EnviroNewsandIssues Newsletter - Edition 11

I know, I know. This edition is out at a weird time. Call it old age, or something I ate. So forgive and the next one will be out in seven days I promise. Back on regular schedule.
...Norm

Event Promotion and Neat Stuff Section...
I am going to a speaking thing with John Ralston Saul on the 8th of June at 7:30PM for his new book, 'The Collapse of Globalism.' It is happening at the Knox United Church as part of the Wordfest, at 506-4th Street SW. You can buy tickets at WordFest - 403-294-7462, or Pages 403-283-6655. You can also buy tickets at that other place that charges a fee.

You should read it.

I happen to think John Ralston Saul and Michael Ignatieff are two of the brighter minds in Canada, and they are both Canadian born and bred.

May 16, 2005

New plan aims to track missing native women - Toronto Star <--- Only in Canada, you say

OTTAWA — The federal government is set to announce $5 million in spending to help reduce the lost ranks of murdered or missing aboriginal women.

Sources tell The Canadian Press that Minister Liza Frulla, responsible for the status of women, will release the five-year plan this week.

It's part of a spending blizzard whipped up by the minority Liberals as they gird for an expected election. Politics aside, however, the Native Women's Association of Canada says the cash is needed to send a vital message.

Canada's Darfur role - Toronto Star

Is Canada doing too little, too late, for war-torn Darfur?

That's how independent MP David Kilgour sees it. He was not impressed by Paul Martin's "token" pledge last week of 100 military advisers and $170 million in aid.

What is that worth, in a region where as many as 300,000 are dead and 2 million uprooted?

But modest as Canada's help may seem, Martin delivered what the African Union intends to ask the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to deliver tomorrow at a high-level meeting in Brussels.

Watchdogs over the oil and gas industry need more clout - Vancouver Sun

A business has only one overriding purpose: to deliver a return on investment to its owners.

Despite all the recent blather about corporate citizenship and good governance, everything is subservient to the pursuit of profit.

Nations that embrace the profit motive are rewarded with ample wealth to provide a high standard of living for their citizens, spend lavishly on social programs and dispense aid to less fortunate states.

However, society has priorities other than making money, such as public health and safety and environmental integrity. Business must operate in such a way that it does not compromise these goals. Legislators put rules and regulations in place to ensure that the common good is not sacrificed for the sake of the almighty dollar.

GREEN LIGHT FOR OPEN SOURCE IN SCHOOLS - eGov monitor Weekly - 16 May 2005

New government report gives significant boost to open source movement

UK schools should "seriously consider" switching from proprietary software to open source alternatives because of the "obvious" cost savings on offer, says the Government's lead agency for ICT in schools.

Research published by Becta on 13 May concludes that in nearly all cases, schools moving to open source software reduced the total cost of ownership per PC significantly. The highly-anticipated report, based on a study of 15 schools, shows that by using OSS, primary schools halved their costs. The relative cost per PC at secondary school level was 20 per cent less than that of schools running commercial software.

The report states: "The use of open source operating systems for servers was generally seen as having a high level of relative advantage, having lower costs, superior reliability and greater ease of use than non-open-source systems." It adds: "In general the view appeared to be that open source office applications were easier or simpler to use than the non-OSS equivalents."

B.C. election campaign ho-hum for some - CBC Vancouver

VANCOUVER – The province of British Columbia may have a history of colourful election campaigns, but the latest one has been anything but, according to some political observers.

"Where is the flamboyant charisma that B.C. is so famous for in this campaign? Why are the leaders being so cautious?" asks political analyst David Mitchell.

An Ipsos-Reid survey released last week showed that 47 per cent of British Columbians interviewed want the Liberals back in power, up one percentage point from a similar poll taken during the first week of the campaign.

The polling company found NDP support is steady at 39 per cent, while Green Party support dropped two points to 11 per cent.

Ipsos-Reid talked to 1,050 voters. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 points, 19 times out of 20.


B.C. party leaders exhort people to vote Tuesday - CTV Vancouver

VANCOUVER — With two days to go in British Columbia's election campaign, the leaders of the two major parties pushed Sunday for their supporters to get out and vote, as Premier Gordon Campbell warned that the NDP's famed election machinery shouldn't be underestimated on Tuesday.

During a campaign stop at his Vancouver riding headquarters, Campbell used a rare rainy day from the month-long campaign to reveal his worst fear.

In the debate, Campbell was put on the defensive by Green party Leader Adriane Carr and James, who attacked his government for cutting social programs, most notably health care, and privatizing services like B.C. Rail.

Canada Conservatives want better U.S. ties - Reuters/Yahoo

OTTAWA (Reuters) - If Canada's Conservative Party wins the general election expected to be held in early summer, it would cut taxes, reform government regulation and forge closer financial ties with the United States, says the man who could emerge as the Conservatives' finance minister

Canada's Conservatives would support bank mergers - Reuters/Yahoo

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's Conservative Party would give the green light to bank mergers if it wins the general election that is expected to be held in June.

Member of Parliament Monte Solberg, who is widely expected to emerge as finance minister in a Conservative government, told Reuters in an interview that he would do whatever he could to make sure Canadian banks are competitive in the world.

Canada's Liberal minority government may fall on Thursday in a parliamentary confidence vote on its budget, triggering an election. The Conservatives, the main opposition party, are neck-and-neck with the Liberals in public opinion polls.

Child welfare system called into question - CBC.ca Edmonton

EDMONTON – Critics of Alberta's child welfare system say an individual inquiry into the case of a recently murdered Edmonton teen doesn't go far enough toward examining wholesale problems with the program.

Monique Nutter, a former child welfare worker, says there are hundreds of kids at risk in Alberta due to systemic problems.

She says workers like herself sometimes juggle up to 30 cases at a time, which doesn't allow for any substantive improvements with clients.

"An hour a week, you can barely get to know the family," she said of her experience.


Parks Canada issues fish advisory - CBC.ca Edmonton

CALGARY – Elevated levels of mercury found in Alberta's mountain fish has led Parks Canada to issue consumption warnings directed at children and women of reproductive age.

Officials say the levels are no cause for alarm but caution should be exercised.

In pamphlets published and distributed by Parks Canada, young children and women of child-bearing age are advised not to consume more than three or four portions of mountain fish each month.

Biologist Ed Abbott says rising mercury levels were first detected by an independent researcher in 2003 and Parks Canada staff have been monitoring the situation ever since.

He said mercury is naturally occurring in soil and plants but airborne pollutants are also a factor.

Wood-killing wasp found in northeastern U.S. - Globe and Mail

Ithaca, N.Y. — The discovery of a pernicious wasp in upstate New York, the first time it has been found in the wild in the United States, has scientists worried about a scourge that has devastated pine forests in other parts of the world.

Richard Hoebeke, a Cornell University entomologist, collected the Old World woodwasp on Sept. 7 in Fulton County, N.Y., north-northwest of Albany, as he sifted for bark beetles caught in screening traps. He identified the adult female bug on Feb. 19.

The invasive insect species, Sirex noctilio Fabricius, has ruined up to 80 per cent of pine trees in areas of New Zealand, Australia, South America and South Africa, Mr. Hoebeke said. If established in the United States, it would threaten pines across North America, particularly in the pine-dense U.S. Southeast. One target would be loblolly pines in Georgia.

Media Advisory - News conference to launch Ontario wilderness campaign
OTTAWA, May 16
WHAT: News conference announcing the "Boreal Wild" public campaign to save Ontario's remaining intact boreal forest region. New information and dramatic maps illustrating dangers of currently planned developments, open letter to Premier McGuinty to be released.
WHO: Wendy Francis and Gillian McEachern, CPAWS-Wildlands League
WHERE: Queen's Park Media Studio
WHEN: Wednesday May 18th, 12 P.M. (noon)
CPAWS-Wildlands League is an Ontario chapter of the Canadian Parks andWilderness Society (and has been advocating on behalf of nature for 35 years.As a member of the Boreal Leadership Council, CPAWS is a signatory to the Boreal Conservation Framework. Developed by conservation groups, First Nations and industry, the Framework calls for a new approach to conservation inCanada's entire Boreal region, including effective land use planning.

Canadian students rank highest internationally in medicine and health, environmental science, and biochemistry at world's largest science fair

Team Canada brings home First Place Grand Awards from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair After competing against over 1400 students worldwide

TORONTO, May 16 - Diagnosing breast cancer, a new form of electricity and antibiotic resistance took top prizes this week as Chet Gervais, a grade 11 student from LaSalle, Ontario, Kartik Madiraju, a grade 10 student from Brossard, Quebec, and Adrian Veres, a grade 10 student from Montreal, Quebec, all brought home First Place Grand Awards from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), held in Phoenix, Arizona, May 8-14. Close to 90 per cent of Canadian projects won awards.

Judged on their creative ability, scientific thought, as well as theirthoroughness, skill and clarity, students at Intel ISEF compete in 14scientific categories with most projects being entered into the environmentalsciences, and medicine and health categories. More than 1,000 expertsvolunteer their time to judge the projects, including Nobel Laureates andother world-class experts. More than 1400 students compete at Intel ISEF making it the world's largest science fair.

Team Canada wins three First Place Grand Awards (see full list of awards at the end of this press release) Chet Gervais won $3,250 in prizes(*) and the First Place Grand Award inMedicine and Health for his project on Digital Mammography. Gervais' patent pending breast imaging system, the first of its kind, provides approximately 100 times more information than current technologies in a faster and painles way. Using Gervais' multi-modality fusion breast imaging system, diagnosticians can also manipulate data in ways that were previously impossible.

Kartik Madiraju won $4,000 and the First Place Grand Award in Environmental Science for his project focused on using bacteria to generate electricity. Using non-toxic, renewable energy resources is important to Madiraju, who discovered how to magnetize bacteria to create voltage peaks of more than 65 mV for up to two hours.

Adrean Veres took home $3,000 for his project on logic genomics,combining biotechnology and computational sciences to resolve antibioticresistance.

May 14/15, 2005

Taxpayers bear brunt of weak Kyoto plan - Green Party Site
By Luca Palladino, Media Team

(Montreal, 15 April, 2005)—The federal government should be ashamed to have called its Kyoto plan the "Green Project" as there is little of anything "green" about it, said Green Party of Canada deputy leader Tom Manley today.The Government of Canada has slated $10 billion of the public purse for a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a document entitled, "Moving forward on Climate Change: A Plan for Honouring our Kyoto Commitment" released yesterday on Parliament Hill. Despite costing billions, the plan will do little to lower emissions without stronger penalties and incentives."It's great to see the government showing a commitment to reduce emissions," said Manley, "but the logical first step is to stop subsidizing the industries that are contributing the most to health and environmental hazards. The Liberal path is leading to a dead end, and in the end, the economy and the environment will pay the price."

Leadership means provoking and even taking risks - Green Party Site
David Chernushenko Candidate in nomination for Ottawa Center

The next Canadian dictionary is more likely to have a photo of Ottawa City Hall under the word "cautious" than under the word "leader". On pesticides, on public transit, on energy efficiency in city buildings and now on the issue of solar hot water panels, Ottawa puts caution first.Caution can be a good thing, but not when it stifles innovation and harms the public good. If the city wishes to be cautious, I suggest they be cautious about pushing Canadian panel manufacturers and local retailers and installers toward bankruptcy? How about being cautious about promoting the continued use of fossil fuel-burning water heaters which contribute to smog and global-warming emissions.

Accidents Reveal Troubles at Mexico's Oil Monopoly - New York Times

MEXICO CITY, May 14 - Juan González Durán, who like nearly everyone in Nanchital works for Pemex, the state-owned oil monopoly, had no doubt about who was responsible for his brother's death last month when a work crew cut into the wrong pipeline and six men died in a blast of ammonia gas.

Mr. González blamed a Pemex engineer who had been overseeing the job but left just before the accident.

"I was a worker for Pemex for years, and I worked on deep-sea platforms, and there I could tell you many bad things that the engineers would do, that they would not pay attention to the work," he said. "It makes me sick."

Mr. González is not the only one fed up in this region, the heart of the oil and petrochemical industry. The blast that killed his brother and five other workers was the latest in more than 12 pipeline accidents to befall Pemex since October.

Did You Know - the Green Party's Policy on Global Justice?

Security and Fairness for All

The green movement is a global citizen's movement with organizations in almost one hundred countries. We share similar values and are concerned about justice throughout the world.

The Green Party will:

Work to establish a standing international peacekeeping force under UN control.

Propose a reform of the UN Security Council, eliminating permanent memberships and vetoes.

Renegotiate our multilateral trade agreements to include "fair trade" tariffs that protect human rights and our ecosystems.

Propose a reform of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, having them placed under the authority of the UN general assembly.

Politicians all the same: Poll - Toronto Sun

VOTER CYNICISM created by the AdScam corruption scandal hasn't just hurt the Liberal government -- it has splashed back on all the political parties, an SES/Sun Media poll on party ethics suggests.

Playing a fool's game with the environment - Vancouver Sun

You can't prove a negative, as any logic teacher can tell you, but that hasn't stopped environmentalists and their sympathizers from requiring exactly that from anyone who would dare to divert from their eco-friendly path.

For instance, during Tsawwassen's recent, successful fight to prevent the B.C. Transmission Corp. from erecting high-voltage power lines in the community, city manager George Harvey told CBC News that the onus is on the province to prove the power lines won't be harmful.

Crisis point in nursing - Halifax Herald

Overworked, exhausted and in despair, nurses are health care's canaries in the coal mine, signalling a daunting crisis that is threatening patient care across this country.

The serious shortage of nurses, as with all health care workers, is not a new or uniquely Canadian problem. But a new federal study released last week on the nursing sector, the most comprehensive ever completed, has brought the critical nature of the situation into sharp focus.

Faced with an ongoing shortfall in the number of nurses needed within the system, administrators have used overtime extensively - the largest increase coming in involuntary, unpaid overtime - to plug the gaps. With no relief to the shortage in sight, nurses are being asked to regularly work overtime shifts, and in so doing become exhausted, more prone to make mistakes, and eventually often sick themselves. The number of adverse patient outcomes increases with the amount of overtime worked. Perhaps most startling, of the 40,000 nurses surveyed in the study, fully one-third said that the quality of patient care dropped last year.

Liberals in trouble: poll - Regina LeaderPost

OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals have suddenly plummeted in public support -- particularly in their traditionally loyal regions of Ontario and Atlantic Canada -- and are headed towards defeat if an election is held now, a new poll suggests.

This is the main finding of a new Ipsos-Reid poll provided exclusively to CanWest/Global.

The timing couldn't be worse for Martin's Liberals. The governing party appeared on the rebound just more than a week ago thanks to the prime minister's aggressive public-relations blitz, but voters have once again abandoned the Grits in droves.

Much of that support is bleeding to the left of the political spectrum -- to the NDP and, to a lesser extent, the Green party.

The NDP stands at 19 per cent, up three points, while the Bloc Quebecois is at 13 per cent, up one point, and the Green party is supported by six per cent, up one point.

In In the vote-rich, but volatile province of Ontario, the Liberals are in major trouble. In just a single week, Liberal support has dropped dramatically to 32 per cent, down 12 points. The Conservatives now attract 34 per cent of the vote, up one point, while the NDP has 22 per cent, up five points, and the Green party has eight per cent, up four points.

Parties seek new ways to cut up timber resource - Maple Ridge News, B.C.

With the forest industry sharing in a province-wide economic boom, despite continued U.S. trade penalties, parties running in the May 17 B.C. election are offering different ideas about sharing the wealth.

All four major parties support increased small business participation in forestry, still the largest B.C. industry. In fact, the B.C. Liberals have already taken some of the big steps promised by other parties, buying back 20 per cent of timber licences from big forest firms, and beginning to redistribute the cutting rights to smaller woodlot operators, community forests and aboriginal groups through interim resource agreements.

Green Party leader Adriane Carr has pointed out that raw log exports rose under both the NDP and B.C. Liberal governments. Like Democratic Reform B.C., the Greens say stumpage has to go up to help settle the long-running dispute with the U.S. over its claim that Canadian lumber is government subsidized.

The Green Party of B.C. would immediately end taxpayer subsidies to corporations that profit from extracting B.C.'s natural capital by ensuring that they pay fair royalties and taxes for access to publicly owned natural resources such as forests, oil and gas and minerals, the Green platform states. "We would base stumpage, the taxes paid on trees cut on public lands, on a competitive open log market system that better reflects the true value of the logs."

Greens urged to join with New Democrats - Kelowna Daily Courier

PENTICTON -- If Green party supporters are serious about protecting the environment, they should join forces with the New Democratic Party, says the NDP candidate in PentictonOkanagan ValleyGarry Litke said Friday that only by defeating the Liberal government can British Columbia's environment be properly protected. Litke made the suggestion in a written response to a Penticton Herald forum with other candidates, He asked Green candidate James Cunningham if he would consider joining the NDP to preserve the environment. "If the Greens are worried about the environment, they should be siding with us in this election and making sure we get rid of Gordon Campbell," said Litke"Gordon Campbell has taken this province in the wrong direction. He's selling off our assets; he's destroying our environment." Litke admitted he hasn't formally approached Cunningham with the idea, and emphasized he is not suggesting the Green candidate drop out

Senate turns down conservationists' plea to fast-track oil-spill bill - Canadian Press
OTTAWA (CP) - Add hundreds of thousands of sea birds to the potential casualties of the current mess in Parliament. Tommy Banks, Liberal chair of the Senate environment committee, has rebuffed pleas from environmentalists to fast-track a bill that would protect sea birds from oil pollution.

The bill, probably the most significant environmental legislation of the current Parliamentary session, would die if the government falls next week.

A previous version died prior to the last election.

The legislation would crack down on dumping of bilge oil from ships, blamed for the deaths of some 300,000 sea birds annually.

Banks defended his stand saying, "There is no such thing in the Senate as fast-tracking except in bills which are completely non-controversial."

STV can't fix our flawed system - Victoria Times/Colonist

Voting experiment would cause more problems than it solved, and wouldn't end our cynicism

Along with choosing a new government on Tuesday, British Columbians will decide whether to use the single transferable vote electoral system -- commonly known as STV -- in the next provincial election.

STV was the near-unanimous choice of a citizens' assembly made up of 160 people chosen at random from throughout the province. The assembly's members accepted public submissions, investigated different ways of electing representatives and carefully considered the pros and cons of a wide variety of different proposals.