East Kootenay Residents Land Use Coalition

Who would have thought that a vote for Harper’s Conservatives would turn into a vote for David Suzuki’s warped war on modern prosperity?

That Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now openly flirting with Suzukiism was reinforced last week as he explained his cabinet shuffle and the government’s new environmental focus. He said he aimed to tackle longterm environmental issues that have been badly neglected.

In a newspaper interview just before Christmas, Harper said Canada’s environmental record is “the worst in the developed world ... in just about every measure.” Now defunct environment minister Rona Brockovich made the same claims earlier in the year.

There is only one study model by only one group in the world that ranks Canada as the worst environmental performer among developed nations, and that’s the work of David Suzuki and a collection of academic activists associated with Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria. The latest in the line landed last month from the Suzuki Foundation, a report that begins: “Canada has among the worst environmental record of any developed country, ranking 28th out of 30 OECD countries.”