MEDIA AND POLITICIANS WANT MORE PIPELINES AS THOUSANDS FLEE WILDFIRES ACROSS WESTERN CANADA

(May 29, 2025)    In the four months since President Trump came to power and began to impose tariffs on Canada, virtually all our senior politicians have been pushing the idea that ... we need to immediately have More Pipelines, More Oil, and more Fracking, Mining and Logging in Canada.  There's no time to think, we just have to do it.  That has been the message from virtually day one of the Trump Tariffs.  

Here in British Columbia our NDP Premier David Eby has been saying ... we have no time anymore for long environmental assessments; instead we need to approve all these projects as fast as possible.  Mark Carney si saying the same thing as are many of the other Premiers.  

Alberta, the media tell us, is fed up because of their bad treatment from the rest of Canada.  But the media and politicians don't tell us that Alberta has had record oil production for the past four years, and Esso just announced Record Profits for the first quarter of 2025.  Alberta, I think, would be much better off if it could separate itself from Big Oil ... Big Oil has been screwing Alberta and Albertans for the past fifty years and more, but since the media is controlled by big business, those kinds of things can never be said.  And instead they pit Alberta against the rest of Canada to keep us divided and looking the wrong way while the banks and oil companies steal everything that isn't tied down.

And none of this 'Development for Corporate Profit' comes for free.  There IS a price to be paid.  This year's wildfires have already started - and some 20,000 people, mostly in Western Canada, are on the move because of fires near their communities.  Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, a big fan of more oil and more pipelines, says this year's fires are ' quite likely unlike anything we have faced in quite some time, if not ever'.  That is exactly true, and it's only going to get worse.

And yet nobody dares say that maybe, just maybe, we should 'cut back' a bit.  Maybe we should reduce the massive over-consumption that we Canadians -and billions fo others world-wide - have gotten used to and seem to think is ... 'normal'.  What we have is not normal.  And we are poisoning the planet.  And we Canadians don't even have a voice in what we are doing because really, we've completely lost our democracy and have been turned into a kind of 'corporate dictatorship' where big business controls our governments and also owns the media while we think we live in a democracy and have a free press.  Which is certainly what I thought for most of my life.  But sadly, it ain't so.  We have very little democracy in Canada and we certainly do not have a free press.  What we have is a corporate propaganda machine, and one that is tremendously effective.

But back to the oil industry - and the banks and the miners and the manufacturers and poisoners and all the rest of them.   They are poisoning and destroying this dear planet which, really, is all we have.  They are destroying it for corporate profit, and we are the ones doing it for them.  WE are the drivers and flyers and consumers and wasters.  People love their children, and want to have a good future for their children.  And I don't think any of us really want to destroy the planet.  The Earth that we live on and which gives us everything we have.  But we are destroying it and the only way to stop destroying it is to be willing to REDUCE our over-consumption.  And that is never talked about.  Why not?  Because nobody in power wants us talking about that kind of thing.  We are just here to be thrown under the bus when the time comes.  And if you look around, you will see that the time may be coming very soon.  Millions of Canadians already can barely afford to put food on the table.  While the richest keep getting richer.  That's the game they are playing on us and we don't even realize it.  We seem to think it's all just 'an accident of some kind' that a home in many of our cities and towns is unaffordable and mortgage payments and rents are increasingly back-breaking to the point where young people can't even afford to have children.. Or eat.  

I live in Victoria but I often listen to Vancouver news on the radio.  For the last few days, leading the news on CBC and the rest of them has been a story of some guy the police just arrested formasturbating and looking into windows.  The media seem to love that story, it's on over and over.  But no mention of the fact that we are destroying our planet.  No mention of the fact that most of us now have plastic in our brains.  That climate change (if you believe in climate change as I do) is irreversible.  Our food is poisoned by chemicals and full of GMOs.  Half of us are going to get cancer.  There is chronic disease everywhere.  But no question of why... no mention that maybe we have to reduce our consumption and clean up our act if we want to survive.  That is the mess we are in, and we really are fighting for our lives now, although the media never mention that fact either.  

There is no free lunch and there never has been ... The corporations want record profits, so the top people can have yachts and private jets and etc.  And poisoning us is just part of the price that has to be paid.  And they are very happy to poison us so they can make more money.  And since they control our governments, the law allows them to do just that.

The question is, are we willing to fight back?  And how do we fight back?  I think we fight back under the banner of "democracy".  Meaning that 'we the people' begin to have a voice in our own governance.  The job of the politicians we elect and pay should be to find out what we want .. And then DO THAT.  Instead, the politicians are completely controlled by big business and the .01%.  And they are destroying our communities and our schools and our society and everything else.  

For example, in Canada, housing policy is run for Corporate Profit.  Building good homes and good communities for Canadians to live in is the last thing anyone in power seems to care about.  But fortunes have been made from our homes for the past 25 years.  Fortunes made by the banksters and investors and financiers and the big developers ... and all paid for by all of the rest of us.  And that too is not allowed to be said while they tell us we have a great democracy.  

Just look around at all the stuff in our homes and workplaces that has been 'ripped from the earth'.  We can do a bit of that, we don't have to go back to the stone age; but we have to have some care and consideration for Mother Nature.  We are totally out of control these days, and having Even More is not the way forward.  Maybe it's time to start having a bit less??  We shouldn't be moving towards Electric Cars, I don't think that is the way forward.  The only way forward, really, is to get rid of at least 90% of our cars.  We have to find other ways to get around if we want to save the planet and have a place for the next generations to live.  Our whole lifestyle has to change ... and those changes can make for better lives for us.  People somehow got by without cars and plastic and 'flying to Vegas for the weekend because I have nothing better to do' for all of the thousands of years of human life on this beautiful planet.  And I think that's what we have to go back to if we want to have a planet to live on.  Otherwise we are really moving into lunacy, but that seems to be where our rulers want to take us.  

So when Trump came to power and started imposing his crazy tariff plans ... the discussion we could have had in Canada is ... 'what really is our way forward?'.  What kinds of lifestyles do we Canadians want to have?  And we should have been having this conversation for the past 50 years.  If we were really a democracy maybe we would be having those conversations.   But we are never allowed to have that conversation; and instead we are told by our politicians and the media that the way forward is to have More.  And Faster.  Full speed ahead.  No time for discussion or talking or debate or analysis.  We need to get rid of the red tape and allow the corporations who have already destroyed so much of our society and our planet, we have to let them do whatever they want.  And if we do that, then 'they' will save us and take good care of us.  Yeah, right.  But that's the story being fed to us today.

To me the question is ... what do we Canadians really want.  I think that is a discussion we have to have.  And whatever we decide, I am happy to go along with that.  

Unfortunately, the people who run Canada do not want us to have those kinds of discussions about where we want to be going.  And we Canadians don't seem to have, at this point in time, the organization or education or leadership or ability to have those discussions.  If we were a democracy, our political parties and media and unions and etc... would be helping us have these kinds of discussions.  But all those institutions have pretty much been taken over by big business, so we can't count on them any more.

And 'what are we going to do' is rapidly becoming a life and death question.  Modern Mining is extremely poisonous, but mining is of prime importance for our Consumer Lifestyle.  The forests are the lungs of the earth.  But they have to be cut down to feed the Corporate Industrial State.  Oil and gas are even crazier at this point in time, but the fossil fuels are so tied into our modern lifestyle that we would be completely lost without them.  

And now Ontario is beginning to build more nuclear power plants so we can all have electric cars and ... live happily ever after. But it ain't gonna be that way.  We really do have to start to change a lot of things.  But before we can change anything, we Canadians have to start to have some power in our own country to do the kinds of things that we decide we want to do.  

Right now the corporations and the politicians have all the power ... and look at the disasters they have created for us   (while maximizing their own profits of course).  Housing; Health Care; Homelessness; The cost of living; food banks doing record business; plastic in our brains, the oceans acidifying, and interest rates going up.  It's win-win for big business with the rest of us paying the price.  

We can do better.  Realizing we've lost our democracy is one thing we have to do.  Plus we have to stop trusting what the corporate media tell us.  We need access to honest and full information; not just the information that a bunch of big corporations want us to have.  As one small example, CTV is owned by a corporation (BCE) where the chairman of the board is the former head of Canada's largest bank, RBC.  Do we really think that the banksters who run CTV are going to be telling us the truth about the important issues of the day?  Media is powerful; that's why the corporations own so much of it, and that's why we need a free press in Canada.  The corporate media we have now does not work for us.  And we forget that at our peril.  

We have been led into disaster and it's time we replaced our corrupt leadership with some real democracy and try to save ourselves and save the generations to come.  I think more democracy is the answer.  The question is, how do we get there from here.  More to come.