Canada’s Unelected Senate Secures Country’s Global Place As An Environmental Rogue

A Foreword by Doug Draper

If you need one more reason why Canada’s Senate should either be elected or be abolished altogether, this may be it.

Canada's unelected Senate kills climage change bill approved by a majority of the country's elected parliamentarians.

Mark this past Tuesday, November 16 down on your calendar as a date that will live in infamy for a Canada that could once hold itself up with pride as a leader when it comes environmental protection, to nation that has become a filthy rogue among developed and rapidly developing countries around the world like the United States and China.

Canada has been tumbling off its green pedestal for the better party of two decades now, through the successive federal Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, and through the current Conservative government of Stephen Harper. But few single decisions have the potential to disgrace Canada more on the environmental front than one made this November by this country’s non-elected Senate to kill Bill C-311 – climate change legislation pushed by the opposition NDP, Liberals and Parti Quebecois that would have called for a 20 per cent reduction of greenhouse levels below 1990 levels by 2020.

This was a bill the Harper Conservatives, which undoubtedly to plays host to the bulk of climate change deniers in parliament, made clear from its introduction last spring that it never liked. But Harper and his flock couldn’t kill it the bill in the parliament because a majority of the country’s duly elected MPs from all three parties and all parts of the country voted in favour of it.

So this November 16, Harper managed to come through for his tar sand buddies back in Alberta by using the now –Conservative stacked Senate to kill the bill – a blow for democracy and for the environment, and for Canada’s standing as a force for progress on the international stage.

For the information of our readers, here is a media brief on this matter, released by nation-wide citizens group, the Council of Canadians.

MEDIA RELEASE

For Immediate Release November 16, 2010

Senate killing of Climate Bill C-311 ‘shocking’, says Council of Canadians Ottawa –

“It is astonishing to learn that, mere days before the next major round of international climate negotiations, the Canadian Senate killed the Climate Change Accountability Act. Bill C-311, which passed the House of Commons last May, was but a first step in the right direction,” says Andrea Harden-Donahue, Energy and Climate Justice Campaigner with the Council of Canadians.

“It would have committed the Canadian government to emission reductions (25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020) that are half of what many who will be at the Cancun negotiations are demanding is necessary.”

“With increasingly severe and frequent weather patterns around the world, rapidly melting glaciers and Canadian impacts such as British Columbia’s unprecedented forest fires and the startling predictions from the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, this decision comes as a shock.” -30-

For More Information: Dylan Penner, Media Officer, Council of Canadians, 613-795-8685.

For another report on this matter, prepared by the CBC, click on the following links –

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/11/17/senate-climate-bill.html and : http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/11/17/senate-climate-bill.html#ixzz15ZA45wJp

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