Race To The Bottom

September, and both Obama and Harper seem to be playing “who can gut the environment faster?” Obama gutted the EPA’s smog standards; Harper, Canada’s ozone monitoring.

Harper’s actions are expected. The only tree he ever hugged was an oak when he was seven and playing hide and seek. Obama, on the other hand, actually made promises on the environment. Wasn’t he the man who was going to bring science back into environmental policy? Then again, he never said that science would trump the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber unveiled what it believed to be the real dangers of the EPA's smog standards: seven million jobs could be lost and one billion in compliance costs spent by 2020. Hey Mr. President, whaddya think the American people want, jobs or clean air? Geez, when you put it that way, well, sure, jobs I guess.

As to Harper, he’s ending funding for the network of monitoring stations in the arctic that monitor the ozone layer. Environment Canada is also going to stop maintaining its Toronto-based World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre used by researchers around the world. For those in the know about the science, these cuts are nothing short of a disaster for us being able to understand the complexity of what’s happening to our planet. For Harper, who has always been enamoured with removing information from policy, what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

If the race to the bottom is similar (after all, the main component of smog is ozone), the news cycle about these stories isn’t. Obama’s decision was big news. Certain media outlets raked Obama over hot coals (rumour has it that they’ve been getting steadily hotter during the past thirty years). Keith Olbermann went ballistic, editorials appeared in major paper condemning the President’s action, the decision mattered. In Canada, Harper’s actions hardly saw the light of day.

Environment Canada? There will be more cuts to come. Harper may have come around and agreed there’s global warming, but hey, if we lose the ability to measure it, who can be sure in what direction it’s trending. Years from now Environment Canada might be one guy with a thermometer who sticks his wet finger into the wind and gives us the weather report.

After Jack Layton: What Might Have Been

There was hardly a mention of Jack Layton’s too early death south of the border, so far as I can tell. The outpouring of grief in Canada didn’t seem to trickle into the traditional American media in any significant way. Not surprising. It was somewhat bigger news in the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. In the wake of his death, the what-might-have-been that most saddens me is his absence from American awareness.

Canadian Prime Ministers, never mind leaders of the official opposition, don’t get much air time in the States. The U.S., after all, is mostly exposed to “All America, All the Time.” A charismatic left-leaning politician from the Great White North isn’t particularly newsworthy. That said, the potential was there, had he lived, for it to be different.

And I was looking forward to that difference. I’m not sure who speaks compellingly for the left in America’s political class anymore. Dennis Kucinich remains out there, but few would describe him as compelling. Most of us would probably jump up and say John Stewart. Oh, that’s right, he’s in comedy. Paul Krugman? Oops, he’s journalism. No, there’s no one I know, at least not from up here.

I like to think Jack, as the first post-Harper Prime Minister, would have had a salutary effect on the left in America. Imagine a Canadian Prime Minister who is entirely likeable, passionately principled but neither obstinate nor impractical, who wears his idealism on his sleeve and achieved power without resorting to attack ads.

Ah, if only. The American left currently seems unable to find its footing, at least in the current moment. And yet north of their border, Canada had a man from the New Democratic Party sweep into the official opposition. He was destined to bring them into power. And then, by George, you’d have it: a genuine party of the left running the country that shares a 5,525 mile border with America.

I would have loved to have seen him on Fox News, his warm, engaging manner, paired with his passionately principled positions, rendering their news anchors as mean-spirited as they are. He might have even created a crack in the American left for one of their own to rise up and speak truth and stand courageously. America would have found itself wanting what he so winningly embodied (in the same way many of us in the States during the Nixon years looked north, with envy, at Trudeau).

But it’s not to be. And it is a loss to America that America will never know.