What's the Matter with Canada?
Oh, Canada ... The country that prides itself as the social-policy soul-mate of Scandinavia--with universal health care, progressive drug policies, gay marriage, and yes, even legalized swingers' clubs, of late--has elected as its leader a former oil-and-gas man from Alberta, the Canadian equivalent of Texas. Huh?
On Monday, Canada's Conservative Party won the majority of seats in parliament, ousting the once-formidable Liberal Party from power for the first time in 13 years. Paul Martin, who became prime minister in 2004, resigned as head of the Liberal Party.
What's an American Cascadian to think?
Well, Canada has four major political parties (the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois), so what may look like a sudden and unexpected upheaval is actually a more nuanced election than you typically get in the United States. Mix in the biggest political corruption investigation in years (the "sponsorship scandal," which involved widespread mishandling of a public fund used to promote federalism over separatism in Quebec), and you have a race that the incumbent Liberal government was itching to lose.
Upon closer inspection, the vote was tight, and the Conservatives, or the Tories as they're known north of the border, are left with a minority government--only 124 out of 308 seats in parliament--which means they have to reach out to other parties and form a coalition to actually govern. In fact, they only received 36.3 percent of the popular vote.
A mandate it ain't.
Puget Sound: Cruisin' For a Bruisin'
Washington's leaders have been making a lot of noise about cleaning up Puget Sound. Governor Gregoire wants to boost Sound restoration dollars by $42 million, or about 50 percent. It's earning the governor heaps of glowing media attention.
But the media has turned a blind eye to the astronomical number of cruise ships poised to foul local waters. A single line, Holland America, just announced that it will be increasing its cruises out of Seattle from 37 to 61. In 2006, according to the Port of Seattle, 200 cruise ships with enter and depart Puget Sound (roughly a 30 percent increase from 2005) and they'll ferry an estimated 735,000 people. Those cruise ships are potential ecological catastrophes, especially when their dumping practices are not actually, uh, regulated, as they are in California and Alaska.
What damage can a cruise ship do? According to WashPIRG:
In a day, a typical cruise ship of 3,000 passengers and crew produces 30,000 gallons of sewage, 270,000 gallons of other wastewater, and additional gallons of hazardous wastes, biomedical waste, oily bilge water, and solid waste.
You do the math. What I mean is: multiply each of those numbers by 200, then multiply again by the number of days each ship is in the Sound, and you'll find the potential environmental impact of just one year of the cruise industry. And the threat to Puget Sound is not just hypothetical. A Norwegian cruise line dumped 40 tons of human waste near Whidbey Island a couple of years ago. Oops.
