RE: Standardized Testing is a Good Thing — November 29, 2011

Vindication for all your negative comments about education. Did you know that although schools were closed for Remembrance Day, many also closed on the Monday, supposedly to let parents have a long week end for shopping in the U.S.? The teachers were in, though. Then, of course, they had that day off for time for the “We” Day celebration at the MTS Centre with Al Gore and Mia Farrow. Far too many days off compared with countries that score the highest in the world tables. Mind you, Finland is often at the top but has fewer school hours than most countries.

Just as an aside, the NDP has long been known to have negative feelings about testing but the Conservative party and particularly Mr.McFadyen were, at one time, very much enthused about introducing more testing - until the last election, when they rarely mentioned it, Mr. McFadyen having had "meetings with teachers" ! E-mail from Winnipeg

RE: Smart Green Climate Change Quiz — October 4, 2011

Do you guys get paid directly by the Koch Brothers or is the money funneled through the Heartland Institute? Your website is propaganda. Your science is junk. Your language deceptive, your aims omnicidal. I hope to live long enough to see all of you brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. Have a nice day, climate criminals . . .   -- Email from Will Watson

RE: Time To Hold Environmental And Climate Doomsayers To Account — November 4, 2010

 

RE: Garden Chemicals — March 25, 2005

What are Mr. Penner’s qualifications and research experience in the area of pesticides and their impacts on ecosystems and biota? Mr.Penner has a diploma in agriculture and is a farmer. He has been an avid propagandist for the hog industry in the province, espousing its benign impact on the environment. His credibility in this area is therefore minimal, relying on hearsay and propaganda from the proponents of spray and pray agriculture which current biological knowledge and modern agricultural ecology clearly indicates is on its way out. - Bill Paton, Brandon

Read more and Rolf Penner's response

RE: Drug Dealers and Global Warming - Parallel Parables? — October 1, 2007

I read with interest several articles complied by your Centre on the present debate re: global warming & climate change. I am a retired scientist from Environment Canada and I hold a dissenting view of the present view of the science. I feel that the global warming science has not been well understood nor well explained by its proponents and especially by the environmental lobby.

In my view Global Warming & associated climate change would be beneficial to Canada , a cold country with large areas in western Canada having long wintry climate which can be stressful to human as well as plant life.

I enlcose a file of an article I published in the UK based Journal Energy & Environment in September 2006. My article entitled " India's economic progress in a changing climate: benefits of global warming!" documents how India and its 1.2 billion people have made economic progress by adapting to a warmer climate of the last fifty years.

I believe that a warmer future climate would be beneficial to Canada in terms of reduced house-heating cost for most Canadians, longer grain and vegetable growing season and a robust growth in forestry in western Canada.

Most Canadians ( retirees like myself) would welcome a warmer future Canada. In my opinion, the deleterious impact of global warming has been exaggerated by the environmental lobby.

- E-mail from Dr M L Khandekar, Unionville, Ontario

RE: Our Green Dilettantes — May 9, 2007
What a great article. I am in complete agreement with you regarding our subsidized Hydro. I actually did not know until just a month ago that our rates were actually subsidized to BELOW delivery cost. That's just ridiculous! And the only companies we can expect to attract with that are companies with high electricity requirements, which means we lose even more money. I don't think Manitobans are actually aware of the details of this. E-mail from Manitoba

RE: Eat Beef to Help the Environment — February 21, 2008
Cattle ranching is spreading like a virus across the planet, gobbling up our precious, ecologically diverse and carbon dioxide absorbing forests. It is no exaggeration to say that the expansion of ranching is a crisis that must be stopped, if life on Earth as we know it is to continue. Richard Brunt, Victoria

RE: Eat Beef to Help the Environment — January 11, 2008
Please congratulate Robert Supuck for his great article appearing in to-days National Post. It's too bad more of the so called environmentalists don't share his views. E-mail from Gerry Kaumeyer

RE: Polar Bear as Poster Animal — April 16, 2007
We view the actions of the petitioners (Greenpeace, the Centre for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council) as being for purely political and fundraising purposes. We have pointed out to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife services that the petitioners in no way speak on behalf of the rights and interests of Inuit. - Letter to the Editor - National Post, Mary Simon, President, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami

Ghost of Kyoto: Government Control by Any Means
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is manipulating a completely unnecessary and scientifically unjustified control of energy and must be stopped. Fortunately, the Texas case is currently stayed by a court order, but the EPA’s history is to do anything to achieve their goal. There can’t be enough articles about what EPA is doing because it is a serious threat to freedom.

International Climate Policy Shouldn’t Punish Growth
Canada has made meaningful progress toward making our economic activity more sustainable. Each dollar’s worth of economic activity in Canada today generates, on average, 25 per cent less greenhouse gas than the same dollar of economic activity did in 1990. In other words, despite hand wringing over oil sands activity and other types of development, our economy is environmentally much more efficient than 20 years ago. Despite efforts to cast Canada as a climate rogue, the dull reality is that Canada’s performance in recent years is closely aligned with several other countries that have experienced equivalent population and economic growth.

An "Eco-Judas" Comes to Brandon
Wood is the most sustainable and renewable resource that we have and using more wood means, according to Dr. Moore, that we will have more forests. He says that buying a wooden two-by-four is essentially an order to someone "out there" to plant more trees.

Saskatchewan's Recycling Woes
Inevitably, Saskatchewan has reacted to the unwelcome imports with a barrage of regulations that have increased its costs. At first, people lugging in loads of cans ran into daily limits on containers eligible for refunds. They had to prove they were residents of Saskatchewan. But it never worked. The smugglers simply broke the large truckloads into smaller batches and arranged to return the interloping cans over several days.

Eco-Fascists
Eco-Fascists deals with two related topics: (1) the difficulties Nickson experienced in securing permission to subdivide her property on Salt Spring Island and (2) the larger context of North American environmentalism within which this local process unfolded. The two are linked because the “incidents” she encountered on Salt Spring ‘came from a plan, one that has been carefully devised and put into place over the past thirty years.’ Let us begin with the Salt Spring story.

Time to Scrap the Maps
Time to Scrap the Maps

Radical Environmentalists Part of Economic Meltdown
Armchair environmentalists who don’t understand the science, who want to tell other people how to live and think government can solve all problems.

Garden Chemicals and Intellectual Honesty
As to the market declining, Dr. Paton has once again neglected to do his homework. According to the Croplife Canada annual report, non-agricultural herbicide sales in Canada increased 16 percent in 2003 over 2002. Despite all of the politically correct hoopla around pesticides, Canadians are in favour of them now more than ever

Hype Versus Reality on Climate Change
Astrophysicist Willie Soon and his colleague Selvaraj Kandasamy have written an excellent column that pulls the rug further out from under the climate crisis alarmists. While its main focus is on India, the article offers two important lessons for the United States and Canada.