology. She fell back on all the old chestnuts. Her primary position was that the poor people of the world have a right to better themselves by moving her. All 80 million of them I suppose, that is the number born every year across the world.
But at the base of it was a fundamental ecological ignorance that argued that if resources were fairly apportioned, there would be enough to go around. And that would solve population issues, which she insisted were only one part of the problem in the third world. Population growth in Canada, though, was no problem at all.
No one can uproot these assumptions more effectively than an immigration reform lobby WITHIN the liberal-left. Wish them luck.
Tim
Key findings of the poll revealed:
Sixty seven percent of liberals and progressives felt the level of population growth caused by immigration negatively impacts the quality of life in the United States.
Fifty eight percent felt that the current levels of immigration are harmful to the environment.
Sixty three percent said that current levels of immigration hurts job prospects for American workers.
With regard to undocumented workers already here, the poll revealed that self-identified liberals are split over whether illegal immigrants should be offered an amnesty. Fifty three percent were in support of a pathway to citizenship and forty five percent were opposed.
"The results of this poll demonstrate what many on the political left have known for some time. Immigration is not a partisan issue. There are many progressives and liberals that are concerned about the unintended consequences that large scale immigration has on the environment, economy, and other issues that many liberals are concerned about," says Leah Durant, Executive Director of Progressives for Immigration Reform. "It is time to take this issue off the back burner. We need to talk frankly about the effects of immigration and find solutions that benefit both Americans and the global community."
For more information about this poll please contact: Leah Durant at (202) 543-5325 or info@progressivesforimmigrationreform.org
Recent Poll by Progressives for Immigration Reform Shows Concern Among Liberals and Progressives Over Current Immigration Levels
This new group for immigration reform, together with Yeh Ling Ling’s diversity coalition for reduced immigration, is a dagger in the hearts of politically correct stereotyping. Ethnics and liberal progressives in America are, at the grass roots level, for the most part, in agreement with us. It is their “spokesmen”, the leadership, which in their name, opposes our goals.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, among others, likes to portray anti-immigrationists as “right wing” nativists, xenophobes, bigots and white nationalists. This is the straw man which they beat up over and over again in their attempt to shut down debate about population numbers.
One wonders, what would be the results if the supporters of Canada’s NDP, Britain’s New Labour Party or Australia’s Labor party were similarly polled about their feelings about mass immigration? My bet is that the MAJORITY of centre-left voters favour a cut back in immigration and a lower population level for their respective countries. The elites who run those parties, however, will never conduct such a survey. And if the results were as I suspect, their answer would not be to pay it heed and revisit their policies. Oh no, it would instead be a resolution to work even harder at “educating” the masses on their misplaced anxiety about immigration. It would never occur to them that ordinary people might be in possession of wisdom that politicians should follow. This elitist attitude on the left was presaged by the Marxist attitude of a century and a half ago that if the working class didn’t accept the world view of the socialist intelligentsia, they were guilty of “false consciousness”, and their opinions need not be respected.
Tonight I was canvassed once again by an NDP fundraiser on the phone. I let her have it, ventilating my views about her party’s growthist ideology. She fell back on all the old chestnuts. Her primary position was that the poor people of the world have a right to better themselves by moving her. All 80 million of them I suppose, that is the number born every year across the world.
But at the base of it was a fundamental ecological ignorance that argued that if resources were fairly apportioned, there would be enough to go around. And that would solve population issues, which she insisted were only one part of the problem in the third world. Population growth in Canada, though, was no problem at all.
No one can uproot these assumptions more effectively than an immigration reform lobby WITHIN the liberal-left. Wish them luck.
Tim
Environmental NGO Silence
North American environmental NGOs are not constrained so much by the conditions imposed by their charitable status, but my their corporate donor base. For the American experience, just review the history of the David Gelbaum affair and the corruption of the Sierra Club. Or read Christine MacDonald's "Green Inc" about how the most prominent and high profile environmental orgs not only accept money from energy and logging corporations but allow the directors of these companies to sit on their boards.
In Canada the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and the David Suzuki Foundation are beneficiaries of serious corporate donations. Suzuki of course, poses as a Great Crusader against climate change, playing to the Green yuppie gallery by his demand that MPs who deny anthropogenic global warming should be jailed---hardly the action of someone inhibited by possible government retaliation from the tax department. Yet he receives donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta's principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees' and Pensioners' Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world, operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants. The Suzuki Foundation's 2005/06 financial report also lists 52 corporate donors including Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal. The latter three benefactors explain Suzuki's silence on the obviously negative environmental impact of mass immigration. The financial industry is fueled by mortgages to home-buyers---70 to 85% of whom are foreign-born.
The Sierra Club of Canada employs the second "solution" offered in this article to circumvent the intention of the law. They set up a dummy organization which they call the "Sierra Club Foundation" as a purely educational group and entice membership to it. Then they use the membership fees in a transparently discreet way to fund their political arm, the Sierra "Club" of Canada, which is blatantly partisan, even to the point of assigning "grades" to the political parties who contest an upcoming federal election. They assigned an "F" to the Conservative Harper government, even though the opposition parties did not actually promise to terminate the Tar Sands project and promised to hike immigration levels by 38% which, in practice, would mean that they would raise GHG emissions by 38%. I gave the Sierra Club an "F" on two counts. One, for their appalling blindness to the relationship of population growth to climate change and immigration to carbon emissions. And two, for tax fraud. There is no "Chinese Wall" between the Sierra Club Foundation and the Sierra Club. Money went from one hand to the other. Meanwhile, over 700 legitimate charity groups were disqualified for doing legitimate charity work in 2007. Groups that provided food banks, hospice care, trauma counselling etc. Many people who gave money to the Sierra Club Foundation believed that it was not to be used for partisan purposes. They were Conservatives, Liberals or New Democratic Party supporters who woke up to read the morning newspaper and found that the organization they donated to was endorsing the party of hyper mass immigration, the Green Party of Elizabeth May. How would you feel if you learned that the SPCA or the animal protection agency you donated to had forwarded your money to the Howard or Rudd government or to any of your political opponents along with their endorsement?
North American environmental NGOs are doing the work that corporations pay them to do. The job of Pied Pipers to green yuppie dupes, decoying them down inconsequential pathways away from the root cause of environmental degradation---mass immigration and rising fertility rates. Best to let them exhaust their members by using them as a fire brigade to put out the brush fires that constantly pop up everywhere. Save this forest, or that river, or this endangered species of the month. Fight symptoms, not causes. After all, corporations can suffer the odd environmental victory. Dedicated parkland can later be ravished with the stroke of a parliamentary pen. What is really important is that environmentalists stay silent while the nation is being flooded with more consumers and cheap labour.
Well, it looks like the environmental NGOs have kept their end of the bargain. Barking dogs that yap at the mailman, but ignore the crook who is robbing the house.
Tim Murray
July 1/09
In Canada the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and the David Suzuki Foundation are beneficiaries of serious corporate donations. Suzuki of course, poses as a Great Crusader against climate change, playing to the Green yuppie gallery by his demand that MPs who deny anthropogenic global warming should be jailed---hardly the action of someone inhibited by possible government retaliation from the tax department. Yet he receives donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta's principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees' and Pensioners' Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world, operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants. The Suzuki Foundation's 2005/06 financial report also lists 52 corporate donors including Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal. The latter three benefactors explain Suzuki's silence on the obviously negative environmental impact of mass immigration. The financial industry is fueled by mortgages to home-buyers---70 to 85% of whom are foreign-born.
The Sierra Club of Canada employs the second "solution" offered in this article to circumvent the intention of the law. They set up a dummy organization which they call the "Sierra Club Foundation" as a purely educational group and entice membership to it. Then they use the membership fees in a transparently discreet way to fund their political arm, the Sierra "Club" of Canada, which is blatantly partisan, even to the point of assigning "grades" to the political parties who contest an upcoming federal election. They assigned an "F" to the Conservative Harper government, even though the opposition parties did not actually promise to terminate the Tar Sands project and promised to hike immigration levels by 38% which, in practice, would mean that they would raise GHG emissions by 38%. I gave the Sierra Club an "F" on two counts. One, for their appalling blindness to the relationship of population growth to climate change and immigration to carbon emissions. And two, for tax fraud. There is no "Chinese Wall" between the Sierra Club Foundation and the Sierra Club. Money went from one hand to the other. Meanwhile, over 700 legitimate charity groups were disqualified for doing legitimate charity work in 2007. Groups that provided food banks, hospice care, trauma counselling etc. Many people who gave money to the Sierra Club Foundation believed that it was not to be used for partisan purposes. They were Conservatives, Liberals or New Democratic Party supporters who woke up to read the morning newspaper and found that the organization they donated to was endorsing the party of hyper mass immigration, the Green Party of Elizabeth May. How would you feel if you learned that the SPCA or the animal protection agency you donated to had forwarded your money to the Howard or Rudd government or to any of your political opponents along with their endorsement?
North American environmental NGOs are doing the work that corporations pay them to do. The job of Pied Pipers to green yuppie dupes, decoying them down inconsequential pathways away from the root cause of environmental degradation---mass immigration and rising fertility rates. Best to let them exhaust their members by using them as a fire brigade to put out the brush fires that constantly pop up everywhere. Save this forest, or that river, or this endangered species of the month. Fight symptoms, not causes. After all, corporations can suffer the odd environmental victory. Dedicated parkland can later be ravished with the stroke of a parliamentary pen. What is really important is that environmentalists stay silent while the nation is being flooded with more consumers and cheap labour.
Well, it looks like the environmental NGOs have kept their end of the bargain. Barking dogs that yap at the mailman, but ignore the crook who is robbing the house.
Tim Murray
July 1/09
Tip-Toeing Around Population Growth---the Socialist Attitude
The myopic socialist gospel is never better revealed than in this speech by Labour MP David Kidney. 1. He rejects Porritt's 2 child policy because he had three brothers and a successful mom. So I guess everybody in the UK can have 4 kids then?
2. By implication he favours Monbiot's position. It's all our fault for hogging resources, third world folks should not be responsible for how many kids they have. 3. No one has the right to interfere with reproductive choice. This laissez faire attitude is odd coming from a socialist, who by definition, wants government to interfere with damn near everything. Especially our right to free speech. 4. Lets focus new technology to help farmers grow more food for more people. Technology to replace soil nutrients? And does he think about wild habitat taken over by human pop growth? So many obvious flaws in his thinking---thinking so typical of his ilk.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Global Population Growth
11 am
Mr. David Kidney (Stafford) (Lab): It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr. Illsley, and I know that as usual you will be firm but fair in chairing the proceedings. It is also a pleasure to see the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), in his place to respond to the debate. I have followed his career with great pride and joy and am pleased that he has been so successful. I wish him well in his new job in Government, which is an exciting but difficult one.
The local council in Stafford is today unveiling its proposals for a consultation on its next local development framework. The Conservative- controlled Stafford borough council will be explaining why it has agreed to a Labour Government plan for a growth point at Stafford, because it has agreed to take 20 per cent. more new housing over the next 20 years than it would have had to take under a normal calculation. I am sure that there will be great controversy locally about why we must have all that house building in Stafford in the next 20 years. When people such as myself explain that it is because of the growing population and the need for housing, people ask me where that growing population comes from and why we have to have it.
There are many explanations of our need for more housing, but much of that need relates to demographic change and not necessarily to immigration change. Those questions illustrate on a small scale in one place in this country the population growth going on around the world, which should concern people but does not get the airing and debate that it should receive.
After I secured the debate, I suddenly started to see the topic attracting comment and attention in the media. Last week, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian about population growth being a serious concern, and argued that we should blame not the poor for having children, but the rich for hogging more than their fair share of the world’s resources. This week Sir Jonathon Porritt was reported in the Telegraph headlines for saying that there should be a two-child limit in future on the size of families. He referred to irresponsible parents who have more than two children and green campaigners who betray their membership by not debating that important issue. I would very much like to dissociate myself from his comments, particularly as I am one of four boys born to my very successful mother and father, who are both sadly dead. My approach is different, and I would like to explain it this morning.
It is important that we focus on the part that population growth will play as a more general issue in sustainable development. The population of this country has now passed 60 million and is forecast to reach 77 million by the middle of the century. The world’s population has passed 6 billion and is forecast to reach 9 billion over the same time scale. That would mean an increase in the world’s population of 6 million every month, which is a staggering statistic.
I am drawn to the debate on population because of my initial concerns for the environment and the urgency of our task to combat climate change. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a world first in setting a binding target for cutting carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent. by 2050. I took part in the debates as we crafted
4 Feb 2009 : Column 254WH
that Act. We of course have to mitigate by reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and adapt by preparing for rising sea levels, warmer summers, wetter winters and more unpredictable weather events, but as I asked on Second Reading, where is the discussion about the effect on all our plans of the level of population we will be working with?
My approach is very different from that of Sir Jonathon Porritt. I do not think that society should interfere in the free choices people make about having children, and I want the world community to discuss all aspects of sustainable development, including population size. In this debate, I want to focus on two points that arise as a result of a growing population. First, given that there will be a larger population in the future, how can we manage the world’s resources to meet their needs? Secondly, can we agree that, on balance, the world will be a safer place if we can stabilise the population at a lower level than currently forecast, and if so, what can we do to achieve that stability?
I will look first at the resources for a larger world population. Currently, over 1 billion people—about one sixth of the population—live on an income lower than $1 a day. The balance between those living rural or urban lives shifted last year: for the first time, more of us are urban dwellers. As the population grows and land use continues to shift towards urban living, we will need smarter ways of providing water for drinking, washing and irrigation and of farming to produce enough food for everyone. As we know from our plans in the UK for cutting carbon emissions, we will have to replace much of our carbon-based energy with renewable sources.
I shall now discuss the implications for water. One in three people in the world already face water shortages, and there are significant areas of water stress now. The Pentagon produced a risk assessment a while ago that identified competition for limited water supplies as potentially a major cause of future conflicts, and we can anticipate migration away from areas of water shortage. Also, we can see that rising sea levels will create too much water in some areas, which will cause flooding, wash away people’s homes and again trigger migration.
We saw last year that prices rise when food is scarce, often beyond the reach of local people, and we witnessed serious riots around the world due to food shortages and unaffordable prices. It was certainly a wake-up call for the international community and our own Government and food producers that food security is even more basic than energy security. The forecast rise in the global population means that demand for food is expected to rise by 50 per cent. by 2030, so we need the agricultural research and development I have mentioned to stimulate agricultural production in all parts of the world. It is a big ask: more food from less land. There will be less land because of the urbanisation I have described. At home and abroad, it is essential that our Government promote long-term investment in research, science and technology to support farmers everywhere.
In other words – watch me stand on my head while I bring you valuable thoughts!
Tim Murray
2. By implication he favours Monbiot's position. It's all our fault for hogging resources, third world folks should not be responsible for how many kids they have. 3. No one has the right to interfere with reproductive choice. This laissez faire attitude is odd coming from a socialist, who by definition, wants government to interfere with damn near everything. Especially our right to free speech. 4. Lets focus new technology to help farmers grow more food for more people. Technology to replace soil nutrients? And does he think about wild habitat taken over by human pop growth? So many obvious flaws in his thinking---thinking so typical of his ilk.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Global Population Growth
11 am
Mr. David Kidney (Stafford) (Lab): It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr. Illsley, and I know that as usual you will be firm but fair in chairing the proceedings. It is also a pleasure to see the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), in his place to respond to the debate. I have followed his career with great pride and joy and am pleased that he has been so successful. I wish him well in his new job in Government, which is an exciting but difficult one.
The local council in Stafford is today unveiling its proposals for a consultation on its next local development framework. The Conservative- controlled Stafford borough council will be explaining why it has agreed to a Labour Government plan for a growth point at Stafford, because it has agreed to take 20 per cent. more new housing over the next 20 years than it would have had to take under a normal calculation. I am sure that there will be great controversy locally about why we must have all that house building in Stafford in the next 20 years. When people such as myself explain that it is because of the growing population and the need for housing, people ask me where that growing population comes from and why we have to have it.
There are many explanations of our need for more housing, but much of that need relates to demographic change and not necessarily to immigration change. Those questions illustrate on a small scale in one place in this country the population growth going on around the world, which should concern people but does not get the airing and debate that it should receive.
After I secured the debate, I suddenly started to see the topic attracting comment and attention in the media. Last week, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian about population growth being a serious concern, and argued that we should blame not the poor for having children, but the rich for hogging more than their fair share of the world’s resources. This week Sir Jonathon Porritt was reported in the Telegraph headlines for saying that there should be a two-child limit in future on the size of families. He referred to irresponsible parents who have more than two children and green campaigners who betray their membership by not debating that important issue. I would very much like to dissociate myself from his comments, particularly as I am one of four boys born to my very successful mother and father, who are both sadly dead. My approach is different, and I would like to explain it this morning.
It is important that we focus on the part that population growth will play as a more general issue in sustainable development. The population of this country has now passed 60 million and is forecast to reach 77 million by the middle of the century. The world’s population has passed 6 billion and is forecast to reach 9 billion over the same time scale. That would mean an increase in the world’s population of 6 million every month, which is a staggering statistic.
I am drawn to the debate on population because of my initial concerns for the environment and the urgency of our task to combat climate change. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a world first in setting a binding target for cutting carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent. by 2050. I took part in the debates as we crafted
4 Feb 2009 : Column 254WH
that Act. We of course have to mitigate by reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and adapt by preparing for rising sea levels, warmer summers, wetter winters and more unpredictable weather events, but as I asked on Second Reading, where is the discussion about the effect on all our plans of the level of population we will be working with?
My approach is very different from that of Sir Jonathon Porritt. I do not think that society should interfere in the free choices people make about having children, and I want the world community to discuss all aspects of sustainable development, including population size. In this debate, I want to focus on two points that arise as a result of a growing population. First, given that there will be a larger population in the future, how can we manage the world’s resources to meet their needs? Secondly, can we agree that, on balance, the world will be a safer place if we can stabilise the population at a lower level than currently forecast, and if so, what can we do to achieve that stability?
I will look first at the resources for a larger world population. Currently, over 1 billion people—about one sixth of the population—live on an income lower than $1 a day. The balance between those living rural or urban lives shifted last year: for the first time, more of us are urban dwellers. As the population grows and land use continues to shift towards urban living, we will need smarter ways of providing water for drinking, washing and irrigation and of farming to produce enough food for everyone. As we know from our plans in the UK for cutting carbon emissions, we will have to replace much of our carbon-based energy with renewable sources.
I shall now discuss the implications for water. One in three people in the world already face water shortages, and there are significant areas of water stress now. The Pentagon produced a risk assessment a while ago that identified competition for limited water supplies as potentially a major cause of future conflicts, and we can anticipate migration away from areas of water shortage. Also, we can see that rising sea levels will create too much water in some areas, which will cause flooding, wash away people’s homes and again trigger migration.
We saw last year that prices rise when food is scarce, often beyond the reach of local people, and we witnessed serious riots around the world due to food shortages and unaffordable prices. It was certainly a wake-up call for the international community and our own Government and food producers that food security is even more basic than energy security. The forecast rise in the global population means that demand for food is expected to rise by 50 per cent. by 2030, so we need the agricultural research and development I have mentioned to stimulate agricultural production in all parts of the world. It is a big ask: more food from less land. There will be less land because of the urbanisation I have described. At home and abroad, it is essential that our Government promote long-term investment in research, science and technology to support farmers everywhere.
In other words – watch me stand on my head while I bring you valuable thoughts!
Tim Murray
EXPLODING POPULATION GROWTH AND DEMOCRACY DON'T MIX
So Obama visits Ghana to celebrate its record on democracy. Wonderful. But no mention is made of the fact that with a Total Fertility Rate of 4.3, Ghana’s population will double by 2050. With its ecological footprint exceeding its bio-capacity by 25%, what chance is there of continuing political stability?
In the rush to throw more billions of aid money into Africa to grow more food in degraded and ecologically-stressed environments, these supposedly well-briefed leaders are seemingly unaware or mute about the impossible population growth predicted for much of the continent. Nor do they apparently notice that several Arab states have purchased large tracts of land in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa to grow food for the rapidly rising populations of their own arid countries.
The Canadian Senate documented the futility of four decades of African aid in 2007. More than a half trillion dollars has made conditions even worse than were before the aid was dispensed. Feed 5,000 mouths now and 25.000 more hungry stomachs return in a generation. It is time we played hardball with democrats and dictators alike. Foreign aid must be increased, but made conditional on family planning. Empower and educate women, and tell local male politicians, bishops and mullahs in Africa, the Philippines, Haiti and the world---get with the program or get off the gravy train. No condoms, no help.
Tim Murray
July 11/09
In the rush to throw more billions of aid money into Africa to grow more food in degraded and ecologically-stressed environments, these supposedly well-briefed leaders are seemingly unaware or mute about the impossible population growth predicted for much of the continent. Nor do they apparently notice that several Arab states have purchased large tracts of land in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa to grow food for the rapidly rising populations of their own arid countries.
The Canadian Senate documented the futility of four decades of African aid in 2007. More than a half trillion dollars has made conditions even worse than were before the aid was dispensed. Feed 5,000 mouths now and 25.000 more hungry stomachs return in a generation. It is time we played hardball with democrats and dictators alike. Foreign aid must be increased, but made conditional on family planning. Empower and educate women, and tell local male politicians, bishops and mullahs in Africa, the Philippines, Haiti and the world---get with the program or get off the gravy train. No condoms, no help.
Tim Murray
July 11/09
HOW THE GROWTHIST COALITION WORKS AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
Re. The profile of the local media
The Comox Valley Record is by no means the largest newspaper in British Columbia. It serves, as I say, a region of about 120,000 people, and as it is delivered via mail (and on-line) without subscription, its “reach” may approach or even exceed those numbers. Two things make it an important beach-head. One is that community newspapers across BC pool much of their material. Letters-the-editor and noteworthy stories, for example. Often a letter that is published in one such paper, like this one, is reprinted in others across the province. Secondly, the Comox Valley is a laboratory of growth, the venue for in-migration in Western Canada. It features a climate that is balmy by Canadian standards, and recreational opportunities that are second to none. Developers are like crocodiles who know that 500 wildebeests are going to cross a certain point in the river, and simply have to lie in ambush for them. But it is much more than that. Developers have not only profited from the out of province demand for land there,--- they have generated that demand.
This is how it worked. Developers looked at the booming oil economy of Alberta and saw a lucrative market for real estate purchases in the Comox Valley. Rich Albertans craved a winter get-away that would also serve as a soft landing spot for retirement. They had the money, and the ambition, but not the practical means. Why? There was no quick, convenient way to fly to the Comox Valley and back. Air traffic would have to be routed with a stop-over at Vancouver, “de-planing” , then taking a small turbo-prop jet to Comox----doubling the travelling time essentially. So developers hatched a game plan. Manipulate the local council into building a runway at the Comox airport that would accommodate wide-bodied jets so that they could fly direct from Calgary and arrive in an hour. Once an election of pliable councilors could be bought, it was a done deal. Westjet, the carrier of choice, was then enticed to offer such flights. The marketing plan fell into place. “Come to the Comox Valley on a Friday afternoon in January after work, golf all weekend, then return to Calgary on Sunday night, in time for work the next day” Or alternatively, “Come and retire in a winter paradise. Leave the frigid temperatures and the blizzards behind.” A key complementary move to this Machiavellian plan was getting local ski operators at nearby Mount Washington on board. Thus a coalition of big money was formed to have the road to the resort upgraded. Voila. A brand new “market”.
And of course, Albertans came, and according to one realtor I spoke to, accounted for 25% of the new home purchases in the region, way up to my island too. Word got out that there was now a worm-hole from Alberta to the Comox Valley and the North Islands, eg. Quadra Island. The developers used Alberta media to advertise that fact. This is in addition to the job the internet has done in luring rich Americans as well. The consequences of this in-migration are analyzed in my paper “Sustainable Tourism---an Oxymoronic Delusion”. They come initially as tourists, and leave as speculators or absentee owners who inflate the cost of land beyond the reach of locals, build large houses, and leave them empty for most of the year. Low income locals are denied the chance to rent them, so there is a chronic dearth of affordable housing. Or those homes that are made available for local renters in the winter are denied to them in the summer. The locals must play musical chairs every year, moving twice each calendar year. An upheaval that many young families cannot tolerate for more than a few years, and are essentially driven away from the community they grew up in---which is ghost town in the off season and a zoo in the tourist season. The business sector thrives on this circus show. The realtors reap big commissions. A home maintenance and property management business for empty homes has sprung up. Tradesmen feed off the home construction and renovations ordered by a wealthier caste of clients. Small shops and stores and tour operators feed off this seasonal boom that gives ballast to their books so that they may survive the winter. And the victims, the lowly paid service workers, dare not oppose a process which pays their pitiful wages. And the media, again, depends on business advertising. Not an audible voice is heard against this transformation, which divides the community and impacts the environment. Neither wildlife nor commoners have a say. They are like the evicted farmers of the enclosure movement. It is a story played out across British Columbia and much of the world. In the west of Ireland, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Hawaii and in Europe. Every formerly quiet haven from the rat race is shopped around the world by the profiteers of growth, and visitors come and conquer. We are sold down the river to the highest bidder. Gentrification and the dispossession of natives is the price of global tourism. It is in fact, the signature of capitalist industrialism, from its inception 250 years ago in your once green and pleasant land to the present day of time-share condos and bustling airports. Bring on $200/barrel oil !
What is most galling is that after engineering and stimulating this kind of growth, the regional planners of the district then went to communities like ours and said that we must accept our “share” of growth by casting aside or remaking our community plans to provide for greater density. Growth, after all, was “inevitable”. And the boy scouts in the Sierra Club responded, not by uncovering this plot or challenging growth, but by rushing in to make sure that it was done “right”. The environmentalists are, as I call them, dutiful janitors who come to tidy up the mess, like an indulgent mother who fixes her son’s room every day rather than tell him to stop turning it into a pigs-sty.
Galling too is the fact that this story has not be told. I have tried to break through numerous times but have been rebuked, scorned and ostracized. The media depends heavily on real estate advertising, and anti-growth letters and articles are bad for business. Not so the articles and letters written by the Sierra Club and their green colleagues. They don’t oppose growth, they only want to channel it. In fact, they are an asset to developers because they make growth more palatable. But the ecological consequences are still severe. More people leave a greater footprint, regardless of where their homes are compacted.
My conclusion remains the same. In order to save the environment, the environmental establishment MUST BE DESTROYED. Their role is to harvest public discontent and re-direct out of harm’s way, away from confronting the growthist coalition of developers, cheap labour employers, energy companies, credit institutions, and the media. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The Comox Valley is Canada in microcosm. In fact, it is a case study relevant to the world at large.
Tim Murray July 11/09
The Comox Valley Record is by no means the largest newspaper in British Columbia. It serves, as I say, a region of about 120,000 people, and as it is delivered via mail (and on-line) without subscription, its “reach” may approach or even exceed those numbers. Two things make it an important beach-head. One is that community newspapers across BC pool much of their material. Letters-the-editor and noteworthy stories, for example. Often a letter that is published in one such paper, like this one, is reprinted in others across the province. Secondly, the Comox Valley is a laboratory of growth, the venue for in-migration in Western Canada. It features a climate that is balmy by Canadian standards, and recreational opportunities that are second to none. Developers are like crocodiles who know that 500 wildebeests are going to cross a certain point in the river, and simply have to lie in ambush for them. But it is much more than that. Developers have not only profited from the out of province demand for land there,--- they have generated that demand.
This is how it worked. Developers looked at the booming oil economy of Alberta and saw a lucrative market for real estate purchases in the Comox Valley. Rich Albertans craved a winter get-away that would also serve as a soft landing spot for retirement. They had the money, and the ambition, but not the practical means. Why? There was no quick, convenient way to fly to the Comox Valley and back. Air traffic would have to be routed with a stop-over at Vancouver, “de-planing” , then taking a small turbo-prop jet to Comox----doubling the travelling time essentially. So developers hatched a game plan. Manipulate the local council into building a runway at the Comox airport that would accommodate wide-bodied jets so that they could fly direct from Calgary and arrive in an hour. Once an election of pliable councilors could be bought, it was a done deal. Westjet, the carrier of choice, was then enticed to offer such flights. The marketing plan fell into place. “Come to the Comox Valley on a Friday afternoon in January after work, golf all weekend, then return to Calgary on Sunday night, in time for work the next day” Or alternatively, “Come and retire in a winter paradise. Leave the frigid temperatures and the blizzards behind.” A key complementary move to this Machiavellian plan was getting local ski operators at nearby Mount Washington on board. Thus a coalition of big money was formed to have the road to the resort upgraded. Voila. A brand new “market”.
And of course, Albertans came, and according to one realtor I spoke to, accounted for 25% of the new home purchases in the region, way up to my island too. Word got out that there was now a worm-hole from Alberta to the Comox Valley and the North Islands, eg. Quadra Island. The developers used Alberta media to advertise that fact. This is in addition to the job the internet has done in luring rich Americans as well. The consequences of this in-migration are analyzed in my paper “Sustainable Tourism---an Oxymoronic Delusion”. They come initially as tourists, and leave as speculators or absentee owners who inflate the cost of land beyond the reach of locals, build large houses, and leave them empty for most of the year. Low income locals are denied the chance to rent them, so there is a chronic dearth of affordable housing. Or those homes that are made available for local renters in the winter are denied to them in the summer. The locals must play musical chairs every year, moving twice each calendar year. An upheaval that many young families cannot tolerate for more than a few years, and are essentially driven away from the community they grew up in---which is ghost town in the off season and a zoo in the tourist season. The business sector thrives on this circus show. The realtors reap big commissions. A home maintenance and property management business for empty homes has sprung up. Tradesmen feed off the home construction and renovations ordered by a wealthier caste of clients. Small shops and stores and tour operators feed off this seasonal boom that gives ballast to their books so that they may survive the winter. And the victims, the lowly paid service workers, dare not oppose a process which pays their pitiful wages. And the media, again, depends on business advertising. Not an audible voice is heard against this transformation, which divides the community and impacts the environment. Neither wildlife nor commoners have a say. They are like the evicted farmers of the enclosure movement. It is a story played out across British Columbia and much of the world. In the west of Ireland, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Hawaii and in Europe. Every formerly quiet haven from the rat race is shopped around the world by the profiteers of growth, and visitors come and conquer. We are sold down the river to the highest bidder. Gentrification and the dispossession of natives is the price of global tourism. It is in fact, the signature of capitalist industrialism, from its inception 250 years ago in your once green and pleasant land to the present day of time-share condos and bustling airports. Bring on $200/barrel oil !
What is most galling is that after engineering and stimulating this kind of growth, the regional planners of the district then went to communities like ours and said that we must accept our “share” of growth by casting aside or remaking our community plans to provide for greater density. Growth, after all, was “inevitable”. And the boy scouts in the Sierra Club responded, not by uncovering this plot or challenging growth, but by rushing in to make sure that it was done “right”. The environmentalists are, as I call them, dutiful janitors who come to tidy up the mess, like an indulgent mother who fixes her son’s room every day rather than tell him to stop turning it into a pigs-sty.
Galling too is the fact that this story has not be told. I have tried to break through numerous times but have been rebuked, scorned and ostracized. The media depends heavily on real estate advertising, and anti-growth letters and articles are bad for business. Not so the articles and letters written by the Sierra Club and their green colleagues. They don’t oppose growth, they only want to channel it. In fact, they are an asset to developers because they make growth more palatable. But the ecological consequences are still severe. More people leave a greater footprint, regardless of where their homes are compacted.
My conclusion remains the same. In order to save the environment, the environmental establishment MUST BE DESTROYED. Their role is to harvest public discontent and re-direct out of harm’s way, away from confronting the growthist coalition of developers, cheap labour employers, energy companies, credit institutions, and the media. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The Comox Valley is Canada in microcosm. In fact, it is a case study relevant to the world at large.
Tim Murray July 11/09
SCOTIABANK JUST LOVES IMMIGRATION
Is it any wonder why the big banks contribute to the environmental NGOs (eg. Sierra Club, David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Conservancy)? Buying their silence over immigration for relative peanuts compared to the billions to made in home mortgages and construction financing. Read on. Tim
Scotiabank says recent immigrants now driving force in real estate market
By B.H. Mckenna – 5 hours ago http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gT1PzsRLrmSqBr1Jhp7KajThqAnQ
TORONTO — At least two of Canada's big banks have found encouraging signs in the country's housing market, one financial and the other social.
A commentary from TD Economics on Thursday said there are encouraging signs that a bottom may be forming under the Canada's depressed homebuilding market, citing an eight per cent increase in housing starts in June on top of a 10.8 per cent increase in May.
Although homebuilding activity overall remains one-third below the pace of a year ago, the report prepared by TD economist Pascal Gauthier noted that the June climb "marks the second consecutive monthly increase in starts after a long string of nearly uninterrupted slides that started last fall."
On a regional basis, June's urban starts increase was lead by a 59.4 per cent surge in the Prairie region, followed by a 25 per cent gain in B.C., and a more modest 3.1 per cent increase in Ontario.
On the flipside, urban starts slid by 6.3 per cent in Quebec and 3.9 per cent in the Atlantic region. However, the bank said regions east of Ontario have generally not seen the same extent of decline as elsewhere.
Overall, the figures "provide more evidence that the Canadian economy has certainly passed the worst of what can be expected in terms of residential investment contraction," TD said.
Meanwhile, Scotia Economics issued a report Thursday saying it has been recent immigrants who have been driving housing demand in Canada.
The report cited census data that showed 72 per cent of immigrants lived in a dwelling owned by a household member in 2006, up from 68 per cent in 2001.
By comparison, the percentage of people born in Canada living in a dwelling owned by a household member rose only two percentage points over the same period, from 73 to 75 per cent.
Because the analysis was based on 2006 data, it was unclear what effect the current recession might be having on the number of immigrants and others entering the housing market.
But it was clear from the report that Scotiabank expects that trend in real estate to continue.
"Given Canada's aging population and relatively low fertility rates, longer-term household formation and housing needs will be largely determined by immigration," said senior economist Adrienne Warren.
Based on standard assumptions regarding immigration, fertility and mortality rates, Warren said immigration could account for 75 per cent of the growth in Canada's population a decade from now, up from 60-65 per cent today, and for almost all of it by 2030. Most of this growth will be in Canada's urban areas.
Among other things, the report highlighted that the faster transition to home ownership among immigrants was supported in part by strong labour markets, which saw the employment rate for core working-age recent immigrants jump 3½ percentage points between 2001 and 2006 to 67 per cent.
This was faster than the 1½ percentage point gain among their Canadian-born counterparts, which rose to 82.4 per cent.
"The better labour market performance of recent immigrants may reflect a favourable skills mix, with many employed in high-growth industries such as engineering, construction and skilled trades," Warren said.
"It may also reflect a greater geographic mobility to meet shifting regional labour requirements," she added.
Of the more than one million immigrants that came to Canada between 2001 and 2006, 69 per cent settled in the three largest metropolitan areas, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, according to the data cited by Scotiabank.
A growing proportion - 28 per cent - settled in somewhat smaller centres, most notably Calgary, Ottawa-Gatineau, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Hamilton and Kitchener.
Less than three per cent chose to live in a rural area.
Scotiabank says recent immigrants now driving force in real estate market
By B.H. Mckenna – 5 hours ago http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gT1PzsRLrmSqBr1Jhp7KajThqAnQ
TORONTO — At least two of Canada's big banks have found encouraging signs in the country's housing market, one financial and the other social.
A commentary from TD Economics on Thursday said there are encouraging signs that a bottom may be forming under the Canada's depressed homebuilding market, citing an eight per cent increase in housing starts in June on top of a 10.8 per cent increase in May.
Although homebuilding activity overall remains one-third below the pace of a year ago, the report prepared by TD economist Pascal Gauthier noted that the June climb "marks the second consecutive monthly increase in starts after a long string of nearly uninterrupted slides that started last fall."
On a regional basis, June's urban starts increase was lead by a 59.4 per cent surge in the Prairie region, followed by a 25 per cent gain in B.C., and a more modest 3.1 per cent increase in Ontario.
On the flipside, urban starts slid by 6.3 per cent in Quebec and 3.9 per cent in the Atlantic region. However, the bank said regions east of Ontario have generally not seen the same extent of decline as elsewhere.
Overall, the figures "provide more evidence that the Canadian economy has certainly passed the worst of what can be expected in terms of residential investment contraction," TD said.
Meanwhile, Scotia Economics issued a report Thursday saying it has been recent immigrants who have been driving housing demand in Canada.
The report cited census data that showed 72 per cent of immigrants lived in a dwelling owned by a household member in 2006, up from 68 per cent in 2001.
By comparison, the percentage of people born in Canada living in a dwelling owned by a household member rose only two percentage points over the same period, from 73 to 75 per cent.
Because the analysis was based on 2006 data, it was unclear what effect the current recession might be having on the number of immigrants and others entering the housing market.
But it was clear from the report that Scotiabank expects that trend in real estate to continue.
"Given Canada's aging population and relatively low fertility rates, longer-term household formation and housing needs will be largely determined by immigration," said senior economist Adrienne Warren.
Based on standard assumptions regarding immigration, fertility and mortality rates, Warren said immigration could account for 75 per cent of the growth in Canada's population a decade from now, up from 60-65 per cent today, and for almost all of it by 2030. Most of this growth will be in Canada's urban areas.
Among other things, the report highlighted that the faster transition to home ownership among immigrants was supported in part by strong labour markets, which saw the employment rate for core working-age recent immigrants jump 3½ percentage points between 2001 and 2006 to 67 per cent.
This was faster than the 1½ percentage point gain among their Canadian-born counterparts, which rose to 82.4 per cent.
"The better labour market performance of recent immigrants may reflect a favourable skills mix, with many employed in high-growth industries such as engineering, construction and skilled trades," Warren said.
"It may also reflect a greater geographic mobility to meet shifting regional labour requirements," she added.
Of the more than one million immigrants that came to Canada between 2001 and 2006, 69 per cent settled in the three largest metropolitan areas, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, according to the data cited by Scotiabank.
A growing proportion - 28 per cent - settled in somewhat smaller centres, most notably Calgary, Ottawa-Gatineau, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Hamilton and Kitchener.
Less than three per cent chose to live in a rural area.
TO STOP GROWTH, YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT IT CAN BE DONE
Comox Valley Record http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_north/comoxvalleyrecord/opinion/letters/50412432.html
NOTE: I am shocked and ecstatic. The wall of censorship has been penetrated. The growthsts in Campbell River and the growth "managers" on the green-left finally have to suffer a challenge to their news management. The Comox Valley Record published this unedited, completed with hits on mass immigration, developer financing and the corporate infiltration of the Sierra Club. If only the complete truth could get out about these corrupt money-grubbing corporate lackeys and their condescending and willfully ignorant green yuppie dupes, who won't even do basic reseach to check the filtered drivel they get from this despicable organization, the Sierra Club---the NDP in hiking boots.
Published: July 09, 2009 6:00 PM
Updated: July 09, 2009 6:17 PM
Dear editor,
“We can’t stop growth and development. That is the reality in our world.” (Wendy Masterson, Comox Valley Sierra Club, Global BCTV News, July 5, 2009)
That is the Sierra Club in a nutshell. “Ya can’t fight city hall.”
In the past two federal elections, they have given top marks to the NDP and the Greens, both of whom favour an immigration quota 24 per cent higher than the Harper government’s outrageous level, a level that has given us the highest population growth rate in the G8. And then they wash their hands and say that we can’t stop growth and development.
So let’s sweep the demographic dirt under the carpet. Let’s keeping packing people into denser urban feedlots out of harm’s way. It has already been tried, and it has failed time and time again. Portland, Oregon, will testify to the stupidity and futility of “smart” growth nostrums, for which it was famous.
Canada’s environmental movement is like a cheerful janitor for corporate Canada — mopping up the flooding floor without demanding that the spigot be turned off. They were mum about the shocking census report of two years ago and had nothing to say when an Abbotsford couple had their 18th child. Why? Because in Sierra Disneyworld, population growth can always be “managed” with strict land-use planning.
Trouble is, as York University professor Robert MacDermid concluded in his 52-page report, Funding CityPolitics, developers fund three-quarters of local political campaigns. He used the GTA as a case study, but his findings are universally applicable across Canada. Just ask Norm Smith of Chilliwack, who tried to mount a campaign against growth in his bid for mayor last year and was outspent 10 to one by the winning candidate, a developer. And guess who controls land-use planning? Local government!
There is no durable sanctuary for greenbelts, farmland or nature reserves in the face of runaway population growth. And how can you fight climate change without controlling and reducing the number of climate changers? Especially in North America, where, on average, each immigrant quadruples his greenhouse gas emissions upon arrival here.
Rod Smith of the British Academy of Sciences stated that if we are to avoid hitting the fatal tipping point of a two-degree temperature increase, we must halt growth now. Not steer it, deflect it or manage it. Stop it. That is the reality that the Sierra Club should know about. And the greatest impediment to stopping growth is the belief that it can’t be stopped.
Is the Sierra Club paid by its corporate donors not to understand this?
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
NOTE: I am shocked and ecstatic. The wall of censorship has been penetrated. The growthsts in Campbell River and the growth "managers" on the green-left finally have to suffer a challenge to their news management. The Comox Valley Record published this unedited, completed with hits on mass immigration, developer financing and the corporate infiltration of the Sierra Club. If only the complete truth could get out about these corrupt money-grubbing corporate lackeys and their condescending and willfully ignorant green yuppie dupes, who won't even do basic reseach to check the filtered drivel they get from this despicable organization, the Sierra Club---the NDP in hiking boots.
Published: July 09, 2009 6:00 PM
Updated: July 09, 2009 6:17 PM
Dear editor,
“We can’t stop growth and development. That is the reality in our world.” (Wendy Masterson, Comox Valley Sierra Club, Global BCTV News, July 5, 2009)
That is the Sierra Club in a nutshell. “Ya can’t fight city hall.”
In the past two federal elections, they have given top marks to the NDP and the Greens, both of whom favour an immigration quota 24 per cent higher than the Harper government’s outrageous level, a level that has given us the highest population growth rate in the G8. And then they wash their hands and say that we can’t stop growth and development.
So let’s sweep the demographic dirt under the carpet. Let’s keeping packing people into denser urban feedlots out of harm’s way. It has already been tried, and it has failed time and time again. Portland, Oregon, will testify to the stupidity and futility of “smart” growth nostrums, for which it was famous.
Canada’s environmental movement is like a cheerful janitor for corporate Canada — mopping up the flooding floor without demanding that the spigot be turned off. They were mum about the shocking census report of two years ago and had nothing to say when an Abbotsford couple had their 18th child. Why? Because in Sierra Disneyworld, population growth can always be “managed” with strict land-use planning.
Trouble is, as York University professor Robert MacDermid concluded in his 52-page report, Funding CityPolitics, developers fund three-quarters of local political campaigns. He used the GTA as a case study, but his findings are universally applicable across Canada. Just ask Norm Smith of Chilliwack, who tried to mount a campaign against growth in his bid for mayor last year and was outspent 10 to one by the winning candidate, a developer. And guess who controls land-use planning? Local government!
There is no durable sanctuary for greenbelts, farmland or nature reserves in the face of runaway population growth. And how can you fight climate change without controlling and reducing the number of climate changers? Especially in North America, where, on average, each immigrant quadruples his greenhouse gas emissions upon arrival here.
Rod Smith of the British Academy of Sciences stated that if we are to avoid hitting the fatal tipping point of a two-degree temperature increase, we must halt growth now. Not steer it, deflect it or manage it. Stop it. That is the reality that the Sierra Club should know about. And the greatest impediment to stopping growth is the belief that it can’t be stopped.
Is the Sierra Club paid by its corporate donors not to understand this?
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
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