4 - Sunday, December 16. 1990 - North Shore News BEAT THE Re-greening aN or own ROR | Henn tnx NORTH PARK MEN’S HAIR 922-9612 of Canada on speeders USSR [_renx cova nonrs From page 2 cle, a 1988 Ford four-door, sus- tained approximately $15,000 in damage. The police described road sur- IT WENT into the press Jock-up for the briefing Jeading up to the an- nouncement by federal En- vironment Minister Robert de Cotret of the long- awaited Green Plan, carry- ing 20 years of accumulated distrust of Ottawa under my belt. ‘The plan, I was certain, would be smoke and mirrors, sleight- of-hand, at best a sheli game. It would be a study of spin-doctor- ing, deception and probably outright fraud. It wasn’t until about two hours later, when I had waded through the first 100 pages that something deep inside me began to stir — ever so grudgingly. Whatever the motive, somebody had put a helluva lot of work into this. As I listened to the bureaucrats from Environment Canada at the front of the briefing room spell out the initiatives contained in the plan, all 110 of them, it struck me that, despite my best effort to re- main utterly skeptical, they were slowly winning me over with their apparent sincerity. Even if they were civil servants. The plan, 1 began to suspect, is more than the sum of its political parts. In total, it is the sort of document I have been hoping to see since the late 1960s, when the scale of the environmental disaster towards which we are plunging first became clear. What we needed was a com- prehensive step-by-step guideline mapping out the way to escape from the ecological deathtrap into which our civilization had stumbl- ed. It was the sort of manuscript | kept expecting some genius to write. But nobody did. And I couldn’t write it myself (quite apart from lacking genius) because ft simply didn’t know enough to cover all the necessary angles. The closest document along these lines was the ‘‘Greenprint’’ issued by a coalition of en- vironmental groups two years ago, and while it was good, it showed the thin data base the groups were building on; they didn’t have a vast federal apparatus at their disposal. Oh, there are holes in the Green Plan, as released in Ottawa. Holes enough to make you want to shield your eyes from all the ul- traviolet radiation getting through. When I asked the bureaucrats who were briefing us why they had meckly accepted the year 1997 as the phase-out point for CFCs, when we all know that the Ant- arctic ozone hole is growing bigger all the time, the ozone shield over Canada is thinning dramatically, and frogs around the planet are suddenly dying out — a sure signal of impending UV radia- tion-induced catastrophe — they had no adequate answer. When | asked if their call fora capping of greenhouse gas emis- sions at £990 levels by the year 2000 meant that they were avoiding a serious commitment to reduce these levels by 20 per cent, as recommended by scientists, they were unable to give mea straight answer, a sure sign that the government was ducking the all-important greenhouse issue. When TE wondered aloud why there was no Environmental Bill of Rights included in the package, the reply was evasive to say the feast. Lastly, f wanted to Knaw why there was no mention in (he plan of any attempt to force niciear plants to ston deliberately dump- face conditions as wet and slick but not frozen at the time of the accident. The injured drives faces ob a charge of careless driving. The West Vancouver Police are i t y stepping up enforcement on un er Cypress Bowl Road in a bid to slow down speeding drivers travel- ling the mountain route. Our restaurant will be closed for filming THAT'S Mon. Dec. 17 thru Fri. Dec. 21 at 7:00pm HOW MANY CANADIANS Don Carmody Productions Ltd. will be ARE WHEEL- filming interior scenes for “The Hitman” CHAIR starring Chuck Norris. BASKET- ae we =} «6 BALL We apologize to our loyal customers for STRICTLY PERSONAL v PLAYERS any inconvenience this closure may cause. ing nuclear waste in nearby waterways. The bureaucrats again had no answer except a vague promise to monitor radioactivity. So the Green Plan is a long way from being the totally comprehen- sive document Environment Minster de Cotret tried to tell us it was. It may well be, as Skeena MP And NDP environment critic Jim Fulton argued later at a press conference that the entire plan amounts to nothing more than a gigantic slush fund that Tory can- didates can reach into to hand out Conate! C election goodies to various consti- ytox? tuencies over the next year. ) It also might very well be true, Pannciparnon as environmental! activists claim, that the entire package goes out of its way to avoid forcing any un- wanted environmental taxes or penalties on the Tories’ friends in big business, and cannot therefore be viewed as a serious effort to clean up the mess industry has created. Likewis., there is undoubtedly an element of truth in the allega- tion that the plan is merely a pro- paganda ploy launched by a bot- tomlessly cynical government to save at least one endangered species — itself. And that, i therefore, the Green Plan repre- sents nothing much more than err ris tmas Brian Mulroney's last desperate r roll of the dice. While the pian was flawed, in- complete and politically skewed, it aa 1 Plaza Lincoln Mercury Twenty years ago, a handful of people could barely imagine such a document. Twenty years ago, for that matter, Canada had just = Buy A NEW CAR OR TRUCK FROM PLAZA LINCOLN MERCURY BETWEEN nin | DEC. 16/90 & DEC. 24/90. YOU GET YOUR CHOICE OF ANY OF THE BELOW minister, a chap named Jack Davis, chosen in large part SONY PRODUCTS. : Sony C.0. & AMIFM stereo because he came from the one : Sony VHS video . caseette recorder province where environmentalism Ssscette recorder was any kind of a political factor. Today, a made-in-Canada eco-manifesto exists. implementing it is of course another business entirely. But its mere existence represents a quan- tum stride forward in collective understanding, maybe even wisdom. It contains, at the very least, a wealth of information never compiled in one volume be- fore. { think despite all the hard knocks against the Green Plan, that #* cannot be cursed simply for ' having been fathered by the ; te . Tories. Its mother, after all, was BM Stk. sAE4S Stk. #TP662 ; ecological necessity. 6 cyl, auto. 7 pass., Clearcoat $f 6 660 4 door, auto, aif, pwr. mirrors And while we may indeed have paint nec “J : already triggered irreversible chain reactions that will lead to en- vironmental disaster no matter what we do now, at least we won't go down without having mounted a serious effort to save ourselves. Who knows? The re-greening of Canada may just have begun.