Category Archives: economy

What can Elizabeth May be thinking?

economy, foreign affairs, trade

Lots of positive press today, and one negative piece from the Globe
and Mail. My letter to the editor follows.

What, you ask, can Elizabeth May be thinking? Good question. Perhaps she’s thinking about the full, true cost of NAFTA (environmental, social, labour rights) and not just the cold financial numbers. Perhaps she’s thinking about the fact that when a trade agreement isn’t being respected, then it’s not worth the dead tree it’s written on. Perhaps she’s thinking that no trade agreement should allow a foreign company to put its profits before the health of Canadians.

Or maybe she’s thinking about taking a principled position instead of just saying what polls and focus groups tell her to. But I’m just guessing, of course.

Chris Tindal
Former Candidate, Green Party of Canada (Toronto Centre)

Priorities and Leadership

conservative party, democracy and good government, economy, foreign affairs, health, social justice

I saw Stephen Lewis speak last night, and was not disappointed. One of the things that really impressed me was his ability to juggle despair with hope, death with life, dire statistics with practical solutions.

Stephen was of course speaking on the topic of HIV/AIDS, along with Mary Ash, filmmaker Norman Jewison, and others at an event organized by ICA Canada.

I won’t attempt to summarize the content of the evening. For one, as Stephen said, the issue is so huge and complex that it’s impossible to hold in your mind all at once, let alone to hold in a blog post. For another, the statistics are difficult to understand in any real way. I have a hard time imagining what it would be like if one in three Torontonians had AIDS, as is the case in too many parts of Africa.

In his closing remarks, Norman Jewison called AIDS the greatest crisis facing humanity, with the possible exception of (or second only to?) nuclear warfare. I would have said global warming in place of nuclear warfare, but either way his comment got me thinking about priorities. Specifically, those of Stephen Harper, who reiterated today that AIDS is not a priority for him.

Instead, his top five priorities upon getting elected were:

  1. An accountability act that does little for accountability.
  2. A GST cut (along with an income tax raise) that most economists think is a bad idea.
  3. “Cracking down” on crime. (Definition of “cracking down” is pending.)
  4. A child care plan that doesn’t create child care.
  5. A health plan that wont keep Canadians healthy.

Notably absent are the three crises above, at least one of which (the climate crisis) is being increasingly cited as a top concern of Canadians. To say nothing of democratic reform, water security, food security, or the inequality of Canada’s aboriginal population (which, by the way, has a higher rate of HIV/AIDS than the rest of Canada), to name but a few. But hey, at least now a can of Coke costs one cent less. (Oh wait, Coke still costs the same. How’d they get away with that?)

When Harper announced his list back in January, he said that “you can’t lead if you can’t focus and determine what really matters.”

I’ll give him that.

An Even Shorter History of Progress

economy

It’s easy to be aware of all the environmental problems facing us today (climate disruption, toxic waste, new pathogens, genetic engineering, antibiotic resistance, peak oil, peak air) without understanding what’s at the root of all these seemingly unrelated crises.

One of the best people to turn to for an explanation is Ronald Wright, bestselling author of A Short History of Progress. Last weekend The Toronto Star printed what was going to be the keynote address at tomorrow night’s Couchiching Conference, which Ronald had to withdraw from for personal reasons:

A span of five millennia may seem long enough to declare the experiment of civilization an unqualified success. But its entire run is barely one-fifth of one per cent of the human career on Earth. Even our modern subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens — people with the same physical and mental abilities as us — has existed between 10 and 20 times longer than its oldest civilization. The settled, urban life we regard today as normal is not the life that made us; not the life by which we evolved.

For me, the greatest mystery of what we call the “ancient world” is how recent it really is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only 70 lifetimes of 70 years have been lived end-to-end since civilization began. Yet civilization has displaced almost all other ways of living, often forcibly. There is now no viable alternative, no blank on the map, no going back without catastrophe. As we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below…

The whole thing will probably take you about 22 minutes, and is a good primer on why unlimited economic growth is a myth that we need to get over as soon as possible. Or, you could watch a Simpsons rerun instead. I don’t want to tell you how to manage your time.

Bees is a Funny Word

ecology, economy, food

Last night I watched a Nature of Things documentary called “Beetalker: The Secret World of Bees.” (In my defense, I didn’t know the name of the documentary before I started watching it.) Anyway, it was pretty interesting, made even more so by supplementary interjections by my girlfriend, Claire “Bees are so cool!” Salloum.

At one point in the doc, Dr. Mark Winston claimed that, “without bees, human society as we know it would not exist.” Now I’m a pretty eco-conscious guy, but even I wanted to laugh at such a silly statement. That is, until he explained that without bee pollination, the overwhelming majority of our agriculture couldn’t exist.

That would be a problem. Because, like, we humans totally love to eat.

That’s why I was a little concerned today to learn that diversity in bees and wild flowers is declining, bees are being killed by pesticides, and that bumblebees could even face extinction.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Sure Chris, I understand that we need bees to make food, and I like to eat, but protecting bees will hurt the economy, and that’s the most important thing. I want jobs, not bees!”

Good point. However, according to Simon Potts from the University of Reading, the economic value of pollination worldwide is over $100 billion Canadian each year. (And according to Doug Woodward–a Green Party member from St. Catharines who may or may not know what he’s talking about–Potts is “low by a factor of maybe 1000.”)

In conclusion, whether you’re into survival, money, or both, bees are your friend.

Tags: , , , , , , ,