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News
News in brief
Population shrinkage and highway defeatage
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Let the population, and the economy, shrink
Track the rise of the birth rate issue. It’s a sleeper now, but it’ll be the issue du jour some jour soon.
Canada’s birth rate has been declining for decades and now sits somewhere around 1.6%. Demographers estimate that nations need a 2.1% birth rate to maintain a steady population. Canada’s population has almost leveled off at about 32 million over the past decade, thanks to immigration.
For some reason, a steady or declining population is regarded as a catastrophe, and major media, like the Vancouver Sun earlier this week, are featuring editorial discussions about how to “fix” Canada’s “problem”. (The Sun’s proffered solution is for the federal government to subsidize fertility treatments to generate more babies born to Canadian mothers. The article by Dianne Rinehart says, “Immigrants increase traffic congestion, pollution, strains on social services, schools and transit, and social tension.” Seems the Vancouver Sun hates immigrants, or is that taking words out of context?)
The issue is more acute in Italy, with a birth rate of 1.2% and attitudes toward immigrants somewhere south of Rinehart’s and the Vancouver Sun’s, and in Japan, birth rate 1% and even worse attitudes toward immigrants than in Italy.
Strongly-felt urges to obey religious instruction, deeply implanted in the American psyche from the Puritan settlements onward, have enabled the US to maintain a natural population growth. Pro-growth propaganda emanating from the US, which percolates up through political debates on every issue there, prevents any rational discussion of how to accommodate population and economic shrinkage in Canada or anywhere else.
How to stop the highway
Meetings and speeches and bake sales made an important contribution to the defeat of provincial and city plans to build a freeway through the Eastside in the 1970s. But what really turned the tide was the march by Begbie Elementary mothers out onto the freeway itself, blocking it for most of one rush-hour morning.
Similarly, the Car Free festivals on the Drive, email lists, public forums, and letters to newspapers and to the transport minister are an important part of the effort to defeat the wrong-headed widening of Highway One, twinning of Port Mann Bridge, and installation of major new port facilities in Delta. But what will really turn the tide against Gateway is something like a mass movement of physical bodies out onto the exit ramp off the highway onto First Avenue, and the erection of an occupation camp there by one group of people, till they are removed by police with injunctions, then another group, then another.
Were drivers on the freeway outraged at the mothers back in the day? Sure they were. The newspapers condemned the action, and letters to the editor were full of freeway users angrily telling the mothers that that was no way to get what they want.
But you know what? Look out your window, walk down your street. Is there a freeway going through the Eastside? Nope. They got what they wanted.
Gateway, like the Freeway, is simply not going to happen. The government will choose to come around either before a lot of expense and trouble is invested, or after all the time, expense and trouble, but either way, that’s going to be where it ends up. This is what needs to be communicated now while the government still has that choice. That message is only sent by direct action taking place on the highway itself.
No to Money Mart
Money Mart, the blood-sucking financial service company that preys on the down-and-out with usurious terms, wants to open an outlet in the new building at Commercial Drive and Venables. The presence of a Money Mart in any community is a magnet for crime. The Grandview Woodlands Area Council is trying to prevent Money Mart from opening another store on Commercial Drive, but the City of Vancouver, while sympathetic, is unable to help.
Public pressure, on the other hand, is both legal and effective. Write, phone or fax and tell them: “You are not welcome at Venables and Commercial in Vancouver.”
National Money Mart Company
401 Garbally Road
Victoria, British Columbia
V8T 2K1
Phone: 250.595.5211
Toll-free: 1.866.205.2274
Fax: 250.595.0410
Email: info@moneymart.ca
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