What's Safe?

Opinion: Safety in Canada needs to be restored.

In my past few blogs: Greening Canada, Freedom of Research, and Protect Our Waters, I've been sharing some basic ideas on what Canada needs to do to restore Government, and our economy, after our Stephen Harper Government. One of the biggest targets that Stephen aimed at was science. Canada was a world leader, before it was quietly muzzled and broken. By oppressing reality, one can enable ideology. 

If we don't have the metrics to determine if something is “bad”, it must be “good”? Was that Stephens thinking? When Stephen Harper ignorantly eliminated the long form census, it wasn't to brand future libertarians on “small government” and privacy, it was to hide the truth, and nothing but the truth, from Canada.

As evidenced by Canada's blind faith in safety, and the magical self-regulating free market, there are many examples of risks our Government should not take with our future. It's troubling to see the results of this contempt of duty to protect Canada. We have unsafe infrastructure, unsafe oil trains, unsafe pipelines, unsafe mining operations, unsafe food supplements that are untested, unsafe & untested designer synthetic drugs delivered by untested e-cigarettes, unreliable population data critical to national security, etc. It's a mess. If we need safer streets, we need better science-based road designs.

Canada needs to control which companies can operate here, and which products are safe to sell. Today, I noticed a hashtag trending on twitter, #GreenEconomyON. Some corporations, touting green solutions for Ontario. The irony is that one actually polluted our Great Lakes with untested products. They themselves stopped producing the product, which is positive, but only after years of public activism. Shouldn't corporations and products be proved safe before we can let them operate or sell products? Shouldn't the Board be responsible? Shouldn't they take ownership of their activities?

Without a higher standard, and quality science to measure safety, Canada will continue to play this dangerous, sometimes deadly, sometimes toxic, game with our future. If we want a safer Canada, we need to use a scientific approach.

Enjoy!