A whistle blows and another train rumbles through White Rock, headed toward the Roberts Bank coal export dock. This one is carrying thermal coal from Montana, bound for a massive power plant, perhaps in Korea. As the train rolls through Delta, black clouds of coal dust billow from the open rail cars, irritating asthmatics and coating farmers’ crops. . .
Fiction and invention are handy tools for politicians. Legacy media often repeats lies with minimal or no fact checking, although perhaps with opposing comments added to suggest balance. That process gives the same standing to false or unsupported claims as it does to well-accepted facts. After Pierre Poilievre released a video taken in a Toronto subway station, Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason wrote an incisive opinion piece that skewers the Convoy Party of Canada leader, a man who wants to be Prime Minister. Mason’s commentary is worth sharing widely. . .
Progressive punishment is not enough to regulate behaviour when an offender has extraordinary wealth. To a corporation like Teck Resources Ltd. — market capitalization $29 billion — inconsequential fines are minor costs of doing business. A $1 million penalty imposed on Teck corresponds to a fine of $11 levied on a household holding Canada’s median net worth, reported at $329,900 by Statistics Canada in 2019.
Robert Reich is an American economist, professor, author, and political commentator who has been quoted here before. His May 5 newsletter discusses why corporations have so much power and workers have so little. While specifically about the USA, Reich’s words apply similarly to Canada. Reich notes indisputable trends and, if these continue, they ensure growing inequality, which, taken to extremes, has led to civil unrest throughout history. . . .
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), an organization that represents about 12,000 tax professionals at Canada Revenue Agency says it clearly: “Wealthy corporations and the ultra-rich don’t pay their fair share.”
Canada’s largest newspaper chain promotes climate change denial and works to elect right-wing politicians, even Danielle Smith who a Postmedia columnist said was surrounded by “guaranteed chaos.”
Professor Robert Reich is a public affairs commentator published in a broad range of forums. His Substack platform is always worth reading. A recent entry argues that that under Elon Musk, Twitter has fully embraced the political right. As evidence, Reich offers the robber baron’s lovefest with book-banning culture warrior Ron DeSantis.
On May 19, Canada’s Supreme Court resolved an important defamation case with six of seven judges finding against former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld. Doing so, the court further defined boundaries of fair public comment and strengthened provincial laws discouraging Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation or “SLAPP” suits.
A disaster strikes. The news reaches every home for a few days, perhaps a week. A debate erupts over whether climate change is to blame. Victims are profiled. There’s a tally of lives lost and property destroyed, and then the disaster is forgotten… But the story is quite different for those of us who are directly affected. We won’t just move on. Instead, we’ll likely be caught in what we might call a disaster’s long tail, a slow-moving series of effects both immaterial and material.
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The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics….When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.
Eight years after Myles Gray was beaten to death by a police gang, almost nothing has changed in the process of holding officers accountable for violent misdeeds. Those Vancouver police should count themselves lucky the Memphis chief and prosecutors weren’t in charge here.
Instead of moving away from climate damaging energy sources, both Liberal and NDP governments of British Columbia have accelerated fossil fuel production through direct and indirect subsidies paid for with carbon taxes.
We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods, fires, droughts, famines and heatwaves will get.
In my years of political observation, I have come to realize that elected officials individually have little opportunity to influence public policy. At senior levels of government, power has concentrated in the offices of the first minister. In local governments and school boards, In local governments and school boards, power is held largely by professional administrators. Public input is tolerated by the power holders, but not welcomed…
Humanity has never removed an atmospheric pollutant at a global, continental or, even, regional scale — we have only ever shut down the source and let nature do the clearing up. The scale of the challenge is immense. We must slow the carbon clock to a crawl before we can turn it back.
According to a study published by Nature Climate Change, governments of 51 countries spent C$940 billion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2021. The number is likely higher since there are many indirect subsidies, such […]
In 1996, Norway began depositing oil revenue into a national wealth fund so that current and future generations would benefit from the nation’s oil wealth. Bolstered by oil taxes and by profitable investments in more than 9,000 companies outside Norway, the fund is today valued at C$1.84 trillion.
The UK commissioned a study published in 2021 that was to help the government establish environmental policies for 25-years. Project leader Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University was assisted by a long list of expert contributors, advisors, and reviewers…
When people gather, it is common to hear acknowledgements that the group is meeting on unceded traditional territories of Indigenous people who have populated western Canada for roughly 14,000 years. The announcements make me uncomfortable. They are hollow words and deep down we know it…
Milestones usually provoke self reflection, and the closer we get to the ultimate milestone, the more there is to reflect…
Regular reader of insights here. I seldom comment but will try to do that more in the future. I'm glad…
Thanks, I appreciate this follow-up.
Thanks for the suggestion. I didn't show a link to the study initially because it was on a site that…
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I very much appreciate your writing with IN SIGHTS Norm. I get too much to read on my computer and…