Christian Leftist

Generally, I’m full of love for our sister country up North. We all know her citizens say “about” as “aboot,” have flapping heads like their caricatures on South Park, and don’t look their doors at night because Michael Moore says so. But those are the things we love about–er, aboot Canada: its quirkiness, its desire to have happy, healthy people who don’t have to work two jobs to pay for their health insurance, who feel no need to pretend they like hockey and have good hockey teams, because they actually DO like hockey and DO have good hockey teams.

Now the Canadians want to mimick us in what we do the worst: exploiting the environment for monetary gain when the long-term price is too high.

It turn out that half of America’s (that’s America the continent, not the country) migratory birds nest in Canada’s boreal forest. Alberta’s section of that forest lies above tar sands that developers want to mine to excavate oil. Bitumen, a form of crude oil found in the tar sands, could provide the Canadian economy with $2.4 trillion over the twenty years from 2010 to 2030. It also could wipe out half of Nrth America’s migratory birds, many of them endangered or threatened species.

Whooping cranes, for instance, only breed in one place in the world — a wetlands area north of the tar sands that the Athabasca River maintains. That river flows northward, straight through the tar sands area where proposed mining would take place.

I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out what would happen if oil miners started to pollute anywhere near tha river.

Moreover, the next three decades could see a loss of anywhere between six and 166 million birds because of tar sands mining, according to the Washington Post.

Our government does not have any principles left to stand on when it comes to convincing other nations to behave in an environmentally responsible way. We can hope that somebody or some bodies move to stop this in court, or we can make the public more aware of what is at stake.

Either way, now is not just the right time. Now is the only time.