Why pick on David Suzuki?

Why pick on poor David and not the Pope? Because the Pope is not holding himself up as the leader and paragon of environmentalism, that’s why. A true leader should walk the talk. A follower can be forgiven for having lower standards. If Nader can live a Spartan lifestyle, so can Suzuki. If Robert Bateman has the courage to stick his neck out publicly on overpopulation in Canada, so should Suzuki. Or he should get off his pulpit and sit down in the pew with the rest of us. Not preach chastity while ducking into the whore house, as one so graphically put it. A Green Icon should not own two waterfront homes and commute between them. He should not pump raw sewage from his island home into the bay and then title a book called “David Suzuki’s Green Guide”. He should not recommend on page 98 of this book that people not fish, then go to the Queen Charlottes and over-fish with his native friends as a guest so that he could do so, while telling CBC listeners that they are living beyond their limits. He should not tell people to live on a “100 mile diet” while buying tropical fruit in the local Heriot Bay store. He should rack up so many air miles and burn up so many carbons. He should not have sired five children whose green house gas emissions should exceed 100 metric tonnes annually if theirs is the Canadian average. He should not, therefore, be a hypocrite.

But more important than that, Dr. David Suzuki should not be a coward and a liar, a liar by Mark Twain’s definition. Twain said that if you were in possession of a truth, but did not share it, you were a “silent liar”. Suzuki has intimated privately on many occasions that he knows that industrialized countries are “way overpopulated”, and that Canada is “nuts” for injecting people from countries of low consumption into this “hyper-consuming” economy just to make up for a falling birth rate. That he will not go public with this critical insight can be nothing more than a symptom of cowardice, of a deference to political correctness and fear of losing his 4 million dollar yuppie donor base and CBC fan club.

Why should the CBC play the same tired old record? For the reason they won’t play any other record that doesn’t sing a pro-growth tune. Oh, but Suzuki was against growth, you say. He even quoted Paul Ehrlich, “growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. But Elizabeth May uses that quote as well. But these people will not publicly renounce immigration. In fact Ms. May wants 330,000 worth of immigrants or more per year. How can you want to fuel the economy with that many consumers every year but be against growth? What these people are against is logical consistency and breaking taboos. To be against growth one must be against population growth. No consumer, however “green”, can cut his consumption to zero. Immigration presently accounts for 70% of Canada’s population growth and that percentage is climbing like a rocket ship. If you are sincere in your rhetoric against growth, you are opposed to immigration and you say that publicly. Private confessions don’t count. And you can therefore guarantee that you won’t be hired as the next host of the Nature of Things.

Tim Murray