Harper Continues Sinking Canada To New International Lows When It Comes To Environmental Leadership

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

While many Canadians were planting trees, cleaning trash from roadside ditches and streams, and engaging in other green activities this past April 22^nd Earth Day, Canada’s tar sands prime minister and his government dishonoured the day with an announcement that they are removing one of the world’s most magnificent and threatened mammals from this country’s “threatened species” list.

Humpback whales. one of the world’s largest and most magnificent and mysteries mammals, are still fighting back from near extinction.

The North Pacific Humpback whale and its counterpart along North America’s Atlantic coast were hunted almost to the brink of extinction by the first decades of the 20^th century and it was only the call of wildlife advocates that placed them on threatened species list in Canada and the United States, sparing them from any more harpoons and allowing them to make a comeback.

But now, at a time when Canada’s tar sands prime minister is doing everything possible to crash any roadblocks to transporting this tar crud from his native Alberta to the west coast through a proposed Northern Gateway pipeline for shipment to smog-choked China, his government suddenly decides it is a good idea to take the Humpback whale off its protected threatened list. And here’s why the rest of us who give a damn about a healthy earth should be outraged about this.

Harper and company would like us to believe that this decision, made through a federal Fisheries and Oceans Department his government has gutted and politicized to a point where it would be dangerous to take anything that department says seriously, is based on growing populations of Humpbacks in recent years.

Indeed, there are reports that the Humpback on both the west and east coasts of North America are making a comeback, but where is the hard date – the unabridged science – to back up Harper’s decision right now.

The answer is that we don’t have it and certainly weren’t shown it for any purposes of outside expert or public input before this momentous decision to take this great creature off the threatened list was made.

As the record, for anyone who wants to take their partisan or ideological lenses off and study it, makes clear, the Harper government has launched a war against science and any scientists working for government, in departments like Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada, any time they attempt to publicly release any information that conflicts with Harper’s tar sands agenda. Any other scientists working for a public interest group is written off by Harper and his potted plants as a threat to Canada’s national interests if they do so.

So why should we not come to any other conclusion than that Harper is delisting this great marine mammal now because people concerned about the environment on and off the British Columbia coast have pointed to Humpbacks as one of many life forms that could be ravaged if there is a spill of this tar sands shit along the BC coast?

Keep in mind, we are talking about a government that has already gutted funding to environment science within the departments it has jurisdiction over and has gagged what scientists are left from freely talking to the press and public. It is a government that has also scrapped some of the world’s leading environmental protection regulations, including Canada’s Federal Fisheries Act, to make it easier for this tar sands crap to be piped through.

Harper’s tar sands regime has managed to take a Canada, once so respected around the world as an environmental leader, and flushed it right down to the bottom of the list of developed countries when it comes to moving toward a cleaner, healthier world in the 21^st century.

Why aren’t Canadians more outraged?!

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