Misunderstood, Misinformed, Prepared to Govern

"He's already sending children the message recreational drug use is OK. Now, he's delivering that message directly to children. That's wrong, on so many different levels ... allies in the media ... making excuses for his mistakes."
Justice Minister Peter MacKay

"...A remarkable thing happened yesterday when I answered a question from a student from the Sioux Valley High school. The students in the room applauded a politician with a message to stay off drugs, and that the current system is not doing enough to keep it out of the hands of kids. That the Conservatives would put out a statement condemning the courage showed (sic) by those students is shameful. Peter MacKay should retract his statement."
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau

Oops, there he goes again. Former President Ronald Reagan's favourite disparaging phrase for his policy detractors will do as well for Justin Trudeau representing the Liberal Party characterizing the Conservative government as truculently deficient in their duty protecting Canadian children from the allure of recreational drugs as Reagan's Republican chide to his Democratic opponents in his War on Drugs.

Not that U.S. Democrats were any less than emphatic in their intention to penalize the drug-pushers and -users among them, though it is usually those with a liberal bent anywhere in any society who covertly savour their brand of drugs while engaging in the political-socially-correct stance of denial and hypocrisy.

In Canada, prescription drugs are legal for particular medical uses, while recreational drugs are proscribed by law, the exception being that marijuana permits are available to vitiate medical conditions. But there is a strong and growing movement for the legal acceptance of mild recreational drugs like marijuana, while maintaining the legal blacklisting of more addictively harmful drugs.

Yet while the situation with respect to the illegality of drug use is being debated and considered, their universal use remains illegal, and criminal by definition. Spawning, it is so true, an illegal drug trade with all the squalid miseries that accompany prohibition, like drug pushers and their victims and the inevitable health toll that drug addiction takes, and its burden on society. A condition that would not change making recreational drug purchases legal.

The young questioner at the high school was more likely baiting Mr. Trudeau than questioning him.
Justin Trudeau is certainly not alone in admitting to having used soft drugs; many other people in responsible positions have casually acknowledged the same, even a figure as politically lofty as Barack Obama, having admitted to cocaine use away back when. But Justin Trudeau's use of marijuana is as recent as his political induction into the House of Commons.

And responding to an adolescent's (likely cheeky) question about the use of marijuana by cautioning the youth in the class he was addressing that medical science has pointed out that it can have deleterious effects on the still-formative brain and should be avoided when young, though it's perfectly all right to use it when they're older still doesn't address that getting stoned and say, driving, is as inimical to public health as alcohol addiction, for example.

Mixed messages both confuse and challenge young people. Who look for validation from 'cool' celebrities, but are quick to challenge the adult cautions thrown their way. The message given was inappropriate and dishonest. The response was partly due to a wish to ingratiate himself with the young and impressionable because he cultivates an aura of youth and wishes to impress future voters, and partly because Mr. Trudeau lacks a sense of inner caution, commonly described as common sense.

Common sense, if he had a dollop of it, might have constrained him from lauding China as a country whose eye is gimlet-fixated not only and exclusively on its bottom line of floating to the top of the industrial-trade complex for world domination as a mighty power broker, but on how to achieve that status while still 'going for green'.

His fallaciously-reasoned statement that China's totalitarian rule is "allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say "We need to go green fastest ... we need to start investing in solar", is most unfortunate. Chinese authorities have never much cared about the environmental and societal fallout of their expansion, energy and power plans.

It's why the Three Gorges Dam flooded valuable traditional farmlands and in the process made millions of Chinese peasants homeless without due compensation. China isn't able to spare valuable farmland; it's why they sign long-term contracts with African countries to farm theirs and take home the produce. And it's why that massive dam project is now recognized as having been ill-conceived with its problems of foundational cracks, flooding, earthquakes and collapse.

China supplies rare earth resources scarce to be found anywhere else on Earth for the construction of wind turbines. Their extraction has resulted in "a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China" which locals claim withers their crops and kills their animals, according to a report in the UK's Daily Mail. As though industrial sewage poisoning rural China's waterways wasn't bad enough.

As for solar, toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of solar devices are processed in China and rather haphazardly, without due regard to their effects. Toxic waste is left casually behind on abandoned sites that must eventually be cleaned up, but the government hasn't yet stepped up to deal with that problem, and nor have the industries that spawned them. And the situation isn't unique to China, but is present there.

In California, let alone China, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition informed Associated Press that 14 of 114 solar-panel producing companies responded to their request for information. "We find the overall industry response rate to our request for environmental information to be pretty dismal for an industry that is considered green" they said.

As for China looking to provide its energy needs through 'green' sources; not likely. Though the country avariciously seeks all manner of energy sources abroad, from natural gas to oil (and nuclear), most of its energy needs are met and will continue into the future to be met, by coal-generated furnaces. New technologies are able to offer cleaner coal-burning techniques, but it isn't clear that China has made any use of the chimney scrubbers.

As can be witnessed by the dismally injurious air quality that China's hundreds of millions of urban dwellers struggle to survive. And we listen to Mr. Trudeau moan about Canada's 'failed war on drugs' and presumably 'failed war on greenhouse gas emissions', because of the entitled and punishing attitude of the current Conservative-led government.