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Peter Kent is a big fat liar! Response to “money laundering” allegations
2012-05-05  |  John Bennett

This week Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent has made repeated allegations that environmental groups are “laundering money”. This is a serious charge because according to the federal government’s own website: Money laundering is the process used to disguise the source of money or assets derived from criminal activity.

This is beyond anything in my experience and is absolutely irresponsible. A cabinet minister is going around spouting serious allegations without proof and the media is repeating them without doing anything to investigate the validity of his statements.

This is McCarthyism. Period. Back in the late 40s and early 50s Senator Joe McCarthy made a career out of unfounded...

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Bike Rage
2012-04-13  |  John Bennett

This blog was going to be about “bike rage”. I witnessed an incident yesterday walking to work.  I heard an angry yell and an expletive from a woman on bike enraged with the rider in front of her who was dawdling along in the bike lane chatting on his cell phone. The yell was so powerful and heartfelt you could feel the rage across the street. Yet, the dawdler didn’t seem to notice.

Before I could start typing however, I participated in a news conference on Parliament Hill. Yes, if I wear a tie and jacket they still let in the building (for how long?).

There is a company in Peterborough that uses radioactive tritium - a known carcinogen - to produce EXIT signs among other things (apparently the...

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Who's Next?
2012-04-04  |  John Bennett

Sometimes you just don’t want to be right.

In the Sierra Club Canada national office we are busy preparing our 2011 annual report. As I go through my files from last year (wow – we certainly were busy) I came across an email that rattled me. It was the last email I sent to supporters in December. In it I outlined the disturbing developments we saw in 2011 and what I thought it all meant.

Much like watching troop movements across the frontier, I could see an impending invasion. The email, in fact, documented the beginnings of an all-out assault on environmental protection in Canada - and the protectors. We could see signs of it coming a couple of months earlier (I mused about it in my blog).

After...

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Government spokesman should apologize for derogatory and inacurate comments
2012-03-22  |  John Bennett


Dear Friends,

Below find a letter that I sent yesterday to Patricia Best of Natural Resources Canada.

It pertains to remarks she made to Canadian Press about Sierra Club Canada, which we feel are inaccurate and derogatory.

Sincerely,

John Bennett, Executive Director
Sierra Club Canada
jb@sierraclub.ca

Follow me on Twitter

Patricia Best, Director of Communications
Natural Resources Canada
21st Floor, Room C2-2
580 Booth Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0E4

Wednesday, March 21, 2012M

Re: Apology

Dear Ms. Best,

...
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First Nations the real target of government’s war on environment
2012-03-14  |  John Bennett

I may be a little more preoccupied with the government campaign to marginalize environmental groups (more than most) so apologies to those who feel I’ve been harping on this too much.
 
Speaking of harping … it’s Harp Seal hunt season and there is no ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for to the seals to give birth (yet the government has given hunters a quota to kill 400,000 pups). Climate change is putting the seals and seal hunters out of business. A sensible government, one might think, would be putting the fossil fuel industry out of business in response. Instead, of course, it is trying to put people like me out of business.
 
Or is it?

Are environmental organizations the real target of the Harper government? Is curtailing the power of the environmental movement what all this talk of “radicals” and meddling “foreign interests” is about.  It might be if we had any real power and...

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