I'm guilty
because I didn't vote in the last federal election. No, not last Tuesday. Sadly, I wasn't allowed to vote in that one. (Kudos to the people who did, though.) I meant that I didn't vote in the last Canadian federal election. It was pure laziness, really, and maybe a lack of appropriate stamps. I'm usually very intent on voting, but the whole get-all-your-papers-together, send-in-this-form, receive-the-ballot-in-the-mail, send-back-the-ballot, and do this all by, say, last week kind of took me by surprise and it just didn't end up happening.
Aside: I also fully screwed up our Canadian taxes, and the Government of Canada is giving us WAY too much money right now. No worries, though. I'm on it. I just admit this to show that it's not exactly straight-forward to navigate this "living in another country" thing. It's often a bit of a pain.
But I do take full responsibility for not voting, and hence, our current predicament. It's hard to stay on top of things from afar, but thanks to the interweb (sigh... I miss Corner Gas), I can find out goodies like this on TheStar.com:
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NAIROBI, Kenya (CP) — Canada took its lumps at the UN climate conference Monday, tying with Australia in a “fossil of the day” award while being ranked near the bottom of an environmental group’s list for efforts to combat global warming.
...Sweden, Britain and Denmark won top ranking in the report, while Canada is among the bottom 10.
The only countries ranked below Canada are Kazakhstan, United States, China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
...Canada, as a signatory to the treaty, promised to reduce emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. However, the Conservative government has said the country cannot meet Kyoto targets for pollution reduction — a position that critics see as a virtual abandonment of the treaty, even though Canada hasn’t formally pulled out. The Conservatives have opted to concentrate on clean air and smog reduction, rather than the wider problem of climate change. [Federal Environment Minister Rona] Ambrose has set a goal of cutting emissions by 45 to 65 per cent from 2003 levels — by the year 2050.
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{blink blink} Wow. Good for us. We beat the U.S. for being only SLIGHTLY less concerned about climate change than Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan. Really? For Pete's sake, Iran is doing better than we are. What kind of legacy is this?Okay, yes. I appreciate the fact that the government is sending me $100/month for childcare expenses, and I swear I'm not spending it on popcorn and beer (that's coming out of a separate fund), but come on: 51st out of 56? Surely we do better than that? Sheesh.
Filed under
the environment
3 comments:
Why is Iran doing better for my sake? i didnt ask them to and I hardly ever spend any time there.
Ah, my dear Pete... I thought of you as I wrote that. :) I even accidentally started off spelling it "Peat", then remembered that it should be "Pete" and edited it.
How's it going?
it is going well. thanks for the star wars forward btw. make sure you show Kai the original trilogy and nothing else until he is old enough to realize jar jar is not cool.
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