Air pollutants have cost Canada $120 billion per year, according to recently released figures from Health Canada, a toll that roughly equals the value of all oil and gas exports.
The health burden from pollutants in the air that come from industrial activities like oil and gas extraction, mining, manufacturing, construction, and transportation — as well as natural events like forest fires — contributed to 15,300 premature Canadian deaths in 2016, the most recent year figures are available.
I highly recommend this interview with Kim Stanley Robinson about his most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, which charts an imaginary path through our realistically projected future of ecocatastrophe. It's simultaneously brutal and optimistic. The interview delves into some of the book's main themes.
On May 29, 2020, in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration marched about a half-mile from Oakland’s Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building. Around ten o’clock at night outside the federal building, as the protest continued close by, bullets spewed from a moving vehicle striking security personnel and killing one.
New calculations show a moderately ambitious tax on the ultra-rich would generate $19.4 billion for public coffers in first year
What if there was one simple policy that could raise the federal government an extra $19 billion or so to pay for a just recovery from the pandemic, with the side benefit of ever so slightly decreasing the chasm of inequality between the ultra-rich and most people in Canada?
New research from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows that even a moderately ambitious wealth tax could do just that.
