CANADA AIN'T SUSTAINABLE

"The average temperature year-round in Canada is minus 5.6 degrees C, making it the coldest country in the world."

February 1994 Harrowsmith Magazine

And This is The Country That Green leader Elizabeth May (among others) wants to fill up. She claims that the hinterland areas of the country are under-populated, and that millions of newcomers could be settled there. Rural Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, the north—you get the picture. Fine. Then you first Elizabeth. Try living at Canada’s central latitude, as represented by the town of Yellowknife on the 60th parallel. See how your back yard garden grows, if you can find a jack-hammer to do the planting, or afford the heating bill for the greenhouse. Think you can persuade your target of 330,000 immigrants per year to join you? Good luck.

After your stint in Yellowknife, I would be most interested if you then continued your tiresome sermons about how the world’s problems have little to do with over-population but everything to do with our wicked “over-consumption”. “If only we lived like Ghandi” etc. etc. ad nauseum. How did you manage to heat your home up there just with solar panels, Elizabeth? Wouldn’t it be a little chilly in Ghandi’s loin cloth on the 60th parallel? Did you get around by dog-teams or were you naughty by stooping to use fossil fuel for your 4 X4, your snowmobile or chain saw? Did you get much “diversity” in your diet by shopping “locally”? How were those home-grown blueberries and kiwi fruits up there? A tad expensive? Or just unavailable? I think your view of our high energy consumption would be a little more charitable once you lived there. It is a lot easier to be a virtuous green in the tropics than it is in the Great White North.

See, aside from the cold, the tundra, the thick taiga, the mountains and the frozen lakes, your dreams of stocking our country with “diversity” in its millions is handicapped by three major Canadian facts.

1. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms permits all Canadians, newly arrived or long-time residents, to live where they want to. What kind of wages do you think it would take for immigrants to leave the cozy company of their ethnic enclaves in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal to move to the Yukon or northern Manitoba? And if they moved there, how long would they stay? How many trillions of dollars would be required in infrastructure investment to make an economy work in these regions? How would food be imported into these areas when the cost of transportation takes off into the stratosphere with more expensive oil? Ever perused report number 25 of 1976 by the Science Council of Canada? Sobering reading that. It seems that someone at least could see what constraints resource shortages would place on growth. Do you think our prognosis is rosier three decades later?
2. If New Canadians can’t be persuaded to “stay on the farm after they have seen gay Paris (or Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal)”, how do you intend to protect the farmland that you claim can be defended from mass immigration with proper land use policies? Land use planning is under the control of local governments, not the federal government. And who owns local government? Who underwrites the campaigns for office to local governments? Developers. Make them go away Elizabeth. Once you accomplish that, then I might listen to your mad growthist vision.
3. We are losing 60,000 acres of prime farmland to immigrant-driven population growth in Ontario alone. Add another 40,000 for the rest of the country. How can this be arrested in the context of the immigration policies that you and your parliamentary rivals all favour? Even if farmland could be protected by strict zoning, what will the productivity of the soil in our arable areas once the cost of oil-based fertilizers and transportation to markets become prohibitive? Your immigration policy cannot be reconciled to our food security. That is a fact.

Growth “managers” like the Greens and the NDP live in a delusional state, just like the free-marketeers in the two major parties. Their image of Canada as a vast empty warehouse for third world emigrants and refugees is a mirage. They need to get away from their coffee houses and urban townhomes and visit the real Canada. Once there, they can sweep away the blizzard of black flies or snow from their eyes and notice that like Antarctic, Canada may be spacious but for the most part, but it ain’t habitable--- at least not for the numbers of humans they wish to entice here. Hell, the current population level is not even sustainable. Terra-forming Mars would be a more realistic hallucination.

Tim Murray
August 4/09