Happy New Year from here

Well, it is the first day of a new year, and I almost stayed awake to welcome 2017. It is a big year here because Canada will be 150 years old on July 1.

I'm not quite that old.

Our national broadcasting network, the CBC (both television and radio) provided us with plenty of memorabilia in addition to the news last night.

However, it breaks my heart that one of the headline news stories told of yet another attempt at mass murder, this time in the Philippine province of North Cotabato, known as one of the food baskets of the area, with its vast plains and rolling terrain supporting the province's agriculture-based industry.
http://cotabatoprov.gov.ph/

Meanwhile Syria, long shattered by a most horrific war, has now lost most of its population.

Think about that...what if most of the population of your country was snuffed out? Snuffed out by terrorists, and in many cases  by its own military which, in the process of  fighting the terror, accidentally killed many of its own citizens.

Look out your window. Are you home today celebrating the new year? What if the view outside your window suddenly included tanks, multiple military vehicles, and columns of soldiers...your own as well as an enemy's?

It is difficult, in peaceful countries, to imagine those horrors. Dead babies...and toddlers who died because they couldn't move fast enough to outrun the tanks.

To use a phrase common to my generation, the mind boggles.

Not to be outdone, much of the northern part of North America is fighting a war of a different kind...a peaceful war for a peaceful reason...to keep intact our mountains, forests, and plains.

It grieves me that some of my favourite Canadians will be affected negatively, at first, if the pipelines across Alberta and British Columbia are put to rest. There will be a new wave of unemployment, and some people will suffer.

I believe there is a solution. If, instead of giving Kinder Morgan the go-ahead to twin its pipeline across Alberta, across the Rocky Mountains, and across British Columbia to the coast, the federal government (this means you, Justin Trudeau) were to re-train, with pay, the displaced workers from the oil patch. New skills will mean new results.

Now, however, disaster looms. Any coastal waters, anywhere, contain fragile ecosystems which would be devastated by an oil spill, and with all the tanker ships containing Alberta oil through the coast of BC, there is an increased...not somewhat increased, but greatly increased...potential for an oil spill that will devastate all of those ecosystems.

A break in a pipeline could speak doom to Alberta's fertile prairie, also The potential for destruction is not confined to the oceans alone. Food production...so vital to our population, could be affected, and of course rivers on both sides of the Rockies could be polluted. The Rockies themselves could be devastated.

Meanwhile, down at a beach on the BC coast...from the humble clam to the magnificent Orca, and any of the hundreds of species in between, all are in danger from increased oil tanker traffic.

There could be a solution, if the federal government would look at it from a different perspective...if it tried looking forward with a solution, not a problem.