Many Canadians are enjoying a rare surge of optimism as they welcome a new Prime Minister, cabinet, and presumably, a new direction, for Canada. I’m one of them, although I find myself stepping back to a more cautious mindset. After 10 years of oppressive democratic, environmental, and public services darkness it seems almost logical that there is no where to go but up. But it’s important that we keep in mind that “up” comes with a price tag; I’m OK with that, to a degree and for the near term, but discounting costs is dangerous territory. Governments and corporations have specialized in shoving costs down the road with, for example, incremental and now significant cumulative damage to our environment, biological diversity, public and social services, and climate. But with each passing day someone will have to pay with a notch or a chunk taken out of their life, perhaps a lost opportunity or less “on the table”, and that “someone” is usually “the people”, you and I.
Reports tell us there are at least 100 aboriginal communities without water and sewage services. At this stage in our history that’s insulting, and while I remain suspicious that that there is some bleeding going on between government funding and native spending in their communities, this critical situation has to be corrected. It will cost us hundreds of millions of dollars!
The new census forms, of which I strongly approve, will require tens of millions of dollars to process and analyze. Mail services – to homes, and perhaps maintaining post offices in small communities, another correction I think important, will costs tens of millions of dollars. Resurrecting our Coast Guard, implementing an honest environmental assessment process that ensures Canadians a legal right to be heard without being labeled as radicals, and rebuilding federal science libraries will come at a cost. Reforming our pension system to remove the insult of over half a million seniors living below the poverty line and provide greater payment to all seniors, so they don’t descend into that frightening world, and providing long overdue benefits to veterans and disabled persons will consume hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why then, I question, as do over half of Canadians polled, is Canada rushing frantically to burden our social system, our already stressed natural environment, our overloaded health care system, in a world in which overpopulation and overconsumption are internationally recognized threats to the earths life support systems, to relocate 25,000 refugees? I understand some people feel guilt, and some the desire to provide humanitarian aid, but relocation has no redeeming values for Canada or Canadians or a world now engaged in a serious battle for resources and ecological survival; a battle contingent on limiting or reducing throughput of (impacts on) natural capital, resources like clean and potable water, food quantity and distribution, arable land, above poverty living space, equitable access to decent services and education, and an atmosphere (climate) that will not slowly cook us. This refugee agenda will divert hundreds of millions of dollars from essential needs of Canadians!
It has always been difficult for people to link their actions with consequences, particularly when the latter are incremental and diffused. Most humans operate in a short term, visual world. But lack of awareness, or outright denial of impacts, serves only special interests, not society.
Humans are emotional animals – that evolutionary reality has a lot to do with our everyday well being. But an orderly society of diverse interests requires a collective contemplation and analysis of consequences of decisions that may be initially based on emotion (such as an ethically questionable election promise). The intense heat of a recent election is not an atmosphere conducive to sane and measured contemplation particularly when “growth” constitutes the most significant threat to the social, ecological, and economic order of our world. Avoiding the severe impacts of these threats is going to take “massive economic and political shifts” away from “business as usual”. This refugee agenda falls pathetically flat on its face in that sense.
Canada can, given our relative wealth, help slow, perhaps some day even stop, the exodus of humans from their homeland, but it will take help flowing from here to their land; relocating refugees simply stalls and complicates serious and essential reform. Failure of this rash agenda is something I would accept. Perhaps then we would concentrate on a collective strategy to preempt forced emigration that already threatens to destabilize critical ecological, social, and political systems.
Dr. Brian L. Horejsi
Penticton