Wow. I am still in shock by the extent of damage from the Harper administration. I am finding the news on this spotty and hard to find, but the best source of recent events is Peter Ross's Opinion piece in Environmental Health News called Silent Summer. The short of it is that Canada has fired all of their scientists in the Contaminants Research Program at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and is dismantling this program. This is the program that investigates accumulated contaminants in marine mammals. Odds are good that any scientific reports you've heard about flame retardants, PCBs, dioxins, etc. in the whales of British Columbia and Puget Sound came from Peter Ross's work.
The loss of this scientific program and world class researchers is an enormous loss to the scientific community; their work was well designed and provided essential knowledge for protection of our marine mammals. Perhaps as bad, this is only the tip of the iceberg for the Canadian and US environment (effects to the US are because we are downstream of Canada so we'll be affected by pollution crossing the international boundary). Indications are that Harper's government is changing the Fisheries Act so that regulations on polluters into Canadian waters will be more "lax" (non-existent is a better description in what looks like many cases).
Are our memories so short that we don't remember river's on fire? Massive fish kills? Water that people wouldn't swim in? All of this because of unregulated pollution and not that long ago (early 1970's). The environmental regulations like the Clean Water Act in the US and the Fisheries Act in Canada have been largely responsible for what we all take for granted now - clean water. I haven't even started on what we know about humans eating fish from polluted waters... that is if they survive this war on the Canadian environment.
As a nation who is benefiting from this? This is bad bad bad Canada.
Unbelievable.
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