Canadians Should Be Embarrassed and Humiliated by David Suzuki

CANADIANS SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED AND HUMILIATED BY DAVID SUZUKI

So David Suzuki, after receiving the “Right Livelihood Award” by the Swedish parliament, says that he is “humiliated” that Canada has become a pariah for not dealing with climate change. And he is frustrated that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has failed to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue. Know the feeling.

I am embarrassed that Suzuki has not dealt with a key driver of climate change---immigrant-driven population growth. It is a major problem in Australia, the United States and Canada—the three worst offenders in terms of per capita green house gas emissions. According to a report authored by Leon Kolankiewicz and Bryan Griffith for the Centre for Immigration Studies released in August of 2008, on average, each immigrant quadruples his GHG emissions upon his arrival to the United States, thereby accelerating the timetable of our global demise, if anthropogenic climate theory is correct. In fact the total GHG emitted by immigrants is equivalent to the total GHG emissions of Great Britain and Sweden combined. http://www.cis.org/greenhousegasemissionsvideo And a study done in Australia by Clive Hamilton and Hal Turton of the Australia Institute concluded that if their country had adopted a “zero net migration” policy in 1999 instead of blindly following the current insane pace of immigration, the highest per capita rate in the world, GHG emissions would be 16% less by the year 2020. They also found that immigrants to Australia come from countries that emit, on average, just 42% of what Australia does. http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/An_Optimal_Population_for_Australia.pdf

In Canada the Green Party and the environmental establishment paint the Alberta Tar sands oil development as the bogeyman, claiming that immigration is a trivial agent of environmental degradation. They are dead wrong, and Suzuki knows it. John Meyer of Newform Research has calculated that immigrants who have come to Canada since the Kyoto Accord was signed in 1990 have contributed four times as much GHG emissions as the entire tar sands project to date, and through the urban sprawl, created by the need to house them, have despoiled an area four times greater than the area of boreal forest affected by the tar sands. Currently, 3-4 years of “business-as-usual” immigration results in as much GHG emissions as the tar sands operation. Clearly mass immigration is a serious issue, not only to Canada, but to the entire world.

Suzuki complains that he has “repeatedly tried to meet with Harper, but has been turned down each time”. Well, we have repeatedly tried to make the David Suzuki Foundation account for Suzuki’s failure to publicly address the importance of mass immigration as a factor in driving climate change, endangering species, and threatening Canada’s food security through the housing developments that sweep over precious farmlands. Still no reply. And why should Suzuki make Harper the scapegoat? Believe it or not, during the 2008 election, upon closer examination, Harper’s program was more environmentally friendly than the program of the four opposition parties, who only proposed to “freeze further development of the tar sands project, while advocating an immigration quota that was 38% higher than the Conservative government’s. That is, a policy which would cause environment losses 38 % times greater than the Harper government was causing. Yet Harper is everyone’s punching bag, rating a failing “F” grade on the Sierra Club report card. Let’s give them an “F” for poor research and politically correct omission.

Suzuki justifies his activism by saying that “When I’m dying, I want to be able to look at my grandchildren and say ‘I did the best I could’.” I rather think that when he is dying, he should want to be able to look at his many grandchildren and say that he was not a liar, at least by Mark Twain’s definition. He should not tell the “silent lie”, when someone knows the truth, but will not share it. Publicly that is. Privately David Suzuki has told people on at least two occasions that allowing immigration to Canada was “nuts” in that people from countries of very much lower ecological footprints were being injected into a “hyper-consumer” society. Industrialized countries, he also confided, are “way” overpopulated. And Suzuki has made a personal contribution to that too, siring 5 children from two marriages with a crop of grandchildren yet to be tallied. Each will come at an ecological price of 23 metric tons of GHG emissions a piece, if they follow the present Canadian average. Suzuki is not the green role model people believe him to be.

Why are we Canadians not humiliated by his conduct? Why aren’t the Swedes embarrassed by their government’s credulity? Why aren’t journalists reporting the truth about him? Will no one follow the money trail and ask why the Royal Bank of Canada, the most stridently public advocate for increased immigration, is a conspicuous benefactor of the David Suzuki Foundation? http://suzukiwatch.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/david-suzuki-caught-lying-about-corporate-donations Can no one see that the Emperor has no clothes? Or don’t they want to see?

Tim Murray,
Biodiversity First
October 14/09

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