Delivering A Toxic Message

Eco icon David Suzuki had some strong words for the mayor when he dropped in last week to urge the setting up of an online registry for industrial polluters. Right now, a staggering 40,000 companies in the city – that's more than 95 per cent – fall below the reporting threshold, which only requires reporting amounts of pollutants greater than 10 tonnes per year. Last spring, the Board of Health announced with some fanfare plans for a right-to-know bylaw but, alas, backed off and urged more talks (read more foot-dragging) with "stakeholders." It's in Miller's hands now. His people say he's planning to include some form of waste disclosure in his smog plan. Yes, it's complicated. A bylaw will require a huge amount of co-operation from several city departments. But how long are we going to go on believing that industry canard that discharges are proprietary info and that disclosing discharges may compromise a company's "competitiveness"? Let's hope not another 20 years.

But we must of missed some of the message......especially who is behind Suzuki and how much of his mantra are they adhering.

Y2Kyoto: Suzuki Foundation Funded By Encana

David Suzuki, on the John Oakley show:
I’m not getting any money from my foundation. I’m getting my money, the foundation gets its money, from ordinary people. We don’t take government money, corporations have not been interested in funding us. We get it from ordinary Canadians across the country. 40,000 thousand of them and we get some foundations in both Canada and the United States. So that’s my agenda. We speak on behalf of the people that fund us.

(To hear the audio clip click here.)

Joseph C. Ben-Ami;
Corporations uninterested? Is it possible that the Great Suzuki has failed to attract a single corporate donation to his feel-good campaign to save the earth? Not one?
Actually, the David Suzuki Foundation’s annual report for 2005/2006 lists at least 52 corporate donors including: Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, Warner Brothers, RBC, Canon and Bank of Montreal.
The David Suzuki Foundation also received donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta’s principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including the OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees’ and Pensioners’ Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants... which begs the question – is Suzuki now pro-nuclear power?

If I were less generous I might be tempted to accuse Suzuki of hypocrisy for accepting donations from corporations that he must believe contribute significantly to the production of greenhouse gases, but that would miss the point entirely. The real issue is that, contrary to his clear assertion, the David Suzuki Foundation does receive funding from corporations.

Come on Joseph if the question was posed directly Suzuki would distance himself from the foundation that carries his name.