…and Michael Moore is FAT!

Terry Glavin, last True Leftist™ in Canada, finds the late, lamented Kyoto treaty (and environmentalism in general) wanting — and apparently it’s all Al Gore’s fault.

No, really:

Kyoto could have been an instrument to force technological innovation in the world’s advanced economies in such a way as to clear a path for eventual and meaningful global reductions in greenhouse gases. But it didn’t turn out that way, and since nobody’s being especially parsimonious in the apportionment of blame for this, while we’re at it, there’s no good reason to ignore the pathological unseriousness that routinely attends to environmentalism, either.

By condoning Kyoto’s initial exemption of China, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize in climate science to wonder whether there was any reason to believe that recalcitrant American senators would soon be going vegan. To expect American conservatives to get on board was as moronic as imagining that just one more poster of a polar bear on a shrinking ice floe would cause them all to prostrate themselves and beg forgiveness at the feet of failed Democratic presidential contender Al Gore. The alarming American “skepticism” about climate science did not end with the release of Gore’s global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. That’s when it began.

Of course, nowhere among Glavin’s incoherent, straw-filled missives against his hippie punching bag du jour (shorter: STOP HITTING YRSELVES) will you actually find any truly serious solutions offered to counter what Glavin himself says will otherwise be “catastrophic” — unless you, for whatever reason, agree with Glavin’s astoundingly credulous assertion that “whatever his shadowy oilpatch connections and whatever his sins, Prime Minister Stephen Harper should be taken at his word and held to his word that Canada is serious about building national and global measures that will deal seriously, not just symbolically, with global warming.”

And ponies? I mean, Glavin has provided us with enough straw in one 600 word op-ed to feed an entire stable of Clydesdales for at least a decade. The simpering, eventehlibrul suck-up routine re: Uncle Steve’s magical powers also makes one wonder if ol’ Terry might be angling for a cushy Senate appointment to help ride out the rest of his Carlsberg years.

But what do I know?

I’m just an “apprentice raging grannie” spitting on ‘Nam vets too busy giving Joe Foodbank the business for not trading in his beat-up Pinto for a Prius to single-handedly administer a viable solution for AGW.

Just remember: True Leftists™  heart big corporations, sustainable [sic] seal hunts, and proto-fascist prime ministers (oh, and piece of shit environment ministers too). All of which will, eventually, save us from a bleak, carbon-based demise at the hands of Al Gore.

And ponies.

UN Gives Canada A Failing Grade On Housing

by matttbastard

x-posted @ Comments From Left Field

(h/t F-email Fightback)

Miloon Kothari, UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, has spent the past two weeks in Canada conducting a cross-country fact-finding mission on homelessness. ‘Underwhelmed‘ doesn’t begin to describe his reaction. According to the Toronto Star, Kothari believes “[a]n ambitious national housing program and a strategy to combat poverty is urgently needed to tackle the disaster-like conditions of homelessness and inadequate housing found across the country.”

More from the Star:

“What is beginning here has already happened in the U.S., where you speak to people (and) they say, `the homeless are there by choice,’ or `it’s those drug addicts,'” Kothari said in an interview yesterday. “That is a very serious mental shift.”

[…]

During his visit, he travelled to Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal as well as aboriginal reserves. He visited shelters, talked to housing advocates and reviewed reports. And at the end of his visit yesterday, he questioned how a country like Canada, with its rich surpluses and history of progressive housing policies, had let the housing crisis get so out of hand.

“You have had a history of very progressive housing policies which were summarily abandoned in the mid-’90s, and the consequences of that are here tragically for all of us to see,” he said.

“I hope there is a radical shift in government policy,” Kothari said.

Unfortunately, as inferred by Kothari, there already has been a radical policy shift–in the wrong direction.

The Ottawa Citizen:

Mr. Kothari admitted that his recommendations were not likely to be popular with Canada’s federal government. Most of his recommendations, he said, are founded on human rights obligations, not the market perspective that he thinks dominates policy in most developed countries — and which, in his opinion, is the reason there is a housing crisis in the first place.

Precisely so. Nationally, the prologue to the crisis was written in 1995 by Paul Martin in the form of his Bay St-approved laissez-faire budget, which, according to Murray Dobbin, “characterized the government as being parasitic, an out-of-control entity that had to be disciplined, rather than a democratic body, an expression of Canadian society.” The Stephen Harper Party has since eagerly run with this Neoliberal narrative, taking it to pathological extremes.

As pale @ A Creative Revolution rhetorically asks:

How many pre-conceived notions about the homeless and those living in poverty have taken on the perspective of Neoliberalism? When did we stop seeing those in need as human? And start to see laziness, and criminality?

Related: pale has more @ the above link on the pre-2010 Olympic gentrification of Vancouver, where the “Homeless and poor, and the drug addicted that live in the city are now seen [by city and Olympic officials] as a ‘PR issue.'” David Eby notes that Kothari made it clear the UN is well aware events like the Olympics result in “forced evictions for construction of infrastructures, city beautification and speculation of land and property and measures to remove homeless people from cities prior to and during the event” and offered the following (likely to be ignored) recommendations:

Vancouver Olympic officials, and the relevant city authorities, need to continue to implement specific targets and strategies on housing and homelessness, and to commit funding and other resources to support these targets. The social development plan of the Vancouver Games should be developed and implemented in public, so that the progress of Vancouver officials can be effectively monitored. I would recommend the formation of an independent monitoring body to assist VANOC in complying with its commitments to improve the housing rights situation in the region where the Olympics will take place.

Also, this 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article by Shawn Foster, Atlanta’s Olympic Legacy: More Poverty, Less Freedom, outlines the lasting negative impact Olympic gentrification can have on a former host city’s homeless and low-income citizens.

Recommend this post at Progessive Bloggers