Tag: Environment

Canada in 2100: a milder Montreal, a dryer Vancouver, and a prairie-free Alberta

Though temperature changes of a few degrees of the earth’s surface might not sound like a lot, it will have a drastic impact on Canada’s geography. It is predicted that global climate change will result in almost 40 per cent of land-based ecosystems making changes from one ecological community type – such as forest, grasslands or tundra – toward another.

Ethical Oil: Part 3, NAFTA

If you’ve already read Ethical Oil: parts one and two, you’ve suffered through the realities of our energy market in this country. You’ve read the back-and-forth about the very existential quandary that seems to be occupying ivory-tower environmental thinkers.

Trying to make sense of Canadian energy policy is not for the faint of the heart, so I called Gordon Laxer. The University of Alberta professor has spent the past 29 years in Alberta, having followed Canadian energy policy through…

Toronto the Green

Before moving to Toronto for the rest of the summer I was warned about the dangers of biking on its streets. I’d need a helmet and some luck, I was told. And I’d heard plenty about newly elected Mayor Rob Ford’s lack of appetite for cyclists and their paths. In fact, the week I arrived, bike paths were making headlines as city council decided to remove bike lanes on Jarvis street they had set up one year earlier. The irony of the decision is that it will cost much more to remove the lanes than it did to install them…

Wave of protest: month-long anti-shale gas march crests in Montreal rally

If anyone thought the battle over shale gas in Quebec was finished, a wave of protest that has swept through the province washed those thoughts away in Montreal on Saturday. Organizers and supporters of the “Moratorium for a Generation” marched on the city, bringing to a crescendo a month-long trek from Rimouski in eastern Quebec and along the St-Lawrence River to downtown Montreal outside of…