Not-so-green Tories

In their never ending quest to maintain their "green" image, the federal Tories have cut funding to several wildlife programs of Environment Canada. Now I'm thinking, if you're trying to convince Canadians that you actually give a damn about the environment, cutting programs to monitor that environment might not be the action you want to be taking. However that's what the Harper Conservatives have just done. Cuts are affecting the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Network, the Migratory Bird Program and the National Wildlife Area program. Now the Harper government is claiming the cuts are needed so they can focus on climate change, but looking into things it shows the opposite.

Part of being the "climate change champion" is monitoring that climate change. Two of the programs that have had their funding yanked monitor changes in ecosystem and bird populations, both of which are affected and hence are indicators of climate change. So in allegedly getting serious about climate change, the Federal Tories are gutting the programs that would show that climate change. Those programs would also show what effect, if any, the Tory climate change "plan" is having on the environment. With this little tidbit of information, it starts to look like the cuts are less about focusing on climate change and more about hiding the evidence. Hiding the evidence that climate change is happening, and hiding the evidence that the Tory "plan" is designed to not work.

Of course the programs haven't be officially canceled, just ask the Tories. The fact that their budgets have been reduced to either nothing or next to nothing works out to the same as canceling the programs is just semantics to the Tories. It all comes down to the fact the Harper Conservatives don't care one whit about the environment, and the window dressing they throw up around that fact to get votes is just that, window dressing. Harper and Co. don't believe that the climate is changing, and don't want to do anything about it. The fact that their view is out of step with the rest of Canada confuses them, so they pay lip service to climate change, all the while they gut the programs that help monitor that change and the effectiveness of any action the government may take to correct the problem. These are not the actions of a government truly concerned with climate change. They are the actions of a government desperate to cling to power.