Author: Scott Vrooman

Protests and petitions were never really my thing. I’ve never owned a Che Guevara t-shirt and my haircut would be entirely appropriate for a police officer. But the more I read about climate change, the more I felt like I was part of a society and …

The latest leaders debate was an unwatchable mess that resembled a malfunctioning Chuck E Cheese animatronic puppet show. But what made it truly sad was that the three men competing to lead our country had a verbal pissing match over who could build climate-torching pipelines the fastest. It epitomized the

The latest leaders debate was an unwatchable mess that resembled a malfunctioning Chuck E Cheese animatronic puppet show. But what made it truly sad was that the three men competing to lead our country had a verbal pissing match over who could build climate-torching pipelines the fastest. It epitomized the

The purpose of the National Energy Board, like any regulator, is to be unprofitable. They perform unprofitable environmental assessments to make sure we have access to unprofitable clean drinking water and preserve unprofitable nature for unprofitable future generations. That’s because citizens value things beyond profits, and the National Energy Board

The purpose of the National Energy Board, like any regulator, is to be unprofitable. They perform unprofitable environmental assessments to make sure we have access to unprofitable clean drinking water and preserve unprofitable nature for unprofitable future generations. That’s because citizens value things beyond profits, and the National Energy Board

In the wake of the NDP’s new majority government in Alberta, Steve Williams, the CEO of Suncor, announced that he believes climate change is happening and the right way to address it is a carbon tax that applies to both producers and consumers. Well it’s pretty obvious what happened here. Steve

At least 75 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change, but not only are fossil fuel companies committed to burning all of those reserves, they’re spending billions searching for more. Wrecking the climate in exchange for money is officially the

The government defines a threat completely differently than a citizen does. We think of threats as violence, things that could physically hurt us. But to a government that also includes anything that could reduce its power. So currently the definition of threats in the CSIS Act includes ‘foreign influenced activities detrimental to

Far more disturbing than what’s in Bill C-51 is the fact that most Canadians don’t seem to care about it. I don’t know if they’re scared, or uninformed, or think Earth will soon be knocked off its axis by a rogue planet sending us all hurtling into the sun so

Far more disturbing than what’s in Bill C-51 is the fact that most Canadians don’t seem to care about it. I don’t know if they’re scared, or uninformed, or think Earth will soon be knocked off its axis by a rogue planet sending us all hurtling into the sun so

The government spent over $180,000 dollars last year to run the office of a corporate social responsibility counsellor for the Canadian mining industry even though there was no counsellor. Which is actually a fitting metaphor for what this office does: nothing. It has no power to investigate problems or issue reports.

One hundred and ninety-five countries, including Canada, have formally agreed that we need to limit the Earth’s temperature rise over pre-industrial levels to two degrees. It’s uncontroversial. Because going much beyond a two degree increase would be “incompatible with an organized global community” in the words of one of the UK’s

This video, by comedian Scott Vrooman, originally appeared on the Toronto Star. American energy corporation Kinder Morgan filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against five pipeline protestors in Burnaby, B.C., because apparently nobody told them the average income of a pipeline protestor. The National Energy Board – an anagram of “regulatory capture” — ruled that the

The below video originally appeared on the Toronto Star. Birdwatchers – the paparazzi of the natural world – are subverting our democracy according to the Canada Revenue Agency – the overbearing mother of the financial world. The Kitchener-Waterloo Field Naturalists, a registered charity, recently wrote a letter to federal cabinet members