“Renewable is Doable” is the key message of a voter education campaign launched today by WWF-Canada, The Pembina Institute, Greenpeace, Ontario Clean Air Alliance and Sierra Club, Ontario Chapter. The groups are asking Ontarians to consider a clean, climate-friendly energy future when they cast their ballot on October 10.
“All political parties are courting the environmentally-conscious voter,” said Dr. Keith Stewart of WWF-Canada. “People don’t look to environmental groups to tell them who to vote for, they look to us for clear, reliable information that will help them to evaluate policies, which is what the Vote for Clean Energy campaign provides.”

Continue reading “Environment Groups’ Education Campaign on Ontario’s Energy Future”

In 2005, Harmer co-founded PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), an organization which campaigned to protect the Niagara Escarpment
from a proposed gravel development which would see parts of the
wilderness on the Escarpment destroyed. To support the organization,
she and her acoustic band embarked on a tour of the Escarpment, hiking
the Bruce Trail
along the Escarpment and performing at theatres and community halls in
towns along the way. A documentary DVD of this tour was released in
2006 as Escarpment Blues.

Her fourth album, I’m a Mountain, was released in Canada on November 8, 2005 and in the United States in February 2006. It was nominated for the inaugural Polaris Music Prize,
a critic’s selected $20,000 cash prize for the Canadian album of the
year. Harmer has performed and canvassed in support of the NDP and Marilyn Churley, her friend in the fight for the protection of the Niagara Escarpment.

In February of 2007, Harmer received three Juno Award nominations. I’m a Mountain was up for Best Adult Alternative Album and her DVD Escarpment Blues
was up for Best Music DVD. Sarah herself was also up for Songwriter of
the Year for her work on “I Am Aglow”, “Oleander” and “Escarpment
Blues”. Also in 2007, she reunited with Weeping Tile to record a song,
“Public Square”, for the Rheostatics tribute album The Secret Sessions.

Source: Wikipedia (extracted Sept. 9th, 2007)

Continue reading “Sarah Harmer – Escarpment Blues”

Maggie Fox, a Toronto-based expert in social media, contends that when you’re building a social network, you don’t create communities, … Continue reading WorldChanging Canada: Maggie Fox interview, Part Two

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
Globe and Mail Update
September 7, 2007 at 10:10 AM EDT
Although the leaders of Ontario’s three main parties are currently on the hustings trying to highlight their political differences, they’re remarkably similar in one respect: all of them are laced with traces of chemical pollutants.

Continue reading “Party leaders equally polluted”

Ontario’s top three politicians are awash with pollutants, from PCBs to pesticides, stain repellents to flame retardants. And it seems the party leaders are more polluted than the average Canadian, according to a report released yesterday by a Toronto-based watchdog group.
Premier Dalton McGuinty, NDP Leader Howard Hampton and Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory offered up blood and urine samples to Environmental Defence to test for 70 different chemicals, including organochlorine pesticides, such as DDT, air pollutants called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, and, for the first time, bisphenol A, a chemical commonly used in plastics.
The tests revealed the politicians carried a total of 46 pollutants in their bodies, many of which have been linked to cancer, respiratory illness and hormonal problems. All three leaders had higher concentrations of chemicals than five families tested by Environmental Defence last year.

Continue reading “Politicians brimming with pollutants”