Canada should not have went in the first place
Just a waste of time.Boys and Girls you and many others have been duped.Read the Emails if your minds can see even a sliver of light.You may direct your passion and enthusiasm to putting these crooks in jail.
Thank you.

Hey Todd and Perry,
good thing we don't have ideologues like you running our country. Otherwise our government wouldn't be doing anything about the very real threat of human-caused climate change that all of the academies of science in the developed world tell us is happening.

Oh, wait - we do have ideologues like you running our country at the moment. That's why nothing is getting done. Time to kick the minority Harper government to the curb along with hardcore ideologues like Todd and Perry.

OPEN LETTER

Dear Prime Minister,

I’m a 71-year-old former Business professor with three questions and a request.

1. Would you agree that there is a conflict of ideas between the “Greens” and the business world, that may be slowing any decision on action?

The Greens keep pointing us towards scientific articles predicting a bleak, even disastrous future for Canada unless we pollute less, and cut CO2 and other emissions by curbing the steady increase in our energy use and consumption.

To save Canada’s environment, the Greens insist that the doctrine of unending growth must be stopped. All that is needed is the “political will,” that is, the courage of our government to do the right thing, ignoring what so many Canadian voters might want. Most Canadians now give the environment a rather low priority. And, given a referendum, most would likely vote for lower taxes, lower energy prices, and perhaps for the return of capital punishment. Politicians must lead, not follow.

On the other side, the business world, politicians, many Canadians, and all our political parties accept the need for continuous growth in production, consumption, energy use and population, native and immigrant, to boost “The Economy” (which always seems to need boosting), to fill the need for skilled and unskilled workers, creating more well-paid jobs to raise consumption, profits, and tax, to fund our mounting costs for health care, pensions, the armed forces and so on.

The two sides are in conflict, but they’re both being short-sighted. A moment’s thought will reveal that our rising population must prevent either Greens or the business world from reaching any of their goals.

Yet strangely there has been no public debate on business versus the birthrate. It’s as if we prefer not to think about the issues. All Canada’s parties, even the NDP and Green party favour increasing immigration.

2. Would you agree that reducing our birthrate and rate of immigration tend to be left out of discussions of the environment and of combating global warming?

Nobody proposes a Chinese-style One Child Policy (though that has actually worked ). Many Greens suggest encouraging and offering free access to non-coercive contraception (and in some cases, abortion). They point out that women who are free and educated, no matter what religion, have fewer, and happier children. Unwanted children are trouble. “Every child a loved child” would be a worthy goal.
But this is not enough. Immigration, too, must drop. According to an Angus Reid poll, 41% of Canadians feel that legal immigration is not having a positive impact on our country. In this case they are right, particularly about the impact on the environment. An immediate halt on immigration, though hugely unpopular with business, government, and potential immigrants, would immediately begin to slow the rising rate of obvious destruction of Canada’s environment: our air, water, seas and soil and probably our climate too (though scientific predictions of the future climate are, like all predictions, not exact).
At the recent Copenhagen summit, population control was not debated and barely mentioned. Money was. Some major polluters see American-style “Cap and Trade” (instead of, say, “Cap and Fine”) as a promising new business opportunity: a way to save millions by buying licenses to keep polluting, or to earn billions by selling hard-to-verify CO2 reductions at some distant location. These “growthists” and “deniers” scorn the Cassandra-like warnings of so many scientists and thinking citizens.

Still, Copenhagen’s non-result did show some awareness that cleaning up the environment will cost money—a lot of money. “Sustainable development” is wishful thinking. So is the thoughtless notion of a profitable growth boom in new “green” technologies and power sources, leading to even more production and consumption with, somehow, less total pollution.

We all love the idea of protecting the environment, preferably at no cost to ourselves. But while the Greens want less, the businessmen and developers want more: profitable new “green” technologies, new hybrids for all, more, bigger and more efficient airliners, and for Canada to be a proud leader in Kyoto too. But Lifestyle changes, even if we all agreed to make them, cannot possibly preserve our environment. We have to reduce our population. Numbers count. To think that, say, road congestion can be solved by adding more and more smaller cars is absurd.

Equally absurd is our understood policy of permanently putting the economy first, as if, say, we are promising to quit smoking as soon as our lung cancer improves. The notion that the economy, the sum total of each individual act of pollution, from lighting a cigarette to building a house, is the enemy of the environment, is too unbearable to speak.

But for many Greens and businessmen, the notion of a smaller Canada with a declining birthrate and reduced immigration feels so strange that it’s almost too painful to consider. It just feels wrong. Businessmen and politicians rationalise that reduced immigration would lower Canada’s status in the world, cut their profits and shrink the tax base—ignoring the evidence that first-generation immigrants are expensive.

3. Would you agree that endless growth in Canada’s population must end in disaster, no matter how deeply each Canadian’s environmental footprint is reduced?

My suggestion is that we move beyond what feels right and towards clearer thinking, by becoming aware that our feelings are not rational; they’re a result of evolution, of how we humans are hard-wired. Our Green side takes pleasure in the thought of lush green pastures and plenty to eat. This is why many of us feel pain at seeing our endless expansion, suburbs metastasising over good farmland, deforestation outstripping tree growth, air and water pollution from factories and vehicles, our oil sands producing more and more oil to be sold and burnt, and so on.

We hear scientists proclaiming that soon it will take three more planet Earths to feed us all. They may be wrong; it may only be two.

Non-Canadians are less worried. Half the world, it seems, wants to come and live in “undeveloped” Canada, boosting their environmental footprint and energy use to our staggeringly high levels.

Meanwhile, our Growth side takes pleasure in our rising population, endlessly expanding our “tribe” as we have evolved to do. We humans were designed to conquer the animal kingdom and fight for our territories. As Canadians, we like our own tribal values, and resist pressures –from invasion or out-population—to abandon them. This is usually labelled racism, but might equally be called patriotism.

In a word, let’s move beyond how it feels to keep doing what we are doing. What does the future hold for a Canada that is already overpopulated, in the sense that its resources are steadily failing? Not by 2050 but by next year. Naturally, most of us feel optimistic because, like all animals, we have evolved as optimists. But we also have the rational power to allow for our innate feelings, while implementing the best solutions to problems that feel so painful to face. Canada needs a hero.

4. Would you please do everything you can to have major debates on the link between population growth and climate change, with the aim of doing what needs to be done—now—for Canada to remain a pleasant place for Canadians to live?

Simon Leigh