I don’t know the answer. But when they start naming bird sanctuaries after this PM, the end must be near.
Naming a bird sanctuary after Stephen Harper is like naming a kids’ summer camp after Rob Ford. But that’s the plan of the Jewish National Fund, which held an impressive fundraiser last week to raise money for the project.
Proceeds from the annual Negev Dinner will be used to build the Stephen J. Harper Hula Valley Bird Sanctuary Visitor and Education Centre in northern Israel.
It is certainly a long and impressive name, using 65 per cent of the letters in the alphabet. Still, there is something faintly Soviet-era about it when spoken aloud. It comes tripping off the tongue, oddly forbidding.
Harper and the Herringbones provided the entertainment at the gala event. Even though the band would be better suited to a venue like the Nachos Room of the Octo Motel, where the lead singer’s dubious falsetto would go unnoticed, the audience, as they say, went wild. Cabinet acolyte John Baird oozed the joy of the recently saved and soon to be raptured. With a look heavenward, Jason Kenney looked ready to grab a tambourine and cut loose.
Steve’s usual Tim Horton’s crowd was in attendance. Gerald Schwarz and Heather Reisman, the Honourable Linda Frum and Howard Sokolowski, suits from the Royal Bank, the CIBC, BMO and TD, Senator Irving Gerstein, Deloitte, Rogers Communications, and the Asper Foundation.
Tables went in descending order from Leadership Circle, Ruby, Diamond, Gold, Silver and Bronze. In plain terms, you could pay as much as $100,000 for a table, as RBC and Nigel Wright’s former boss at Onex did, or as little as $10,000, as did the Asper Foundation and Senator Irving Gerstein.
The senator could still wave to his good friends at Deloitte who were at a $25,000 Gold table. Any way you slice the doughnut, a lot of Timbits were on display and a good time was had by all in a worthy cause. Say what you like about Stephen Harper, he has a way with the common folk.
While the lead singer of the Herringbones was getting his own bird sanctuary in Israel, Bloomberg Businessweek was reporting that by 2020 wastewater from the Canadian tar sands will cover 62,000 acres of Northern Alberta and possibly spread through the boreal forest ecosystem.
Big players like Syncrude are planning what are being described as “end-pit lakes”, thirty of them in total. If they are allowed to go ahead with their plans, Canada will have a new lake district.
But it won’t be like Windemere or Esthwaite Water in Cumbria, which inspired the English poet William Wordsworth (and which, by the way, is up for sale on eBay.) There will be no host of golden daffodils in this Canadian “lake district”. At best, it will eventually turn into what are being euphemistically called “replica lakes”.
A replica lake starts as a dump of toxic slurry covered by freshwater to a depth of sixteen feet — the amount of water allegedly required to keep the bad stuff on the bottom.
Eventually, these poison lakes will “replicate” living lakes, complete with fish, frogs and mosquitoes. The exact number and location of eyes, fins and legs remains unknown. But life will return, or so Syncrude scientists say. Turns out there are naturally occurring microbes in that sludge that suck the poison right out of those pollutants. That’s right, the poison lakes will heal themselves.
Canada’s greatest living freshwater scientist, David Schindler, isn’t so sure. He told Bloomberg, “Nothing is going to grow in that soup of toxic elements except perhaps a few hydrosulfide bacteria. All of the unforeseen consequences are being downplayed.”
Which pretty much sums up the Harper government’s entire approach to the environment. That’s why a bird sanctuary is a poor thing to attach to this politician’s name.
It was his government that took the filleting knife to Canada’s environmental protection laws.
It was the new Bird Man of Hula Valley who was in the driver’s seat when 1,600 ducks met their gluppy demise in a Syncrude tailings pond in 2008, the pictures going around the world.
It was the Harperites who closed the legendary Experimental Lakes Area, depriving Canada of a world-beating freshwater research facility.
Under the Harper government, Canada has sunk to last in the OECD countries in lowering carbon emissions.
And no matter which Harper appointee is in the Environment portfolio, rest assured Canada will have a lock on all future Fossil Awards.
Could this dismal record be the reason that The Economist has concluded that the moose has lost its shades? You will remember that just a decade ago the same prestigious magazine was writing about the “Cool Canada”, a place blessed with fiscal prudence and, as they put it, “social liberalism”. The emblem of that stature internationally was a moose with shades.
Ten years later, the same publication recently ran a story called “Uncool Canada”, about a land that had become a one-track petro-state pushing tar sands exports while doing little about climate change and “picking on the most vulnerable.”
So the David Suzuki Hula Valley Bird Sanctuary Visitor and Education Centre … yeah, that would work.
But Stephen J. Harper? No, if it’s true he’s on his way out, there are many more fitting memorials to his legacy his friends might consider.
There could be a Stephen J. Harper Correctional Institute, testament to his relentless commitment to tough justice; double-bunking only.
Or what about the Stephen J. Harper Fellowship for advanced studies into the ‘hoax’ of global warming?
Best of all might be the Stephen J. Harper Alberta and Pacific Pipeline connecting the bounty of the “oilsands” with the pristine waters off the coast of beautiful British Columbia.
As the PM morphs into a down-scale Glen Campbell, a sort of Rhinestone Politician, I have this one Christmas wish.
When next he sings, let it be to the RCMP.
Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.
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