Shareholder value built on destruction
A whistle blows and another train rumbles through White Rock, headed toward the Roberts Bank coal export dock. This one is carrying thermal coal from Montana, bound for a massive…
Norman Farrell
Truth matters
Fiction and invention are handy tools for politicians. Legacy media often repeats lies with minimal or no fact checking, although perhaps with opposing comments added to suggest balance. That process…
Dangerous actors — corporate and political
Progressive punishment is not enough to regulate behaviour when an offender has extraordinary wealth. To a corporation like Teck Resources Ltd. — market capitalization $29 billion — inconsequential fines are…
Should we care?
Robert Reich is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator who has been quoted here before. His May 5 newsletter discusses why corporations have so much power and…
Immense tax gap losses
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), an organization that represents about 12,000 tax professionals at Canada Revenue Agency says it clearly: “Wealthy corporations and the ultra-rich…
Guaranteed chaos okay with fact-free ideologues
Canada’s largest newspaper chain promotes climate change denial and works to elect right-wing politicians, even Danielle Smith who a Postmedia columnist said was surrounded by “guaranteed chaos.”
Despicable bedfellows
Professor Robert Reich is a public affairs commentator published in a broad range of forums. His Substack platform is always worth reading. A recent entry argues that that under Elon…
Marginalized citizens gain protection
On May 19, Canada’s Supreme Court resolved an important defamation case with six of seven judges finding against former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld. Doing so, the court further defined…
Climate disasters may be unstoppable
A disaster strikes. The news reaches every home for a few days, perhaps a week. A debate erupts over whether climate change is to blame. Victims are profiled. There’s a…
Under fascism, universal freedom is doomed
The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics….When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases…
Thin blue line bleeds red
Eight years after Myles Gray was beaten to death by a police gang, almost nothing has changed in the process of holding officers accountable for violent misdeeds. Those Vancouver police…
Planting seeds of destruction
Instead of moving away from climate damaging energy sources, both Liberal and NDP governments of British Columbia have accelerated fossil fuel production through direct and indirect subsidies.
Zero years for procrastination
We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods,…
Defending democracy through public engagement
In my years of political observation, I have come to realize that elected officials individually have little opportunity to influence public policy. At senior levels of government, power has concentrated…
Carbon dioxide removal may be “next to useless”
Humanity has never removed an atmospheric pollutant at a global, continental or, even, regional scale — we have only ever shut down the source and let nature do the clearing…
Carbon tax justification for fools
According to a study published by Nature Climate Change, governments of 51 countries spent C$940 billion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2021. The number is likely higher since there are many indirect…
Norway’s oil fund approaching C$2 trillion
In 1996, Norway began depositing oil revenue into a national wealth fund so that current and future generations would benefit from the nation’s oil wealth. Bolstered by oil taxes and…
Economics of biodiversity
The UK commissioned a study published in 2021 that was to help the government establish environmental policies for 25-years. Project leader Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University was assisted…
Hollow words, and deep down we know it
When people gather, it is common to hear acknowledgements that the group is meeting on unceded traditional territories of Indigenous people who have populated western Canada for roughly 14,000 years.…
Woke is not a slur
President Biden vetoed a measure that would have blocked fiduciary retirement fund managers from considering climate change, corporate governance and other factors when making pension investments…