Читать книгу Here's Proof Only We Conservatives Have Our Heads Screwed On Straight!!! - Lowell M.D. Green - Страница 9

Got a call not long ago from a guy with a very interesting question. “I had to pay five cents for a plastic bag to carry my groceries home yesterday,” he said, “I understand that, but can you explain why they charged me an extra cent for the HST? I thought this five-cent thing was a charity. First of all, one cent on a five cent purchase is a 20 per cent tax, and secondly, I didn’t think charitable donations were subject to tax of any kind!”

Coming up with answers to those questions took me the better part of a week and countless calls to various accountants, Revenue Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Revenue.

I couldn’t get anyone to provide a reasonable answer as to why stores are allowed to charge one cent HST on a five-cent item, which is, as my caller pointed out, 20 per cent. One woman at Revenue Canada had probably the best answer to that conundrum when she chuckled and pointed out that, “It’s pretty hard to find two thirds of a penny these days!”

The broader question however: “If it’s charity, why are we charged any HST?” is much more difficult to get clarified. What it seems to boil down to is that the five-cent charge for a plastic bag is not a charitable donation even though part or even all of the money goes to a registered charity. As an accountant pointed out, when you pay that five cents you are making a purchase—a plastic bag—and thus the HST applies. The money goes to the store, and must be declared to Revenue Canada as revenue. If the store then donates those five cents or any portion of it to a registered charity then it is the store that gets the credit for making a charitable donation. There is no law dictating that the money must go to charity. (Whew, I hope you understand all of this!)

But yes you are perfectly correct, when you insist that both the federal and provincial governments are making money off what (in some cases at least) is in effect a charitable donation. In other words folks, we’ve been bagged!

The real scandal here is the fistful of lies we’re being fed by various so-called environmental groups and individuals in order to justify the five-cent charge.

You may recall when these charges were first implemented we were expected to believe a fantastical story about a huge “island of plastic” somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. This island, we were told, is evidence of the terrible damage plastic is doing to the planet. We were absolutely assured that this five-cent charge will discourage people from using plastic bags, thus saving the planet from a horrible fate. Not only that but the money will go to help save polar bears, Blanding’s turtles, spotted owls, wood chucking woodchucks, coyotes, and other assorted “endangered” species such as beaver and Canada geese.

At first we were told this island was twice the size of Texas. Then, before you could turn around, suddenly the “garbage island,” as it is now called, becomes twice the size of the continental United States. And growing! Some reports claim the island threatens to engulf the entire planet!

Fortunately conservatives, with our superior intelligence, don’t fall for this sort of nonsense, but the intellectually challenged “progressives” are thrown into such a tizzy that they ride off in all directions shouting, “Send money to Gore/Suzuki!”

To give you an idea of how crazy this whole thing is here are just a few paragraphs of a story written by Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden that appeared in an environmental publication called The Independent. This wonderful bit of fiction and many other stories that are even more like fairy tales appear widely today on the Internet and are read and apparently actually believed by tens of thousands of incredibly gullible people. (Conservatives, as you know, lack gullibility.)

Here’s the story—as fanciful as anything the Brothers Grimm ever concocted:

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris—in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump—is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex” believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam is circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr. Moore founded, said yesterday:

“The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size of the continental United States.”

The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk—which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags—is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

It is perhaps one of the most incredible stories of the past century and it all stems, not from reality, but from the very fertile brain of a guy who grew weary of his woodworking business in California and decided to go after the really big bucks.

His name is Charles J. Moore. He now calls himself Captain Moore and, as you can see from the Independent story, he is now being described as an oceanographer. He is no such thing. He’s a woodworker who has a sailboat. At least he had a sailboat when he started all of this Alice in Wonderland stuff. He’s probably got a lot more toys today.

Moore claims that in 1997 he took a shortcut in his sailboat from Hawaii to California and suddenly discovered what he then described as a “giant island of plastic” floating in the Pacific.

Astonishingly, during the several hundred years man has been sailing in those waters no one, until “Captain” Moore came along, ever spotted this huge island or took this mysterious “shortcut.”

There have never been any pictures of this island and satellites can’t find it, even though it is apparently twice the size of the United States. In fact, in 2010 a legitimate research team set out to find this mysterious island—they dragged the area with large mesh containers for an entire day and discovered less than a handful of debris further east—closer to the California coast. Where the plastic was supposed to be the thickest, they dragged their nets for an entire day and came up with absolutely nothing. Not a speck of anything other than beautiful sparkling clean Pacific water.

None of this has stopped Mr. Moore (sorry “Captain” Moore) from tapping into a wonderful money stream. To legitimize his operations, Moore founded what he calls the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and as a director of this very prestigious-sounding outfit he’s written a few what he calls scientific papers setting off even more alarm bells about all the plastic that is supposed to be floating out there in the ocean.

Incredibly, many people actually take all of this nonsense seriously!

By the way, when Moore first declared he had discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” he claimed it was very visible. In fact let me quote directly from the biography of “Captain” Charles Moore that appeared on the Internet in February of 2010:

Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita and its Captain found their true calling after a 1997 yacht race to Hawaii. On his return voyage, Captain Moore veered from the usual sea route and saw an ocean he had never known. “Every time I came on deck to survey the horizon, I saw a soap bottle, bottle cap or a shard of plastic waste bobbing by. Here I was in the middle of the ocean and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.

This very visible island of bobbing plastic that stretched as far as the eye could see has now very mysteriously metamorphosed into a kind of plastic soup, which of course explains why no one has ever photographed it or seen it. It’s apparently why satellites, which can find a tick on the back of a speeding camel, can’t find it.

If you Google Captain Charles Moore or Algalita Marine Research Foundation you’ll see even more fantastic stories about how this plastic island grows larger by the day.

You will also notice at the bottom of every website is a large billboard saying DONATE TODAY. CLICK HERE.

This wonderful fairy tale is one of the major reasons we are now dinged five cents each time we need a plastic bag to carry our groceries home, plus of course the one cent for the government.

The other reason for the charge is the poster animal for the World Wildlife Fund—polar bears!

Right from the start of this giant plastic bag rip-off we have been told by some retailers that proceeds from the sale of the bags were going to the World Wildlife Fund to save polar bears, which, according to the environmentalists, are threatened with extinction because of global warming. Sorry, climate change. (It’s hard to stay current with the bafflegab.) How much money has been raised by all the stores charging for plastic bags I have no idea. I have tried for more than a year to get even a ballpark figure with absolutely no luck. Nor have I been able to determine how much money, if any, actually ends up in the pockets of the WWF that, by the way, has a truly incredible yearly income of more than 220 million dollars.

What I have learned however is that polar bears don’t need the World Wildlife Fund, or anyone, to save them. Their populations in almost every area of the North are expanding so rapidly that hunting quotas are being increased almost every year. In 2011, for example, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board almost doubled the number of polar bears hunters are allowed to kill in the Davis Straight area. This follows a 28 per cent increase in the quota allowed hunters granted for all of Nunavut in 2005.

According to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) and Polar Bear International the polar bear population in the late 1950s had dropped to about five thousand. Today however these organizations report that there are between 22,000 and 27,000 polar bears in the world—about 15,000 of them in Canada. Furthermore all the evidence is that their populations continue to increase.

So much so that Simon Awa, then the Deputy Minister of the Environment for Nunavut, told me in 2006, “There are too many polar bears in Davis Straight for their own good.”

Five years later, in May of 2011, I asked Mr. Awa, now retired from government, if he still shares the same view. “Absolutely,” he replied. “My views today concerning polar bears are exactly the same as they were five years ago. Times are good for the polar bears of Davis Straight right now,” says Awa. “It’s thanks to an abundant supply of ring and harp seals. Seal hunting by humans has been greatly reduced and as a consequence we are seeing more seals now than we have seen for many years.”

Mr. Awa goes on to say, “Polar bears have persisted through climate change cycles for millennia as have we the Inuit hunters. People all around the world are behaving hysterically. As a hunter, as an Inuk, I have first-hand knowledge. The idea that polar bears will be wiped out by global warming is just a scare tactic!”

Typical of the media treatment of the whole issue of polar bears is a story that appeared in the May 2011 edition of Maclean’s magazine. Surprise, surprise, the story is topped by a sensational picture of a blood-covered, freshly skinned polar bear pelt featuring a bullet hole large enough to put your fist through. The caption beneath the picture says: “In search of big profits, hunters in Quebec are taking down polar bears at an unsustainable rate.”

The story concerns rumours spreading throughout Nunavut that Quebec hunters had killed an inordinately large number of polar bears this past winter. The Maclean’s story goes on to say that in fact many bears were killed, but for some reason the story fails to inform us exactly how many bears they are talking about. Nor is there any mention of the increased quota just granted hunters in Nunavut or the fact that the polar bear population is expanding so rapidly that in some areas they are becoming a dangerous nuisance.

What the story does is reinforce the totally false impression that not only are polar bear populations declining rapidly but that global warming is going to wipe the bears off the face of the planet.

It’s another classic case of uninformed theory versus reality. The global warming theory from the professors, government experts and whacko environmentalists is that melting ice caps will deprive polar bears of food, thus virtually wiping them out. It’s the perfect scare tactic that groups such as the World Wildlife Fund use to frighten the dollars out of the kind-hearted but gullible southern populations and of course persuade stores to ship them thousands of dollars from the sale of plastic bags.

The real experts however—the ones who live amongst the bears like Simon Awa and many others—say the theory about global warming killing off all the polar bears is just pure nonsense. The bears, thank you very much, are doing just fine they say; perhaps too well for their own good.

That’s the reality but as we have seen time and time again when left wing theory comes up against reality the theory usually wins, no matter how wrong that theory may be.

And the conservative point of view on all of this? Easy. We made it very plain on May 2, 2011, what we think of left wing whackos and university professors!