Monday 28 April 2014

It's not just me ... and it's not just climate

This commentary on Canada's falling standing globally in the top-tier UK medical journal The Lancet pulls no punches. It will not come as news to anyone involved in climate policy discussions in Canada that the HarperGovernment(TM) has sought to muzzle federally-funded climate and environmental scientists. What's new here is how this is being noticed abroad, and the large negative impact this and Harper's other pro-industry ploys are having on Canada's world status.

The commentary points out several independent, global performance rankings on qualities other than GDP on which Canada's standing has been plummeting. I'll offer that tracking performance on these rankings is one good check on the job performance of our federal government. If we are dropping on civil society indices of openness, that's a big strike against the PM and party in power. Our fall to 55th out of 58 on the Climate Action Network ranking is just one more sign of this extremist skew. But hey, we're still not quite as bad as Khazakstan, Iran or Saudi Arabia (remember, we're the "Saudi Arabia of tar"!)  It cannot help our credibility in challenging Putin's expansionism when our ranking on this scale falls below that of Russia.