As the year has wound down, it’s time to look back on it and forward to 2017. 2016 has seen many dark clouds. The election of Donald Trump was perhaps the darkest one of all. Justin Trudeau appears to have lost his appetite for proportional representation, and climate change is accelerating. No one would blame…
Category: sustainability
Is Kinder Morgan going to be Justin Trudeau’s Standing Rock?
I’ve been one part saddened and one part outraged by the video footage coming out of Standing Rock, North Dakota over the last number of weeks as passive, unarmed water protectors are attacked on a daily basis, sometimes by police in riot gear. Police and security forces have not hesitated to use attack dogs, Taser…
Making real “dates” for dumping fossil fuels
Some great news on the climate change front this week as Canada joins the ranks of a number of other nations in committing to a firm date by which we will no longer be burning coal. The Liberal government announced on Monday that by 2030 coal use in Canada will be a thing of the…
Diminished by a mega-mall
Tsawwassen Mills shopping mall had its official opening Wednesday, October 5. This is a shopping centre of truly gigantic proportions situated on Tsawwassen First Nation land in Delta near the ferry terminal. Described by some as “alarmingly big”, this mega-mall is over 1 million square feet in size and composed of not one but 16…
Are the federal Liberals really serious about climate change?
Like many Canadians, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals during their first year in office. I even suggested in a previous blog that the saying “they campaign from the left but govern from the right” might finally no longer apply to the current incarnation of the party. But I suffered…
Connecting the dots on the Fort McMurray catastrophe
My sincere condolences go to the tens of thousands of people so profoundly affected by the fires in and around Fort McMurray, Alberta. I do not ever recall such a large population evacuated due to fire in Alberta, BC, or anywhere in Canada for that matter. Fort McMurray’s population of 80,000+ is no small hamlet…
Growing quality, not quantity
With the Globe 2016 conference happening in Vancouver, politicians and leaders from some of the world’s biggest businesses are coming together to try and address “sustainable business” — in other words, how to continue to grow their businesses and the economy while doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. The implied goal — indefinite, continued…