From a critique of the Harper budget by Brent Patterson of the Council of Canadians:
WATER
While the government acknowledges that “millions of Canadians depend on the Great Lakes for their drinking water” and says that “cleaning up the Great Lakes is a key objective of our Government’s Action Plan for Clean Water”, the government allocates a mere $8 million a year to Environment Canada to “implement its action plan to protect the Great Lakes”.
In contrast, at the end of last year, the US Congress authorized $475 million to be spent on cleaning up the Great Lakes. In February, US President Barack Obama proposed another $300 million into this program. And just this past October the Harper government lobbied the US Environmental Protection Agency to weaken and delay their tough new measures against ship-diesel exhaust on the Great Lakes aimed at reducing the health toll from air pollution. The federal government is simply not serious about protecting the Great Lakes.
With respect to water in First Nations communities, the government says it “will undertake a comprehensive review of its current approach to financing First Nations infrastructure” in order to “support access by First Nations to alternative sources of financing, and approaches to improve the life-cycle management of capital assets”. This raises the spectre of private-public partnerships and all-out privatization, rather than the public provision of water and the recognition of the human rght to water.
And while taking no real action to protect or conserve water, the budget allocates $18.4 million over two years to the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators initiative, which the government says “produces a coherent set of indicators on water quality, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions over time.”
Full critique
McGuinty to sell out Ontario and put water at risk, says Council of Canadians
Toronto – The Council of Canadians is deeply concerned with the McGuinty government’s support for policies that put water in Ontario and abroad at risk, following today’s Throne Speech and is questioning whether the Premier is actually committed to protecting water, given his emphasis on privatization and ‘tech fixes’ that create more problems than they solve.
Full story
We should be more than skeptical about our ‘government’s commitment to water’.
What they are committed to is selling the rights to water to the highest bidder.
I have been warning about this for years: the whole world is in a water crisis. The UN declares that food is a right, shelter is a right, but water is a need (not a right!??) and therefore can be sold to the highest bidder.
In the late 1990’s the then VP of the World Bank declared that the next world war will be over water (NOT oil, NOT land, NOT food, NOT weapons, NOT gold…hello??)
Most of the world’s major rivers are drying up or severely polluted. The USA has built entire cities (i.e. Las Vegas) in areas that are desert, where no human life was meant to live, and surprise! they dont have enough water…so guess what…they plan on stealing ours. And, the likes of NAFTA lets them do it.
Way to go Canada. Nice job selling us out.
Get ready to pay through your nose for water the way you are now paying through the nose for hydro, insurance, heating fuel etc.
It will only get worse with the new ‘green energy’ act nonsense they are bringing in, that most people are heartily in favour of. People still don’t seem to understand that the name of the act does not correspond with the contents of the act.
The ‘clean water act’ is not about clean water. It is about making everyone except the biggest polluters responsible for not polluting the water! Does anyone realize there is absolutely no point to this except to enable the government to prosecute innocent people while protecting the culprits?
Please…stop the planet…I want off.
Between Harper and McGuinty, there soon won’t be much left of Canada the way we know it now. Neither one have any regard for the environment or our precious resources. Their only goal seems to be to sell us out to the highest bidder!
It’s makes me very angry and very sad the way they’re destroying this beautiful country that I love.