Why Nature's a Loser

I'm told that I'm getting "lefter" and "lefter" as the years go by.

That may be so. I know that one is supposed to become "conservative" with age and that certainly hasn't happened in my case.

Yet I don't think my general philosophy of life has changed all that much from my days in government when I shepherded all that consumer legislation through and negotiated the saving of the Skagit River.

In doing these things, I was consistently opposed by my caucus but had the approval of Premier Bill Bennett who, by himself, always outnumbered the caucus. I honestly feel that if the big issues of today were around in the '70s, I would have felt then as I do now.

I've no doubt changed opinions and priorities as circumstances change, but, alas, governments, especially the Campbell bunch in Victoria, haven't done the same.

If I require a defence, allow me to take as my shield the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson who said "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Stonewallers

My concern with the environment is far, far more than the plague of Atlantic Salmon fish farms on our coast, though I feel as strongly as I ever did on that matter. My principal concern is that we're strangling ourselves and all other creatures on earth and haven't the wit or the willingness to do anything about it. Though all polls show the environment becoming a very large issue from coast to coast, as Mark Twain said of the weather, nobody is doing anything about it.

All serious science points to this coming calamity: icebergs off New Zealand, the melting of the Greenland ice cape, the incredible storms happening everywhere but especially in our part of the world, the terminal state of the world's fisheries, the loss of species, as being anything but coincidences or the natural evolution of earth.

The PR flacks for environmental desecrators would have us believe that this is all just part of a cycle. Sensible people know that this is a bunch of barnyard droppings and remember these same or similar voices shilling in favour of tobacco and DDT, to say nothing of nuclear power, fish farms and clear cutting old growth forests.

These same people stonewalled help for victims of the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984. That's because PR flacks are not paid for veracity or sentimental concerns over broken or dead bodies. Their job is always to do all that's necessary to protect and enhance the positions of their clients and we should never forget that. The majority of the public knows the folly of listening to these people, but governments still follow their advice. Why?

Big business at controls

The answer is in how we structure our affairs. The systems of senior governments we employ in Ottawa and all provincial capitals place power in the hands of one person: the first minister.

In British Columbia the environment is at the tender mercies of Stephen Harper and Gordon Campbell, both of whom are in power because of big business. It's not surprising that industry pays the piper who then plays their tune.

These governments also rely on voters' amnesia plus the ability of governments at election time to mask their bad deeds with promises of good ones to come.

Right-wing governments portray big business as being good corporate citizens, which they aren't. Business runs on the principle that the only obligation the president and directors have is to increase returns to shareholders. I don't say that with any sort of a sneer -- it's just that if we don't understand how and why corporations act as they do, we can never find solutions.

The corporation's case for government staying clear of enforcing environment laws and regulations is fortified by the challenge of "globalism," where their competition is often in a developing country that cares not a fig for the environment, safety, workers' rights and so on.

We must recognize those problems and know that the answer is not permissible environmental degradation.

We must put nature first

What I'm saying is that we know what the problems are, we know where to go for solutions, and we know that governments will do dick-all as long as the money keeps coming and we keep on voting for them.

Is this simply an attack on industry? No, it's merely a call for better environmental laws and that they are strictly enforced. The choice is not between corporations and employment, but we must understand that if we must desecrate the environment to create jobs, we will be putting saving and repairing our environment in a secondary role at best.

But this not the choice and, as world class experts like Dr. David Suzuki point out, the cumulative effort to preserve, enhance and rebuild the environment creates more jobs than it eliminates. Of course there will be adjustments across the spectrum of industrial activity and our society must recognize this and have plans in place to deal with them.

I don't believe that British Columbians, Canadians in general, want to declare as public policy that the environment must yield to jobs. If that is our philosophy, we might as well just surrender the environment to companies like Alcan who, incidentally, are now painting themselves as warriors for the environment, providing irrefutable proof that the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell.

Let us not forget another power. Organized labour has a duty to its members not just to improve their working conditions but to save their jobs too. When industry reduces or eliminates jobs, labour must respond. When you think about it, this is what organized labour has had to deal with since the Industrial Revolution.

In more modern times, one need only to look at how cars are built; once a highly labour-intensive production, a huge part of that workforce has been replaced with robots and computers.

For all that, while unions will fight job losses, they also have a strong history of caring for the environment.

What all this means is that if the enormous environmental concerns are to be dealt with, labour, industry and government must be involved in assessing the problems and solving them.

That's why I'm surprised at the attitude of many on the left to the single transferable vote, which provides MPs some clout in a minority government (which invariably happens with STV). As long as prime ministers and premiers exercise absolute control over the MPs, they will continue to pay a small amount of inoffensive lip service to the environment while letting corporations do as they wish.

Different democracy needed

It's argued that the public can still throw out a government that is uncaring about the environment. Really? What does the voter do when neither major party cares a fiddler's fart about the environment?

Or their policy is nothing more than high blown, platitudinous rubbish?

In the last federal election leaders debates, not a single question on the environment was directed to any leader. In the next election campaign, I daresay this will change if only because the Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, contends that he's an environmentalist. But that's of little use unless Mr. Dion means what he says, which, while not completely beyond the realm of possibility, certainly runs against the grain of history.

As voters we've fallen into the age-old trap. While our leaders futz about Kyoto, smaller and fixable environmental concerns get no attention. It's rather like the arguments we heard about banning smoking in bars and restaurants. Why not go after the cars and trucks -- they're far worse than tobacco, was the cry of the smokers. The answer was, of course, "but we haven't the present ability to deal with cars and trucks, while we are able to do a smoking ban."

We can't let Kyoto distract us to the point that we don't do anything, for if we don't deal with doable environmental reforms, our problems, already at the critical stage, will worsen.

Until we have a system that makes MLAs and MPs respond to our concerns and do what they're told, we will have the worst of all worlds: we won't have any sort of Kyoto while smaller matters will just continue to pile up unattended.

We're down to this: industry will do nothing unless forced to, unions will fight any reforms that might cost jobs, and governments knuckle under to industry. As long as we have a "winner-take-all' system that confers all power on the first minister, the environment will be talked about and that's all.

In short, the environment won't be dealt with because governments don't want to do anything and don't have to.

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• Coping with Climate Dread