Harper's Environmental Polices Go Adrift in Sea of Oil

For the past four and a half years, Stephen Harper has wasted billions of dollars of tax payer money to pretend to have an environmental policy. He now no longer has to pretend.

With Guy Giorno's omnibus bill from hell, the last hint of concern for the environment was flushed down the drain. Making sure that it could trigger a summer election, when he knew no one wanted a summer election, we now have no environmental plan, no atomic energy and soon no Canada Post.

As Linda McQuaig says today:

If there is a God, she’s surely bewildered by the apparent determination of the human race to ignore the deafening wake-up call she’s recently sent our way. As wake-up calls go, it’s hard to beat the BP oil spill. The relentless gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the past 85 days, captured live on camera, should be enough to finally force us to look critically at the deeply flawed concepts that have become the guiding ideologies of our times — starting with unbridled capitalism, and its elevation of economic gain above the very sustainability of the Earth we inhabit.

... last December, in response to extensive industry lobbying, the Harper government actually relaxed offshore drilling rules, giving the industry more flexibility in ensuring safeguards against oil spills. The BP gusher is seen by Ottawa, not as a wake-up call, but as a fresh marketing opportunity for Alberta’s oil sands, which are now preposterously being pitched as a “safe” land-based alternative.

Environmental groups are sounding the alarm but they are only scientists. Harper hates scientists. They get in the way of his spin.

Environmental groups say if environmental assessment changes are brought back into the government's final sweeping omnibus budget bill, C-9, they will weaken the EA process by giving the federal environment minister the power to scope down offshore oil drilling projects to only study a fraction of operations. "In the wake of the BP oil disaster, do you Senators really want to be remembered as the reason we reduced the ability for Canadians to review environmental energy projects?" Green Party Leader Elizabeth May pleaded with members of the Senate National Finance Committee at one of last week's marathon sittings on Bill C-9, focused on the proposed environmental assessment changes included within it.

McQuaig suggests that if there is a God she can't be happy. There can't be a god, because there's no way she would have given us these two lunkheads, Harper and Giorno. They are definitely proof that the devil exists though.