The current state of European Union reminds me of the classic Chuck-E-Cheese game Whac-a-Mole, where a rubber mallet is used to smack plastic moles on the head as they pop out of different holes. Countries burdened by debt loads larger than their economies are the moles and just as European Union officials attempt to tackle one, another pops up.
This debt crisis, the $1.5 trillion U.S. deficit and a high Canadian unemployment rate have been cited as the paramount risks facing the Canadian economy by Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. He has been busy delivering a slew of comments in the days leading up to the June 6 federal budget and the picture he has painted is fairly bleak. Despite the economy showing some signs of speedy growth in the first quarter of 2011, Flaherty announced he was worried another downturn was nipping on the heels of complete recovery.
With Canadians too mired in personal debt to be counted on to jumpstart the economy with renewed consumeristic fervour, Flaherty said the hope for a re-invigorated Canadian economy lies with the private sector. According to Flaherty, Canadian companies are "flush with cash," so it's up to the private sector to pick up where the government's stimulus programs left off invest in the economy and create jobs.
However, this message is more than a little worrisome coming from a government that admits to deliberately omitting numbers from a climate change report it submitted to the United Nations indicating a 20 per cent increase in air pollution caused by the private sector in Canada's oil sands industry. The hidden data, recently uncovered by Postmedia News, indicates that oil sands pollution surpassed Canada's auto emissions levels in 2008-'09, and that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the oil sands industry actually cancelled out the reductions in emissions from other sectors.
The information was deliberately left out of a 567-page report prepared by Environment Canada for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
If this is any indication of how the government regulates the private sector at a time when the hotly controversial $5.5-billion Northern Gateway Pipeline project that would run from Alberta to the B.C. coast has been proposed and global warming is opening up the Arctic to gigantic industry projects like the $4.3 billion Mary River iron ore mine proposed for Nunavut, what's in store for the Canadian environment with the Finance Minister urging large-scale industry to lead the way to paradise?
Canada's unemployment rate is actually not faring too badly at the moment. In April, we hit the same rate we were at in October 2008 and with the progress that's been made in the first quarter of 2011, we're even below the 10-year average of 8.3 per cent. Our banking system is literally second to none, and with a long history of lobby groups rallying together to force change at the top level of government with the threat of unpopularity, Canadians are in a strong position to manage the wealth of energy we're sitting on the vast uninhabited tracts of land ripe for energy production and extraction and not just run for cover whenever we hear the word "recession."
Earth-friendly products and initiatives are everywhere nowadays, recycling is the status quo, and plastic bags are on their way to becoming a social faux pas. With cancer on everyone's minds, Canadians are leaning toward alternative medicine and therapies trying to get healthy fast, farmers' market are cropping up everywhere, and if alternative-energy transportation was mass-produced and affordable, I have a hunch that Canadians would be ditching their gas-guzzling machines and lining up in the droves to buy the newest technology.
On the grassroots level, a new culture of environmental awareness is emerging, yet the big C's on P-Hill seem out of touch and behind the times, not just by omitting data from a U.N. report, but by omitting climate change pollution and solutions from their recent campaign altogether. The government's smoke-and-mirrors tactics on such an important issue only reinforces the archaic message that the environment is expendable when it comes to job creation and economic progress. Flaherty's bleak forecasting while entrusting the private sector with the responsibility of leading Canada to recession-proof waters could very well be intended to sway public opinion in favour of some large-scale industrial projects that, to date, have been meeting popular resistance because of the environmental threats that they pose.
