Canada's Environmental Voice
Toronto has a seemingly neverending cycle of film festivals, but only Planet in Focus trains its crosshairs exclusively on environmental concerns. The 14th annual version (from November 21 to 24) featured a slate of strong, complex and curious documentaries, and another handful of very well deserved PiF award winners.
Graphic by nik harron Ontario made a small splash in the financial world at the end of October when Premier Kathleen Wynne and two top cabinet ministers announced the province was set to become the first Canadian jurisdiction to issue “green bonds,” a debt tool for governments to raise money […]
DAVID SUZUKI MY FATHER. My earliest memory from childhood was when I was four, and he was taking me camping. It was my father’s absolute love of the outdoors. He was an avid gardener. He would gather plants and small trees wherever he went and plant them in his garden. […]
There are SOME things you will find on almost every university campus in Canada. There are the chants of orientation week, quiet corners in libraries, goofy mascots and long lines for coffee in the mornings.
The last I saw Hermann Scheer, he was walking north up a side street from Unter den Linden in Berlin. It was mid-evening in August 2009 and we’d been talking for well over an hour, seated at a small table on the sidewalk next to the Café Einstein, an establishment […]
In 2011, the CEOs of oil companies operating in the tar sands were found guilty of ecocide in a mock trial staged by the Eradicating Ecocide Global Initiative. The trial was part of British lawyer Polly Higgins’ campaign to have ecocide recognized as an international crime by the United Nations. […]
AS I WRITE these words, a battle quietly escalates. Two weeks ago in New Brunswick, on the heels of a tone-deaf throne speech in Ottawa, RCMP officers invaded an illegal1 blockade by the Elsipogtog First Nation in protest of shale gas exploration on their land. The pepper spray, rubber bullets, barking […]
THE ATHABASCA RIVER begins in the Rockies and flows northeast, joining the Peace, Slave and Mackenzie to form Canada’s biggest river system. Just outside Jasper National Park, the river slides past the town of Hinton. In 1955, a pulp mill was built there to convert the local forest into Reader’s Digest.
Ontario’s green energy plans have been modelled on the success of Germany’s national program to switch to renewable, non-carbon energy sources. The Feed-in Tariff Program, Green Energy Act legislation and decommissioning of coal generating stations are all part of the provincial government’s push to emulate similar German initiatives.
