My brother sent this to me. While the US is being bombarded with pro-coal marketing, up here we’re getting the same from the Nuclear industry. I’d love to see an Ontario Nukes version of this video.
Where’s The “Yes To FPTP” Campaign?
The ballot question for the October 10th Ontario referendum on electoral reform will ask voters to choose between “The existing electoral system (First-Past-the-Post),” and “The alternative electoral system proposed by the Citizens’ Assembly (Mixed Member Proportional).” A number of grassroots campaigns have sprung-up to argue that MMP is the best voting system for Ontario, including Vote For MMP, Equal Voice In Politics (women for MMP), Liberals for MMP, and more.
So, where’s the campaign to argue that FPTP (the current system) is the best for Ontario? It doesn’t exist. Instead, we get this, the “No MMP” campaign. Some of their criticisms are legitimate (no one ever said MMP was a perfect system), others are intentional distortions of the truth. (Isn’t there a word for when someone intentionally distorts the truth? I’m sure I’ll think of it later….) What the campaign doesn’t do, however–because it can’t–is defend or advocate for our current system, which the majority of Ontarians and Canadians acknowledge is no longer serving us well. If we actually had a province-wide discussion that pitted the merits of MMP against the merits of FPTP, MMP would win hands down. The “No MMP” folks know this, which is why they’re instead basing their campaign on fear of the unknown and misinformation.
By the way, who are the “No MMP” folks? We don’t know. While Vote For MMP and other progressive referendum campaigns are comprised of grassroots citizens and politicians of integrity from all political parties, the No MMP campaign has decided to remain anonymous (they announced their campaign through one unknown spokesperson, and have placed no detailed “contact” or “about” information on their site). How much credibility should they therefore be granted? Until they can demonstrate that they’re a legitimate group with at least some popular support and backing, next to none.
Update: Cam helpfully points out that the above sounds to him as if I’m saying that individuals who don’t support MMP lack credibility. That’s absolutely not my intention. (As I do mention above, some criticisms of MMP are legitimate.) I am, however, suggesting that we deserve to know what kind of support and membership the No MMP campaign has so that we can assess their credibility as an organization.
Power To Choose
Below (and here) is a video of comments I made a few weeks back at an event called “Power To Choose,” sponsored by the WWF, Greenpeace, the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, Sierra Club of Canada, and the Pembina Institute. I’m honoured to have been one of the five initial presentations chosen for the web, along with people like NDP MPP Peter Tabuns and Gord Miller. Regular readers may notice similarities to two previous posts, The Triple E Crisis, Plus and My Canada Includes The Laws of Thermodynamics.
Today’s AQHI Has Decreased From 3 To 4
Crossposted from Torontoist.
It’s been about a month now since Toronto (in conjunction with the province and the feds) launched the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) pilot project. And yet, very few Torontonians seem to understand what the AQHI actually means for their health and behaviour on any given day. Given that, a closer look is in order.
Unfortunately, just like Toronto’s air, the closer one looks the less clear things become. Listening to the radio in the morning, it’s easy to get the impression that the AQHI replaces the old Air Quality Index (AQI), which is where we used to get the binary “smog alert/no smog alert” announcements. Not so, Toronto Health tells Torontoist, “The Air Quality Index (smog alert) is a scale that measures the quality of the air based on single highest pollutant, whereas the new Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) measures the combined health risks/effects of multiple pollutants. In other words, the two indices are not comparable and cannot and should not be linked.”
Don’t worry, that doesn’t make a tonne of carbon sense to us either, but basically it means that it’s impossible to say, for example, “a 5 under the new system is equivalent to a smog alert under the old system.” Add to the confusion that, as Mike Smith points out in NOW, a high Air Quality rating actually means we’re experiencing low air quality. “One wonders,” speculates Smith, “if the rather more obvious name, the Pollution Index, was avoided because of its effects on tourism.”
Or perhaps its effects on reelection. The federal government, which is spearheading this initiative, has promised to create “clean air” (which many critics have suggested is a deliberate attempt to try and distract the public from its inaction on the climate crisis). Of course, it’s very hard to convince people the air is clean when they’re experiencing a “smog alert” every other day. Hearing that Air Quality is at a 4 or a 5 makes everything sound much cleaner. On Wednesday last week, for example, the AQHI was at a 3, even though there was a smog alert in effect. The smog alert went unreported by at least one major Toronto radio station, which instead just informed their listeners of the AQHI.
If you’re interested in the specifics of the AQHI 1-10+ scale, there’s a table on the government’s site. Apparently last Wednesday’s smog day represented “ideal conditions for outdoor activities.”
A list of all AQHI numbers reported to date does not appear to be available, but our observation has been that it’s tended to stay around 3-5 so far. Again, that makes some political sense. Just as the American government’s terrorism risk index can never fall below “elevated” (not only is it in the Republican party’s interest to keep its citizens afraid of an attack, it would be a disaster for this administration if an attack took place while the alert level was low), it’s politically disadvantageous for the AQHI to ever rise too high. There’s therefore reason to be at least a bit suspicious of what levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals our government has decided are “safe” for us to breathe.
On the other hand, some individuals are actually more “at risk” of respiratory problems than others, and they’ll hopefully find this new system useful in predicting when they’ll experience the most difficulty breathing. If the system works as it’s supposed to, it could help save lives by giving asthmatics, for example, more warning of when it’s safe for them to go outside.
That being said, ultimately Toronto Public Health says, “it is our intention that the AQHI will replace the existing Air Quality Index (smog alert) once it is fully implemented in Ontario.” A few years after that and maybe we’ll stop using the word “smog” altogether. Is our tinfoil hat on a bit too tight, or is possible that at least one motivation behind the AQHI is to eliminate smog though Orwellian “newspeak” methods, rather than real ones?