Santa Claus Joins Ranks Of The Homeless
Just in time for the global environment meetings in Cancun, Mexico, this country’s Environment Commissioner delivered a harsh report on the Conservative record in battling climate change. As it was being released, the Harper government was being awarded three “Fossil of the Day” awards. Alas, from both within and without, Canada has adopted environmental policies that are an embarrassment to our international reputation and likely formed a key reason why we lost the Security Council vote a short while ago.The humiliation grew only more acute with the release of the latest Climate Change Performance Index, in which Canada fell to 54th out of 57 countries. The current government took up the practice almost five years ago of saying one thing about its environmental commitment while practicing the opposite. This purposeful benign obstructionism has left Canadians and the provinces confused, frustrated and embarrassed. In reality, the death of any real climate change agenda is almost complete. In a series of international meetings from Bali, Copenhagen and now Cancun, Canada is now viewed as an interloper, fighting more defined regulations as opposed to embracing them. The Prime Minister’s use of the Conservative-dominated Senate to kill the Climate Change Bill (C-311) forcefully alerted Canadian climate scientists that their efforts fell on deaf ears. Now, with the Harper government’s intention to kill the Kyoto Protocol, this country has little left from which to redeem itself in the eyes of the world.This week, the Prime Minister stood up in Question Period and stated that he is looking out for the economy of this country by focusing on security, among other things. Yet there is nothing more insecure than a planet in decline – nothing. Will stealth jets clean up our water? Will billions of dollars spent on prisons lower our carbon footprint? Could it possibly be that cutting taxes on corporations will lead to a green revolution? Did the $50 + billion stimulus plan deal in any significant way with our staggering emissions? No matter how many people you throw in the slammer, or how many high-tech jets you purchase, you will in no way reduce our carbon footprint by one smidgen. How can you have security when farms are lost due to drought, lakes are poisoned, agriculture is in decline, and coasts are ruined by rising tides?All this will hit the human security dimension of Canada hard. Our kids can’t be protected and neither can our grandchildren. For that matter, we can’t help Santa Claus either. For much of the year the North Pole is more characterized by open water than the kind of quaint town you can build for your elf community. “There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not water,” affirms Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Date Centre. Yet that is what we now have.“The Arctic will be ice-free within about 20 years,” says Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.” More conservative estimates say it will take 50 years at most. Santa is now without a home.To bring attention to the urgency of the situation, Lewis Pugh performed the unthinkable and swam the open water at the North Pole. He went for one complete kilometer in frigid water and never discovered feeling in his fingers for four months afterwards. Check out the video of his remarkable swim below and observe one man’s mighty effort to persuade people like Stephen Harper and John Baird that the security of our very population is at stake.We’ve lost our international reputation and that’s bad. We’ve now lost our ability to provide for the environmental security of our own citizens – that’s worse. But when we can no longer ensure a stable place for Santa Claus, we’ve truly nothing left to pass on to our kids.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sS8OcEwXNs