$USTAINABILITY $CAM

Greetings, Comrades! Good news! Our wise and benevolent local government has come up with glorious plans to save us from ourselves! For a mere $340,000.00, the CVRD has hired an out-of-town planning company to come in and tell us how to live. The Green Socialist Manifesto (oops, I mean draft 3 of the Comox Valley $ustainability $trategy) is 80 pages long and available online at the CVRD website. I would heartily recommend that you take a look at it, and while you're there it wouldn't hurt to take a gander at how much we pay the staff to sit around all day picking their noses and rejecting septic tank permits.

This $ustainability $trategy is just bristling with wonderful green ideas, like cramming us all into cheap multifamily housing in town (a developer's dream), taking cars away from 85% of us, and forcing us to use mass transit. Oh yes, I'm sure that I will enjoy sitting on the bus with the winos and crackheads who will be infesting these future ghettos, but the plans include lots of "greenspace" conveniently located so the criminals can mug me on my way home from the bus stop. After all, bad guys have to make a living too - equal employment opportunities and all that.

We are also going to reduce our carbon footprint in a big way. In fact, the CVRD is so dedicated to this that they're planning to send a couple of their henchmen (make that loyal employees) on a free trip to China to explain to the Chinese people how wonderfully the green agenda is working in the Valley. That should reduce those pesky CO2 emissions all right - if they're planning to walk, bike, or take the bus. Excuse me, but isn't this a bit redundant? I mean, it's CHINA, for God's sake - they already KNOW how to be communists!

They'd also like us to reduce our energy and water use by 50%. Yes, I can see it now: after a fulfilling day of attending sustainability workshops, volunteering for community projects and memorizing the quotations of Chairman Mao, I can pick up my ration of organic tofu, shove it into my recyclable bag knitted from armpit hairs and trudge home to my hovel in the inner city. Then I could enjoy a fun night of squatting around in the dark smelling my own feet - with 50% reduction in water use, it won't be long before we all smell so bad you won't be able to tell us from the environmentalists.

Maybe we should reduce our crapping by 50% too. That would be a great waste-management strategy. We could even do offsets - constipated folks could sell their crap credits to people with diarrhea. There you have it: Mrs. Pelican's Crap and Trade program. Think I could get a grant for that?

PS: Take a look at what the Fraser Institute has to say about "Smart Growth". It's not pretty.