The Campaign’s Purpose Is To Effect a Feel-Good National Spirit And Ignores The Effect Of Out-Of-Control Immigration
Last night, I inadvertently stumbled upon a CBC Newscast that eventually degenerated into a mushy and microcosmic Gen X version of Woodstock. It featured the PC-nominated moderator of Decency, Fair Play, Good Sense and Calm Reason, Peter Mansbridge, the omnipresent host of CBC Television News, and Mother Corp’s anointed spokesman of Young Cool, the famous George Strombopolous. Together they sat to gush about the great success of the CBC’s much advertised “One Million Acts of Green” campaign to encourage the efforts of Canadians to effect minor changes to their lifestyle or personal habits, that in their sum total, allegedly do so much to protect our environment. Their comments followed a short documentary which profiled Canadians who were heroically doing just that, from Vancouver to the Maritimes.
Of course, the emphasis was entirely on praiseworthy efforts by citizens who opted in various clever ways, to reduce their footprints. No mention at all was made of the increasing number of “footprints” that are admitted to our country by mass immigration, or who are born here with the inducement of increasingly generous child benefits. To do so would have violated the CBC Mandate, which is to promote harmony at the expense of the truth, to celebrate the differences, but not to acknowledge them if they have the potential to promote the division that the CBC won’t speak of.
In Canada one must never cause “offense”, and never define it in objective terms but only according to the subjective reactions of those who choose to take offense. And now with the “One Million Acts of Green” campaign, the CBC has converted the nation to a mass group psychotherapy session, relentlessly conducted on news “features” like these. For the CBC, all complex issues can be reduced to human interest stories. Last night, falsehood was chaperoned into the public consciousness by another CBC Host, Mark Kelly who has clones from West to East. Kelly, of course, was, and continues to be the prototype of this kind of journalism, where the pain and the glory of individuals who are unrepresentative of total reality receive an unjustified prominence at our expense.
This particular documentary was classic. Of the folks depicted in the Manitoba car-pool that was formed as an alternative to one occupant commuting, two were immigrants. And the story about the furniture store in Toronto that rehabilitated old items and sold them to save the landfill and make a buck, focused on refugee claimants who popped in for a good deal. No one pointed out that one immigrant of any description multiplies his footprint by several factors upon his settlement in Canada—or the inconvenient fact that just one New Canadian, native born or foreign born, erases perhaps 85 years of responsible recycling, if our disposal habits are anything like the British ones that the Stockholm Environmental Institute calculated. Or that each additional citizen will, if not immediately, match the Green house gas emission average of 23 metric tonnes per Canadian. That is a factoid for groupies of the Obsession of Man-Made Climate Change (AGW). That includes all soft greens from organizations like the CBC to the environmental NGOs, who calculate all their green living tips exclusively in terms of per capita carbon emissions. The concept that population growth might have something to do with climate change, or that climate change should take a back seat to the more imminent consequences of biodiversity loss which is manifest and speculative, is beyond their imagination.
Folks, there is nothing that those immigrants who were interviewed can do, to make up in conserving, reusing or recycling or the multitude of petty individual lifestyle changes presented, for the damage that their consumption will do to the environment just by virtue of living the lifestyle they voted for with their feet.
I get the CBC formula for environmental salvation : Just keep cheerfully bailing water out of a boat that continues to sink because passengers keep climbing aboard. Reduce our personal impact so there is room for more consumers to pick up the slack. CBC personalities boast that their green living campaign had achieved emissions reductions that were equal to taking 10,000 cars off the road. Meanwhile, mass immigration adds approximately 150,000 car drivers to Canadian roads each year, and in 16 years, newborns this year could add approximately 45,000. Obviously, “a million acts of green” cannot offset the damage done by unnecessary and mostly immigration-driven population growth.
Why don’t so many other taxpayers “get it”?
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
