Canada slow to embrace green technology

Even the car companies are ahead of Canada in pollution consciousness

The Straight Goods Cyber Forum
with Larry Solway

Commentary:

  My lefty-at-all-costs friends are always horrified when I deviate from the party line. Howard Hampton I'm sure (If he bothers to react) has a fit when he hears that one of his trusted cohorts actually likes the idea of non-polluting nuclear power, the NDP having predictably made a solemn vow to stop the nukes.
  I do draw the line on the Kyoto Accord waffling. Sign the document. Join the environment club. Clean the air. Save the Planet. Etc etc. But you are in a huge fight, not only with the energy philanderers in Washington, (Bush and Cheney both oil magnates.) when you insist they sign on to Kyoto. They can't. It would upset their buddies in the car business whose main thrust these days is (just look at the TV ads) for bigger, tougher, meaner, and status-is-everything. I dare anyone running in the November congressional election to campaign (as Ralph Nader might) against the proliferation of the almighty sports-ute. Daimler Chrysler recently extolled the super-torque heart-stopping power of a new truck that will go 0 to 60 in 6 seconds. It comes then as a breath of fresh air to read "The SUV Official Backlash Starts Today".
  Finally! At last there may be sanity coming. Maybe there will be a groundswell of resistance to pollution. Maybe we will all sign the Kyoto Accord and get on with the job of restoring the air we breathe. Maybe someone on some road to Damascus has experienced an epiphany.

While all this conscience-stricken marketing goes on, Canada lags behind

  The slogan will appear on billboards. The sponsor is a car company! It is none other than BMW, hallmark of status and cachet (they also make a very expensive Sports Ute.) Now they are introducing a new kind of status: small, cute, and performing - the Mini. This is the car that Austin/Morris brought out after the 1972 oil crisis. Remember that one. It's the same crisis that threw the Big Three into chaos as Americans turned to the economy of Japanese cars. The tide turned. It has never turned back. The obvious footnote to the collapse of the Big Three is that even at the height of line-ups at gas pumps, they insisted that Americans wanted their cars and would never switch to little economy cars.
  While all this conscience-stricken marketing goes on, Canada lags behind. Not only do we toady to the U.S. by waffling on Kyoto, we seem not to have noticed that Ballard has sold more fuel technology to Europe. We are not buying the technology for our own power generation or sponsoring it as a replacement for the internal combustion engine.
  We are being lost in the dust.
  Meanwhile on another front: Health Care and the continuing debate. The debate is fueled by the doomsayers, principally in B.C., Alberta, and Ontario, who insist the system is beyond repair. It is their ploy to scare us into accepting a two-tier system.
  Last week the CBC did a short documentary on Health Care on the evening news. It was all about the emergence of private health care, To hear the conservative politicians tell it, it would mean nothing but win-win - as those guys love to say. It would be private care, publicly funded. If it is more efficient they crow, why not do it. It's a very compelling argument. Except that when you use private facilities paid for with public money it is inevitable that the private facility will "cherry-pick" their clients and avoid taking high-maintenance patients. It happens in privately run jails. They seem to work, but the publicly operated jails are left with the most difficult offenders. The private guys cherry-pick the convicts who are easiest to handle. Same thing has to happen with private health care paid for publicly. No one can oblige a private facility to accept everyone. They'll skim the cream and leave the tough stuff to public facilities. Some deal!

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