SUMMARY

With Canada's environment comprising near tropical seas to arctic Ice, and near desert to the world's bread basket, and pure rivers and lakes to high mountains, and temperatures ranging below freezing to over 100 degrees, and an incredible array of plants and wildlife, we posses one of the most diversified environments in the world.

Since before Confederation, we and the world have come here to exploit this majestic country. By 2010, we now have complete dominion over what is left of our portion of this planet.

The CFP is intent upon leaving future generations of Canadians with a better Canadian environment than that which we have inherited. We believe that we can continue to develop our nation by making our environmental footprint smaller and smaller and ensure it works in harmony with the evolution of our natural world.

Environment

• Environment Stewardship
• Environmental Opportunities
• Innovation vs. Symbiosis
• Disposal vs. Re-Processing
• Material and Process Labelling and Classification
• Existing Hazards
• Environmental Contaminators
• Global Warming

Environmental Stewardship

Canada’s innate, physical, human, technological, informational and financial resources blend to form the environment in which we live and pursue our destinies.

Similarly, the basic elements of earth, water, wind and fire tend to be constantly on the move within Canada. In many instances they arrive from outside our boundaries, pass through and then leave us. It is the changes that we apply to them that determine the effectiveness of the stewardship of our portion of the planet.

Consequently, our environmental mission is undoubtedly to utilize these five resources and four elements in a mutually symbiotic rather than destructively parasitic manner. Whereas, such a concern or goal appeared unnecessary when much of the world was not understood nor even inhabited, by the 21st. century humanity is affecting our global environment from pole to pole. We can no longer live as parasites on this planet.

Many of the technological and scientific discoveries of the 20th century have helped to create a widespread global perspective within humanity. This new perspective may be just in time to help us begin to focus upon our metamorphosis from parasite to biotic beings.

Environmental Opportunities

The opportunities to transform all that we do into symbiotic environmental processes and systems represents almost unlimited scope for new: research, products, industries, institutions, businesses and other human enterprise.

With governments and markets being the forums of innovation, it is critical that Canada create a major environmental studies infrastructure with its’ own funding mechanisms.

In the recent past, major environmental pollution enterprises have applied their resources and developed innovations to reduce their contamination of our environment. Such research and improvements must be encouraged.

Innovation vs. Symbiosis

Unfortunately, we lack understanding of the potential for reversing many of our technological creations and thus we aren't presently capable of achieving a symbiosis with these products and our environment. Consequently, we face a dichotomy between human innovation and environmental symbiosis.

We understand how one drop of dye can change the colour of a whole jar of water. Thus, we should be able to understand how relatively small quantities of some pollutants can affect major portions of our environment. Clearly, we must ensure that adequate resources are made available to discover the solutions to our dichotomy with nature.

Disposal vs. Re-Processing

Burying toxic material at sea is utter foolishness from an environmental recovery/ restoration context. We must find the way to neutralize such materials while we still have relatively easy access to them.

At a not too distant point, we may even have to consider the possible necessity to transport unmanageable substances to outer space rather than risk further deterioration of our planet. Alternatively, we may have to find a way to transport dangerous material to our planet's inner core for incineration, although there may be risks of creating dangerous imbalances even there.

Most people would see the wisdom in limiting the creation of significant quantities of new substances and biological entities until the reversal processes are understood so that their components' environmental balance may be restored.

The CFP will support policies that would enable greater understanding and application of these reversal processes.

Material and Process Labelling and Classification

The CFP would encourage global acceptance of product labelling and classification that signifies the degree of environmental neutralization achievable by a process, substance, material or product.

Existing Hazards

At this time, (2009), all across Canada there are small fenced plots spread throughout most communities where toxic materials are stored in barrels and possibly shipping containers. There are no definitive policies and programmes to deal with such materials. A tiny fraction gets expensively transported to mine sites and is then stored out-of-site, out-of-mind.

Such material stashes, and proliferation of sites, does not represent a responsible approach to environmental management.

The CFP would support the relocation of such materials and the strategies and remediation steps needed to eliminate or minimize the potential for environmental contamination.

Environmental Contaminators

In some ways, every person is an environmental contaminator due to our use of processes and products the natural environment can not destroy. Thus, it is unrealistic to expect us to eliminate contaminants in this generation or the next.

Nevertheless, we can begin the processes to decrease future contamination and clean up exisitng contamination. In fact, almost everyday humanity is making new discoveries to help us fight this battle.

The Kyoto Accord is a noble attempt to rally political will to move in the right direction. The CFP naturally supports their broad aims, but the CFP 's perspective is more interested in supporting the discovery of practical means to reduce and eliminate pollutants than to force the shut-down of economical enterprises within Canada.

Unfortunately, but also pragmatically, there is no escaping the fact that by far the greatest share of environmental pollutants is created by large enterprises. A few of these may be based in Canada, but of course most are not. Consequently, the power of our government to force improvements is very limited.

On the other hand, we may be in an excellent position to work with these organizations to discover and create new and innovative solutions to their environmental issues.

Global Warming

In spite of extensive research that blames our industrial development for global warming, there are many who argue that this is merely a normal planetary cycle we are experiencing during this century.

The CFP is not interested in taking sides on this debate. The fact is that as long as we place a very high priority on cleaning up our environment, we will all come out ahead. Time and resources spent on debate would be better used for dealing directly with our problem.

Our policies will reflect strategies to clean up industrial processes and other sources of environmental contamination. The time for debate has passed, and the time for action has arrived.