C-300 Still Flawed

Canada’s mining industry spent a rare week under the national media’s heat lamps, as many reporters rallied to support the anti-mining Bill C-300, which is sponsored by backbench federal Liberal member of parliament John McKay, and is once again before committee in Ottawa.

Bill C-300 would give the ministers of foreign affairs and international trade new responsibility to hold Canadian resource companies accountable for their practices in developing countries by submitting annual reports to the House of Commons and Senate for review. The ministries could then sanction delinquent companies by keeping money from arms such as the Export Development Canada and the Canada Pension Plan.

The progressive Toronto Star kicked off the miner bashing with a front-page feature that essentially rehashed stories on Copper Mesa Mining’s (formerly Ascendant Copper) ham-fisted community relations in Ecuador in 2006 and Anvil Mining’s deadly Kilwa incident in 2004 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for which the company was cleared in 2007. The paper tried to extrapolate these two incidents to claim Canadian miners have a bad reputation around the world. (That a Star reporter with a hate-on for miners could only dig up such old examples of poor community relations, and that the two companies involved were actually American and Australian speaks to just how good the record of Canadian miners overseas really is, overall.)

Meanwhile, the taxpayer-funded and left-leaning Canadian Broadcasting Corp. predictably chimed in with stories bearing headlines like “Gold miners oppose rules on overseas operations” — giving the impression our miners are now operating in other countries without any regulations at all.

The peak came on Nov. 26, when Canada’s biggest gold miners and their supporters testified before the committee, and tried to fight back against salacious allegations made against them during previous weeks’ testimonies by anti-mining activists protected from slander charges by parliamentary privilege.

Bill C-300 is a solution in search of a problem, because Canadian mining companies generally behave very well in the developing world. And if they don’t, the host countries certainly have the bureaucratic and technical muscle bring them into line. To suggest they don’t have this regulatory capacity is one more example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to use George W. Bush’s phrase.

If the bill becomes law, the two federal ministers overseeing it will be deluged with complaints from hyper-politicized envirokooks and cranks from around the world, and will simultaneously be incapable of properly investigating the validity of any wild claims flooding in from remote places on the other side of the planet.

• The edifice of manmade global warming alarmism continues to crumble in the wake of “Climategate,” which stems from the email hacking of a server used by the world’s key global warming proponents at University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the U. K. The emails show a completely dysfunctional environment antithetical to the scientific method, with frank discussions on data fixing and the sidelining of rivals in the scientific community by perverting the peer-review process. The sheer volume of emails on how to shake down oil companies puts these “scientists” in the same league as Somali pirates throwing grappling hooks over another passing oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden.

The CRU director has stepped aside, if only temporarily, and the CRU has reversed itself and will release data it has for years fought to keep from public scrutiny. And the original raw climate data? It was all thrown out and only massaged data remains. How convenient.

The wider facts are stark: There has been no global warming since 1998, contrary to all the CRU’s once-vaunted climate models, and probably due to the cyclical, near-cessation in sunspot activity; the ocean level has not risen; there has been no substantial polar ice melting; there has been no upswing in tropical storms, contrary to dire predictions; and polar bear populations are healthy, as testified by our own Inuit.

Anthropogenic global warming is a hoax and possibly a fraud perpetrated by a segment of scientists and environmentalists eager for funding and anxious to surreptitiously advance a leftist agenda. Most Western politicians have gone along for the ride because the global warming hysteria allows them to carry out the biggest tax and liberty grab in world history, all in the name of “saving” a planet that gets along fine with or without us.

Thankfully more people are catching on: in Australia, the opposition Liberal party turfed its warm-monger leader Malcolm Turnbull for the feisty climate skeptic Tony Abbott, who says he’s ready to fight the next election on the issue.