Double Speak

Re Middle class doing better than ever MR Times March 27/14

According to Mr. Kamp the middle class is doing better under the Conservatives, This stands right up there with other outrageous statements by Conservative MPs Canada’s Minister of citizenship, immigration and multi-culturizm Chris Alexander that announced "poverty has been eliminated in Canada”, just how removed from reality is this government? 

Amazing how you can make numbers say anything you want especially if you don’t mind misspeaking a little along the way. First revelation from the Conservative ideological bubble $120,000.00 is not the middle class and I am sure this is the lower end of the upper class are paying less taxes, the rich are the only people that are paying less, the middle class average family income is from $60,000 to $85,000 dollars and this group is shrinking while the poor and lower middle are growing. Of course Mr. Kamp doesn’t mention the 1 out of 5 children living in poverty or the First nations people that have had a 2 percent cap on costs since 1996 so are now getting the equivalent of .23 cent on the 1996 dollar Kamp didn’t mention the 30,000 Canadians sleeping on the street on any given night, or the 16.2% of Canadian people living below the poverty level or all the seniors that are falling into poverty and debt trying to keep their heads above water. 

This sham of a government has been playing a giant shell game cutting transfer payments, social programs, medical and anything else for the people and diverting our tax dollars to subsidizing corporations, any government can download the taxes on to the Provinces and then the Provinces download them to the municipalities and say what a great man am I. Thanks to the Conservative government cutting transfer payments to the Provinces for such things as medical, the citizens of BC pay more for MSP than all the corporations pay in corporate taxes in BC. I pay from $35-$65 dollars a month in bridge tolls (TAXES) now, and the corporations get to use the infrastructure I pay for, for literally nothing, not only that but exploit our resources for a pittance, never mind about all the new fees and doubling and tripling of existing fees. Then you have the nerve to say you have cut our taxes, if you put all the Federal, Provincial, Municipal taxes, fees, tolls the money governments take out of Hydro BCAA, liquor and sales taxes you would find you give by far the lions share of your earnings to the government. 

If the real rapidly shrinking middle class is surviving it is only till they run out of credit as Canadians owe more now than they have ever owed, just like their government who has Canada owing $647 billion dollars the largest deficit in Canadian history. 

Thanks to the Conservative inept and dangerous economic polices we have a 7 percent unemployment rate in spite of about 500,000 million foreign workers doing Canadian jobs probably because in destroying the unions they also destroyed the very organizations that trained our apprentices and journeymen and other skilled workers and companies are quite happy to hire foreign workers for less money than Canadians contrary to Mr. Kamp’s misspoke. Then we have a .90 cent dollar which I am sure Mr.Kamp will tell you is a good thing and they are trying to get it down to .60 cents and then everything will be wonderful.

Talk about painting an incomplete picture these people do not have even a slight grip on reality.

Recipe for Disaster

A quote caught my eye the other day "I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals."-George Berkeley I thought to myself what a stupid quote oysters can’t invent an I-Phone or a Atomic bomb or how about an incredible engineering wonder such as a SUPERTANKER, like I said stupid quote. 

Then it occurred to me that it wasn’t oysters that are responsible for the decimation of not only themselves but 10 million scallops and any other creature that has a shell on our BC coast, it was mans activities that have acidified the oceans. Ph levels on BCs coast have dropped from the normal 8.2 Ph to 7.2 Ph which is significantly more acidic and is caused by man made carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide being absorbed by the ocean. I guess there are many different opinions on whether I-Phones or Atomic bombs are good or bad but 1000 supertankers being invited to inundate BC shores is definitely one of the dumbest short-sighted, dangerous ideas ever. 

We all know what a weed whacker is, you know those loud irritating garden tools that wakes you up in 6.00 A.M. well they are not only loud but they used to be 2 stoke motors but because they were so polluting they have had to become 4 stroke engines, well guess what supertankers have 2 stroke motors 14 cylinders and 3ft 2in pistons and an 8ft 2in stroke and produce 260 times more sulphur dioxide than all the cars in the world, just one supertanker produces as much as 5000 tons of sulphur a year and 16 supertankers create as much air pollution as all the cars in the worlds. 

Being a two stroke engine is only part of the problem as your normal 2 stroke weed whacker burns refined gasoline with a little refined oil, a super tanker burns bunker oil which is the sludge that is left over from the oil refining process and has up to 4500 times more sulphur than is allowed in car fuel and these behemoths burn 16 tons an hour or 380 tons a day. 

This is without a doubt a clear and imminent danger to the citizens of BC, our wild life, the environment and the very province we live in, Mayor Robertson has even more to fear from these pipelines, supertankers and coal-ports than he even knows. 

I know oysters did not have a hand in their own destruction along with eventually most of the life in the sea and yes the world if we continue on this fools path, but once again we ignore the obvious and the science and invite around 1000 supertankers to our BC shores. A super tankers motor weighs in at 2000 tons so in our infinite wisdom we have allowed 1000, 2000 ton extraordinarily dirty weed whackers into our back yards so don’t be surprised if there is an epidemic of allergies and asthma, cancer and a pandora’s box of other health problems. 

Maybe that isn’t such a stupid quote after all.

Invisible Danger

I want to talk about the miracle scenario painted by the warm and fuzzy propaganda campaign being drummed into the people of BC 24/7 365 days a year, where a pipeline doesn’t leak into our rivers and pollute and poison the land which is a statistical and physical impossibility and there are also no supertanker catastrophes or leaks to destroy our beautiful BC coastal environment and kill millions of aquatic and forest creatures which is a statistical and physical impossibility also, and make no mistake it would only take one to destroy thousands of jobs, millions of wildlife creatures not to mention destroying BCs coastal environment for decades even centuries to come.

What no one is talking about is a serious pollution consequence no one is even talking about or telling us about, catastrophic  amounts of air pollution from Supertankers. Kinder Morgan 400 a year, into Vancouver harbour and Burrard inlet, I have hit bottom of my sailboat miles off UBC in the spring with a 5 ft 2 in draft keel an obstacle not on any chart because it will be gone by fall, Northern gateway 240 Supertankers a year and from the proposed LNG plant in Kitimat up to 7-8 supertankers a day all the way up 240 Km of the 4th most dangerous waterway in the world. Lets not forget the Supertankers that will be hauling all that coal from at least 3 BC coal ports, even the Americans won’t  let them ship from American ports, it is to dirty and from what I understand they are none to happy that Canadians are allowing it, because of the inevitable accidents Americans will likely suffer as much damage as we do. 

Here is the problem Supertankers burn Bulk crude which is the sludge that is left over after the oil refining process, you can literally walk on it when it is cold it is basically asphalt (much like dilbit), It has up to 4500 times as much sulphur in it than the diesel that you put in your car, these floating pollution factories pump out  260 times as much sulphur dioxide than all the cars in the world put together, not to mention CO2, heavy metals and all the other pollutants generated by burning this cheap extremely dirty fuel.

The motors that burn this bulk crude are 5 storeys high with 14 cylinders 3ft 2in diameter pistons and a 8ft 2in stroke and they burn about 37,000 litres an hour or about 20 tons of this crude a day, just one of these behemoths emits as much as 5000 tons of sulphur a year. 

There it is just 16 of these supertankers produce more pollution than all the cars in the world, is it any wonder that our oceans are dying with over 500 super tankers and super cargo carriers plying our oceans and more being built every day, is it any wonder that a cites ports are the source of most pollution and the cause of the many health problems the people exposed to this pollution suffer from, in fact it is estimated that over 90,000 people a year die as a direct result of living in coastal areas where this poison is concentrated, so you could say yes it is a cheap fuel to move product around the world but health wise and environmental costs are astronomical. Do you consider that cheap?

A while back Canada stopped America from building a natural gas power plant at Sumas, gas a comparatively clean fuel on the BC border because of the resultant unacceptable pollution hazard and the fact that it would have been like putting another 500,000 cars on our roads, and the fact is pollution from these giant oil bombs will dwarf that pollution and nobody is even talking about this aspect of this lose-lose disaster for the people, animals, environment and economy of BC. 

GONG SHOW

If you want to see the quality of the people running Canada at this time there is no better example than watching the gong show that passes for the Canadian Parliament. 

Canadians have watched everyone from the Prime Minister and half his caucus and the Senate stand in front of the Canadian public and Lie their faces off but this latest Butt is the ultimate Butt joke, here you have a CONservative MP that perjures himself in a feeble attempt to legitimize his masters attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Canadians in the next election because it looks like that is the only way the CONS can possibly win. 
Here is the gist of this sordid tale, this Butt stands up on the floor of the legislature and tells this story about the last election and he makes a point of the so-called fact that he witnessed this act with his very own eyes, he watch voters put their voters cards in the garbage and then watched an individual retrieve those cards which were taken and given to other people who then used them to vote again, pretty serious stuff wouldn’t you say. 
The first thing I have to say is if that was me or most other honest people that witnessed something like that they would have seen to it that the people who were doing this would be stopped and charged so I can only guess they were members of his party because he never stopped or reported this obviously alleged illegal practice, then as the story goes 3 years later he got up in front of the legislature and told this fabrication not once but twice, 19 days later he turns around and says it didn’t happen he never saw anything at all, he just embellished or misspoke the story. In other words it was obviously a premeditated lie, and a whopper at that, which makes it contempt of the legislature at the very least, if he was a MP in Australia he would be going to jail. 
Now here is where the story moves into the twilight zone according to the rest of the CONservatives he never lied and doesn't deserve a contempt ruling he merely misspoke, embellished, I might accept that he embellished but he embellished a bare faced lie, he purposely lied and mislead the legislature for devious ends, now the real crazy part unfolds as the rest of the CON cabal instead of admitting the obvious are trying to convince the Liberals, NDP, Green party and not to mention the Canadian people that it was not a lie at all, he only did what they all do every day, well if you are talking about CONservatives he is probably right but any 3 year old knows you are not supposed to lie and you get in trouble if you do, but apparently our elected Conservative MPs have degenerated to the point that anything goes lying, election fraud, stealing public tax dollars and who knows what else is done by them every day. 
Mr. Butt will be doing the talk show circuit any time now.

It is painfully clear lying and corruption and contempt are now the norm rather than the exception, it is time for the Governor General to put an end to this travesty of an already illegitimate government and call an election. 

Omnibus protest

I was at the OMNIBUS protest in front of our perpetually absent MP Randy Kamp’s office and took great pride at all the caring Canadian patriots holding their signs and braving the bitter cold to protest the so many things wrong with this government it is impossible to focus on one issue anymore, I was heartened by the young people that had the courage and foresight to join us. 

But sadly they were not what was foremost on my mind, it was the thousands of people that were not there, I suppose they were sitting in front of the TV watching some movie they have seen 3 times or maybe even watching the news and getting angry over something they don’t approve of, maybe even this very protest rally. 

I have to wonder where were the people that expect our government to be at least competent money manager a government that turned a surplus into the biggest deficit in Canadian history $647 billion, they even managed to lose $3.1 billion dollars and have the Canadian dollar at an abysmal 80 cents, where were the unemployed 7.2 percent of Canadians who should be outraged that 446,847 foreign workers are in Canada doing Canadian jobs, everything from non-skilled to skilled jobs and the fact that this government has failed miserably in making sure there are Canadians trained for these positions, talking about incompetence you have a government that seems to pay 3 to 10 times as much for everything they do or buy such as the G-20 and an icebreaker for example, where were the people that care about public health care where because of Conservative environmental polices (or to be more specific lack of environmental laws) you have 400 percent increases in cancer rates in certain areas and at the same time the government is trying to get rid of public health care, where were the people that don’t believe that only commercially viable wildlife species should be protected by the government of Canada or that only 97 lakes and 62 rivers out of 2.25 million lakes and rivers deserve protection, or how about forcing environment destroying pipelines on a majority of people that do not want them, Harper has acted to destroy environmental law brought in as far back as Sir John A. Macdonald. Where were the people that don’t believe the government should be spying on innocent Canadians and our allies, where were the people that are angry that Canada’s government has for the first time in history litteraly given away Canada’s sovereignty (a treasonous act in my mind) and infringing on Canadians right to make laws consistent with Canadians rights and values such as protecting our enviroment, rights of privacy, voting rights, for example where were the people that don’t want Americas police sweeping into Canadian homes to take you away for supposedly breaking some obscure American law that they can’t even enforce in their own country ( this just happened in Vancouver where Seattle police raided an old age home looking for drugs and never found any, it was according to our government a simple misunderstanding) I guess we should be thankful they are not going to prosecute the older lady that resisted them or even just had a drone put a missile through the front door. 

Where were the people that hate the fact that Canada the peace keeper has been turned into a gunboat diplomacy thug, a hypocrite of the highest order a leader that calls good environmentalists and scientists that disagrees with them terrorists and at the same time hobnobs with real monster terrorists.

Where were all the mothers and fathers that always believed their children would be brought up in a Democracy and do they even know what that means and instead have a government that without debate and once again using giant omnibus bills is purposely making voting harder for Canadians and in affect disenfranchising 100s of thousands of Canadian voters, where were the people that are incensed with the way our war veterans are disrespected and treated, where were the people that don’t like MPs getting up and spouting barefaced lies and then within days turning around and recanting his testimony with the feeble excuse that he misspoke, where is the honesty, integrity, ethics where is the respect of democratic principles of this government and our Prime Minister that has been found guilty of contempt. 

They lie on a daily basis, flagrant illegal election law abuses and their pathetic answer to fixing these abuses is to disenfranchising even more voters and making sure there is no one there to catch them in the next election when they do the same thing to steal yet another election. 

I realize Canadians are a very laid back passive people but time is running out for Canadian's and their quasi-democracy in Steven Harpers own words quote “you will not recognize Canada when I am through with it” well Canada, he has already made it unrecognizable from the Canada I was born into and the democracy my father and so many others fought and died for it’s professed ideals and democratic principals. 

I loved how Canada was a world leader sometimes biting off more than it could chew but always trying to lead the world in the right direction. I sorely miss that Canada.

I know this letter is to long but anybody that has been paying attention knows that I have only scratched the surface of this governments corruption, incompetence, destructive shortsighted economic and environmental polices.