PLANET IN PERIL

Dear Editor, Sad, isn’t it?  Canada’s days as an honest broker are over. The Harper government has transformed my country from a kinder, gentler peacekeeping nation, into a wanna-be petro-state that takes sides, “smites” its enemies, sows seeds of hatred based on culture, religion or gender and intimidates those whose views differ from its own.  After all, by Harper's definition, I’m a “radical” because I oppose the tar sands and donate to “subversive” organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation. Apparently so, too are First Nations people who are trying to fight Harper’s draconian legislation which directly threatens their land, water and air.  Harper may be backing off parts of his "anti-terrorist" Bill C-51 which threaten so many of our civil liberties. But only after repeated warnings from many informed people, including former Prime Ministers and Chief Justices. And the fact those parts were there in the first place, is revealing.

Dear Editor , A tragic thing happened in my province on Christmas eve. A Winnipeg woman was shot with a pellet gun and suffered,  according to police,  a "life-altering injury." A pellet gun is a weapon my Member of Parliament, Robert Sopuck (CPC - Dauphin/Swan River/Marquette - above) is convinced is "literally, not a firearm." Scant weeks before this unfortunate incident, Mr. Sopuck had introduced a private members bill to amend the Criminal Code. Its purpose - " to clarify that low-velocity rifles such as BB guns and air rifles should not be considered firearms.”  And a bit before that, the Supreme Court had declared that  they were so, firearms! 

Dear Editor, Crooked bankers of the world, rejoice!  Wikileaks has revealed that negotiators from 50 countries, including Canada, have been meeting in back rooms, cooking up ways of making it even easier for these financial titans to fleece their customers, everywhere! It's all part of the ('til now) super-secretive "Trade in Services Agreement" (TISA), a massive deal that would affect the way the big banks are allowed to do business, world-wide. According to the confidential draft text, TISA would "further deregulate global financial services markets."  Not only that, it would prevent these nations, including Canada, from ensuring that sensitive customer data remains in the country of origin! I'm no financial whiz. But, if we want to keep our precious banking records secure, this can't be good! Why is all of this happening? According to the text, "To assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquar

Methinks my Member of Parliament, Robert Sopuck (above), speaks with forked tongue. The Honourable Mr. Sopuck (Conservative, Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette) recently rose in the Commons to brag about his government's multi-million dollar "national conservation plan." The plan, he promised, "will mobilize action across all regions for stewardship and conservation."  But, alas, in his last mail-out to householders, he sings a different song. In it, he once again "cheerleads" for the re-opening of the long-closed Mt. Agassiz ski resort in Riding Mountain National Park.  This would entirely reverse an earlier plan to remove the aging ski-lift infrastructure and return the site to its natural state. And never mind that the re-opening is opposed on several grounds by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. CPAWS is one of our nation's main watchdogs trying to make sure our parks are managed in a way that leaves their natural heritage

Dear Editor, After reading the letter-to-the-editor from Robert Sopuck, (Conservative MP for Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette) in  The Roblin Review   back in January (Canada-Eu agreement will bring jobs to the riding) (*see below), one would think there are no "downsides" to free trade, at all!  How convenient that he and Prime Minister Harper are leaving out the parts that aren't as flattering. Free trade agreements have, for years, been chipping away at the ability of sovereign nations to make laws that protect our health and environment. Far from protecting us, such deals hand over more and more power to giant, ruthless and unelected corporations to sue nations like Canada, if our laws interfere with their own "rights" to make a profit.  As long ago as the 1990s, an American outfit called Ethyl Corp. made off with $19 million of Canadian taxpayers' money under provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ethyl Co

by Larry Powell The CBC is to be commended for breaking the story about phoney organic products being sold in Canada, including the infamous bakery in BC. It has given this matter extensive coverage, and rightly so.

Winnipeg Free Press Get serious. Whenever we discuss fossil fuels, climate change is the issue. Details here. Flooding in Manitoba - 2011 (PinP photo)

Winnipeg Free Press My initial impression upon reading your Dec. 16 editorial Gear Canada to create new jobs was that the writer was indulging in sarcasm. Sadly, as I read on I realized that the message is that manufacturing and agricultural jobs are better off going off-shore, allowing goods to crisscross continents and oceans before landing on our plates or stores. Details here.

Dear Editor, You have to wonder how many more monster storms it's going to take before the world takes meaningful action on climate change. Just one example is Haiyan, the "super-typhoon" which devastated vast areas of The Philippines this month. It was the biggest storm to hit land, ever!  A poor Filipino man living and working right here in my home community of Neepawa apparently lost as many as 30 members of his family in this horrible tragedy. As the storm was raging, his country's Chief Climate Negotiator was making a tearful appeal at a UN conference in Poland. He pled for an end to the "madness," of climate change. He asked that we turn away from our addiction to fossil fuels, which is the root-cause of it all.  Many climatologists remain reluctant to link any single storm, including this one, to climate change. But they have repeatedly warned that warmer oceans brought about by rising global temperatures, stoke the ferocity of both wind and w

My  letter to the Editor, "Have our Servants Become Our Masters? - Why Fossil Fuels are No Longer Our Friends," published in The Roblin Review earlier this month, seems to have hit a nerve.  It led to a follow-up letter from a reader in the north, published the following week in the same paper. He accuses me of being out to kill Canadian jobs and finds my letter a "disgusting piece of drivel" in the way I insult Mr. Harper and the oil patch. Please read my response to that letter, below!   Larry ====== Dear Editor, I'm glad that John Titanich has seen fit to respond in the Review to my earlier letter about fossil fuels and why they are no longer our friends. After all, public debate is the bedrock of a healthy democracy.  Mind you,  John did get a tad personal. But that comes with the territory, I guess. As for his suggestion you can't be an environmentalist if you drive anything more modern than an ox-cart, well, I've heard th

Dear Editor; What will it take to convince the Manitoba government that  it  should never allow arsenic to be released into our surface  waters? I consider this action reprehensible, yet that is exactly what  the province has permitted (the Town of) Virden to do, with arsenic that  has been removed from the water source at the town's treatment plant. The following is my response to Premier Selinger and Minister Mackintosh in regard to their letter. It informs me that they’ll continue to allow the arsenic that’s recovered from the Virden water treatment plant to be released elsewhere. My concern is that this will, over time, only add to surface water contamination and pollute the environment. This will create unknown consequences for future generations. Many other substances that are considered toxic in other jurisdictions are obviously not of concern here. It seems this government has no problem with putting lives at risk.

Dear Editor: Complacency about water safety thrives in Manitoba. What are we putting into our water ? PLT photo We are putting toxic waste (poison) into our water.   Toxic = dangerous, immediate or long term effects.  In the absence of scientific research, no one should  simply claim those products are safe and acceptable, then  allow them to be discarded into a water source. There is absolutely no legitimate government interest fulfilled, by allowing arsenic, lead and other contaminants  into a water source. Yet, that is exactly what is happening! The town of Virden, Manitoba, for instance,  has been issued  a  licence by the province   to dump arsenic taken from the  water treatment plant, into a  surface water  source, which downstream, enters into the Assiniboine River. The questions then that need to be answered are: Why does government, the province of Manitoba  condone and permit such a disdainful action? Why ar

by John Fefchak Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Water is the life blood of all living things. It just seems we have so much fresh water in Canada, we don't  look after it, as we know we should. (U.S. and Canada need to  reduce algae bloom on Lake Erie, WFP 29 Aug) It is clear that governments have ignored the basic principles of water stewardship for too many years in the pursuit of narrow economic interests. Lake Winnipeg has become a horrid reminder of devastation, that we are  leaving our children and their children to bear alone. Now Lake Erie has a sickness that has returned. So many of our Lakes have become diseased. The name of this disease is 'human complacency.' Slime on a Lake Winnipeg beach near  Gimli. PLT photo.

Dear Editor,  Oh, to be in Europe, now that they have put us to shame, once again!  Member states of the European Union have just voted to clamp a temporary (2 year) ban on members of that "devil family" of bee-killing insecticides known as "neonicotinoids." It is now illegal to use the stuff anywhere over that entire continent! While Europe has finally seen the light, they're still applied prodigiously on food crops in North America. The seeds of crops such as corn and canola are now shot-full of them before they even go into the ground!

by Larry Powell                    Robert Sopuck, MP for Bottom-Trawling & Shark-Finning.                                                                              It may be deplorable.  But, for the Harper government (and my own MP, Robert Sopuck), not quite deplorable enough. I'm talking about "shark-finning." Each year, worldwide, an estimated 100 million sharks are caught for their fins, only. The sharks, still alive and bleeding, with their fins cut off, are then dumped back into the ocean, either to die a slow death, or be eaten by other predators.  Shark fins are considered a delicacy. While shark fishing is legal off Canada's coasts, finning was banned here years ago. Still, tonnes of fins obtained elsewhere in this manner, often from endangered species, are imported, yearly. So an NDP MP introduced a private members' bill to help curb the practice by simply banning imports into this country. Sopuck (CPC - Dauphin/Swan River/Marquette), sp

Dear Editor, Is it now old-fashioned to expect those who govern us, to do so in a decent, respectful way? If it is, then call me old-fashioned. Even for someone painfully aware of the depths to which our democratic system has sunk, especially since the Harperites took over, I was shocked to learn about a bullying incident which played out on Parliament Hill earlier this month.  The Commons Agriculture Committee was meeting to talk about "low-level presence." Before you doze off, it's a topic which everyone who puts food in his mouth, should care about! This government actually wants Canada to start accepting traces of genetically-modified (GM) genes in the food we import, even though those genes have neither been inspected nor approved by our own domestic regulators! A guest appearing before the committee, Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN), opposed this idea. This was hardly surprising, since CBAN's very reason for being is to

Dear Editor, Remember when school would start and your teacher would ask you how you spent your summer vacation? While school is now a dim and distant memory for me, last summer is anything but. I spent about ten days of it, flat on my back in the Regina General Hospital, after a near-death experience.  It all started on a dark and stormy night in late June. Like many other folks living in a huge area of the eastern prairies, we suffered property damage in the thousands when a dangerous "plow wind" of well over 100kph struck about midnight, while we were in bed.  (Sadly, it was consistent with what our top scientists have been warning us about for decades: That the climate we humans are changing by our addiction to fossil fuels, is bringing "weather events" which have become way more severe and frequent than they once were.)  The wind buckled our garage door (above), damaged our car inside, blew the tops off several of the spruce trees in our shelter belt

By: John Bennett - Sierra Club of Canada - Wpg. Free Press OTTAWA — All the benefits Roslyn Kunin attributes to life in Canada in her recent column, including peace and order and good government, came about through civil disobedience. The suffragettes who won women the right to vote did not shy away from it. Details here. First Nations Protestor - Regina. PLT photo

Dear Editor, I never thought I'd say this. But I may be lucky to be living in a riding represented by a Member of Parliament on the government side, (Robert Sopuck - Dauphin/Swan River/Marquette) after all. I say this because the government Mr. Sopuck represents, under Stephen Harper, has decided the Assiniboine River, one of millions of lakes, rivers and streams in Canada, is among the very few designated as "protected" by its new, "Navigation Protection Act."  (It happens to flow through Mr. Sopuck's riding.)  Shellmouth Dam on the Assiniboine. Could it now be harder to approve such structures in Tory ridings - but easier elsewhere? PLT photo. The Assiniboine forms Lake of the Prairies, a popular area for cottagers and boaters, just a few clicks west of where I live. This protection means that ice-fishers, anglers and pleasure boaters will keep their historic right, which dates back to Sir John A. himself, to navigate the river without having to