Trudeau Vs. Suzuki: A Brief Note

During the course of a campaign, its always good to prove your center right creds by kicking a few hippies https://t.co/Wdw5WNH7Ts

— Bigcitylib (@Bigcitylib2) September 27, 2015

Suzuki [Foundation] Strikes Back!

My favorite bit (naturally):

Those not familiar with Sun News host Ezra Levant — who also founded a propaganda organization and website to promote the fossil fuel industry and target environmental groups — might be interested to know he has been proven in court to be less than credible, with a judge in one case ruling that he spoke in "reckless disregard of the truth." In fact, he's currently facing another in a string of libel charges. He's also had to apologize publicly for rants and comments that were deemed racist and has been found in violation of the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council's ethical guidelines. He doesn't believe in the science of climate change, thinks recycling is "pointless" and believes Canada should put all its economic eggs in the oil sands basket. Many of his attacks are ad hominem — that is, they are aimed at perceived flaws in an individual's character rather than his arguments — and most are blatantly false.

Incidentally, his latest libel case, which I expect to end as all the others (with Ezra, or whoever finances Ezra, paying up), has been delayed until January.

Moffat On Suzuki

Mike Moffat has a valid point.  It isn't, as David Suzuki sometimes contends, that economists don't understand "externalities" or claim we should ignore them.  The term is a bit of economic jargon, after all.  No.  The people who ignore/downplay externalities are those folk who, for example, say they want to help clean-up the environment but decry a carbon tax or whine when somebody sticks a turbine out in the lake.

The rest of us, in other words.

Clarification On David Suzuki: The Globe Misleads

 The Globe has sown confusion in the blogosphere this morning with this story, which begins:

Seeking to blunt Conservative attacks, Suzuki quits board of environmental foundation

Canada’s most famous environmentalist, David Suzuki, says he left the board of his charitable foundation to avoid being a lightning rod for criticism and government attacks that would undermine its work.

Still, Peter Robinson, who is the head of the David Suzuki Foundation, said the group is facing a “chill” that is leading it to pull back from important environmental debates lest it be accused by the federal government of exceeding its charitable mandate.

In fact, Suzuki's departure from the foundation that bears his name had nothing to do with the federal government's latest attack on charities opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline.  How do I know this?  It happened during the summer of 2011.  Now, the larger point--that Suzuki's move was to ensure that his personal actions didn't draw conservative attacks upon his foundation--is fair enough.  And the fact that it is still being attacked for such personal remarks demonstrates the mendacity of the Harper government's allies in this fight.  But no, Joe Oliver's latest efforts against the enviro movement had nothing, nothing to do with Mr. Suzuki's decision.  The Globe is seeking a story where there isn't one.

Gerry Nicholls: Full Metal Wingnut?

All that matters [to David Suzuki] is his almost mystical need to stop climate change, even if that’s an impossible task.

And this perhaps is why Suzuki is endorsing McGuinty. It actually has nothing to do with those giant wind-turbines ( McGuinty’s Mechanical Monsters) which blight the rural landscape.

Suzuki simply realizes that McGuinty is to Ontario’s economy what Arnold Schwarzenegger is to wedding vows.

And by that I mean McGuinty’s policies of high taxes, excessive regulation and massive deficits will ultimately cripple Ontario’s economy.

This will increase Ontario’s poverty and unemployment and economic misery, but on the green bright side it will also result in a lessening of industrial activity which might slightly reduce the province’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This is the future Suzuki is applauding.

OK.  So this appears in the Canada Free Press, so Gerry probably doesn't believe any of this horseshit, he's probably just pandering to the "turbine truthers" in his audience.  But if he does actually think that David Suzuki wants to increase "poverty" and "economic misery" in Ontario, and that's why he's supporting the McGuinty Green Energy legislation...if he actually believes that Mr. Suzuki is evil, in other words, then Gerry Nicholls is a kook.  I truly hope, therefore, that Gerry is being entirely cynical, shovelling boob-bait to the yokels that frequent CFP.  The alternative is frightening to contemplate.

That is all.

Sun Smears Suzuki

 When you read this story about the "controversy" David Suzuki and his foundation have found themselves in for endorsing Dalton McGuinty's Green Energy initiatives, you have to read between the lines.  What's between the lines can be found in a November 2010 blog post by Donna Laframboise, once journalist for the National Post.  It covers a lunch-time meeting between her and Sun Media's Kory Teneycke, in which young Kory tried to convince Donna to return to the business as a T.O. Sun columnist and Sun TV News talking head:

Kory responded to my really, I’m not a television person protestations with assurances that it would be OK. At the beginning, few people would be watching anyway, he insisted. He was sure that, with a bit of practice, I’d do fine.

[Teneycke's]one firm directive was that I should challenge David Suzuki.

Sun media has been planning to target David Suzuki since April of 2010 (when Kory met Donna).  They appear not to have hired a designated Suzuki basher, as per the original plan. But nothing else seems to have changed.

David Suzuki Confirms That NDP Is No Longer The Party Of Environmentalists

Dear NDPers,

When I was young and growing up in B.C. I used to vote for you people.  Then, Mike Harcourt sold out over Clayoquot Sound, went from being a Green to a hippy kicker as soon as he came into power and had to choose between the unionistas and enviros.  And this NDP preference--for choosing free beer for autoworkers at union meetings over protecting our shared environmental heritage--was confirmed when Carole James vowed to repeal the B.C. carbon tax in 2009,  by Jack Layton in the 2008 federal campaign, and by Andrea Horwath's current campaign for Ontario Premier. 

No wonder Mr. Suzuki can't stomach you anymore.  And, as I say, this isn't being purely partisan. I used to vote NDP.  You have truly disappointed me. It has become evident over time that your enviro wing served the same purpose as the SoCon wing of Canadian Conservative parties.  You gave them sweet words, but when push came to shove it was always the autoworker slamming a six-pack in the parking lot of his plant in Oakville at lunch that won out over the well-being of the noble fox snake.  

So, people talk about the LPoC losing parts of its base, but an equally important historical fact about voting behavior in the past decade is that the NDP has lost about 10% of the national vote that it might harvest to the Green Party and Liberals.  If you ever want to form a government nationally you will have to win that back somehow.  I don't see any evidence that you are even trying.  Andrea Horwath sure isn't.

Vivian Krause On Sea-Lice

Once a consultant for the salmon farming industry, these days Vivian Krause refers to herself as a "researcher", and spends a fair bit of time attacking groups like the  David Suzuki Foundation for their criticism of industry practices, in particular their contention that sea lice from farmed salmon are infecting and depleting wild stocks.  Here are some excerpts from her latest, entitled The case of the missing Sea Lice:

For more than a decade, the David Suzuki Foundation has run an aggressive campaign against farmed salmon. "It's poison!" David Suzuki told a conference in Toronto. "Phone your local hospitals and find out if farmed salmon is served to patients," said a brochure from his foundation.

The Suzuki Foundation distributed a brochure titled Why You Shouldn't Eat Farmed Salmon. It features David Suzuki's photo prominently on the front page. Since last February, however, that brochure -along with 20 press releases and Web pages about salmon farming -have been quietly removed from the foundation's website. Gone.

You can read the whole thing, but Krause's claim is that the reason Why You Shouldn't Eat Farmed Salmon has been pulled from Suzuki.org is because her own efforts have shown the arguments in the brochure to have been falsified:

Internet archives show that last February, 16 press releases and Web pages about salmon farming were removed merely hours after I put on my blog a detailed letter to David Suzuki in which I asked questions about the funding and scientific weakness of the Suzuki Foundation’s position.

She concludes

Given that for more than 10 years, the David Suzuki Foundation has played a leading role in fostering the opinion that sea lice from salmon farms are a serious threat to wild salmon, it is not good enough for the foundation to simply and quietly remove the press releases that started the whole sea lice controversy in the first place.

My hope is that David Suzuki is big enough to admit that contrary to his foundation's claims that were broadcast far and wide, its sea lice research never did show that sea lice originating from salmon farms cause high levels of mortality among juvenile salmon in the wild.

Well, I found Ms. Krause' arguments a bit "fishy".  For example, if you type "salmon farming" or "sea lice" into the Suzuki Foundation website, you get pages and pages of results, mostly warning about their effect on the mortality of wild salmon.  So, if the organization has pulled material, it has also left a ton of material making the same point up on its website.  I'd also note that the publication date on Why You Shouldn't Eat Farmed Salmon is 2002, which may mean that the information contained in it has been superseded by later research.

So I emailed the foundation, and Ian Hanington, their communications guy, responded with the following (which I have annotated in places):

Thanks for your letter.

The David Suzuki Foundation rebuilt and migrated its website to a new platform in April/May 2010. In doing so, we updated some content and got rid of some older content in many subject areas (a normal process for any information-heavy site). As you’ve noticed, though, we still have a lot of information about salmon aquaculture on the site, and our positions have remained consistent and science-based.

Mr. Hanington then discusses the capabilities of the "internet archives" Ms. Krause references in her piece:

We would also note that the “Wayback Machine” referred to in the article works by sending a computer program (a crawler) on to a website once every few months to crawl through web pages. It is an incomplete process, as often pages are missed due to technical reasons. Our old website was not built in straight HTML, so it was harder for the Wayback Machine to archive properly.

As the Wayback Machine crawlers only visit a site every few months, the archive can’t be trusted for placing exact dates of pages that are removed from the Internet.

Here’s a blurb directly off the Wayback Machine’s FAQs page:

Not every date for every site archived is 100% complete. When you are surfing an incomplete archived site the Wayback Machine will grab the closest available date to the one you are in for the links that are missing. In the event that we do not have the link archived at all, the Wayback Machine will look for the link on the live web and grab it if available. Pay attention to the date code embedded in the archived url. This is the list of numbers in the middle; it translates as yyyymmddhhmmss.  For example in this url http://web.archive.org/web/20000229123340/http://www.yahoo.com/ the date the site was crawled was Feb 29, 2000 at 12:33 and 40 seconds.

I hope that helps.


Thank you, Mr. Hanington, I think it does.