CLAIMS THAT CANADA IS A ‘LAGGARD’ ARE DUBIOUS TO SAY THE LEAST.

If you walk any part of the beautiful trail on Lake Ontario between the iconic industrial cites of Oshawa and Hamilton, you will find magnificent parks and wetlands. But, for the likes of CPAWS, the Greater Toronto environment has been raped and pillaged.

While people may feel uneasy about the hysterical claims and increasing power of alarmist ENGOs, they are reluctant to speak out, partly because anybody who criticizes ENGOs will immediately be screamed down as being “anti-environment,” and likely set upon by the ENGO jackal pack. Meanwhile wasn’t this piece of allegedly bad eco news on the front page of a national newspaper?

CPAWS knows a good deal about pack hunting because it was among the ENGO signatories of the mob-like 2010 Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, CBFA, whereby Canada’s leading forestry companies were bullied by do-not-buy campaigns to sign onto an agreement that sought a veto over future development. Governments, local communities and native groups played no part in this shakedown, which collapsed earlier this year.

Like “the environment,” “biodiversity” is a term where the ideological devil is in the details. As humanity has flourished and spread over the earth, it has inevitably converted wilderness. However, humans are unique in actually being concerned about their impact on nature.

The richer they become, the more concerned they are, but also the more likely not just to demand, and get, higher standards, but to donate to environmental extremism out of guilt and/or ignorance.

Radicals declare that we are responsible for a “wave of extinction,” and that thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of species are being driven out of existence annually. In fact, the recorded number is in the low single digits. But like the environment more generally, biodiversity is a useful weapon for those who seek global control of human affairs, a political thrust with the UN at its epicentre.

The Biodiversity Convention — like the climate policy fiasco — came out of the UN’s 1992 Rio Summit, which was masterminded by the late great Canadian eco-meister Maurice Strong.

Strong may be gone, but his sub-species of power-hungry environmental alarmists is growing like an invasive weed, choking development in the process. It is no coincidence that a key part of Strong’s strategy was to fund ENGOs and allow them into the UN and Davos processes to pressure governments and corporations to support “sustainability,” that is, green socialism.

The Harper government sought, with spectacular lack of success, to streamline the environmental approval process. The Trudeau Liberals have promised to make it even more unwieldy, not merely by incorporating “traditional” — that is, non-scientific — “knowledge” into the process, but also by “connecting” human no-go areas. But whatever the sock government does, we may be sure it won’t be enough for the radicals, or for their mainstream media handmaidens.