An Animal Lovers’ Guide To Canada’s 2019 Election

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Who would animals vote for, if they had a choice in Canada’s upcoming election?

Wait does politics even matter for animals? Does who controls Canada’s government really have an impact across more than 9 million sq. km of Earth, rivers and Great Lakes, and more than 5 million sq. km of ocean?

Depending on where we put those X’s down on election night there are uncountable numbers of lives who will be affected, and even lives that will be ended because of the decisions we make in the ballot box. So who should animal lovers vote for?

So now’s about the time I admit that the title of this article was clickbait, and if you think I’m just going to talk about wild and domesticated animals, and not our own species… This is going to get personal.

That’s because the major life and death issues that affect animals, are the exact same life and death issues that affect humans. Which are the exact same battles that affect our bank accounts, and how much we pay in taxes. How’s that work?

Animal Issues Are Human Issues, and Money Issues…

What’s the #1 threat to Canadians? What’s the #1 reason people have to fear for their lives in this country? Is it an invasion from Greenland? Should we be wary of our Northern neighbours? Is it terrorism? What’s the #1 preventable cause of death in Canada?

There’s actually two main reasons that Canadians’ lives are cut short that dwarf all others: Cancer, and heart disease.

And while we all know that inhaling cigarette smoke causes cancer, and the government puts giant gross warning labels on it, and taxes the hell out of tobacco to discourage people from smoking as a result, what is the government doing about the 21,000 Canadians who die every year as we second hand smoke the toxic Greenhouse Gasses coming out of tailpipes and smokestacks? Toxic gasses that also come with an $8 billion hospital bill that we are all paying for thru taxes?

Actually, since Trudeau came to power, to be honest: A LOT. Here are some of the highlights (these are focused on the climate emergency and fossil fuels, for a complete list of the progress made for animals and the environment since Trudeau became PM see the full list at the end of this article):

Trudeau’s Successes:

• Protected millions of hectares of Canadian Earth and Ocean. In particular, Trudeau has vastly surpassed his campaign promise to expand Marine Protected Areas to 10% of Canada’s coastline, (which you might remember from geography class is the longest on Earth). After Trudeau recently created a massive Marine Protected Area nearly the size of Germany in the fragile Arctic ecosystem, in what is expected to become the last in-tact ice habitat for Polar Bears in Canada, approximately 14% of Canada’s coastline is now protected.
• Banned oil and gas mining in Marine Protected Areas (how was that ever legal?!)

• Enacted the most advanced Carbon Tax/Price on Pollution among G20 nations. Although it’s not really accurate to call it a Carbon Tax, because most Canadians are going to get a cheque in the mail as a result of it.
• The Carbon Tax represents the greatest progress that’s ever been made on the climate crisis in Canadian history, and over the next 3 years will keep 80–90 Megatons of toxic Greenhouse Gasses out of the atmosphere, equivalent to taking 23–26 million cars off the road, or shutting down 20–23 coal power plants.
• Speaking of coal power, Trudeau has set an extinction date for coal power in Canada.
• Enacted a plan to help developing countries replace their own coal power plants with renewable energy.
• Stopped the Northern Gateway pipeline.
• Enacted a $5,000 rebate on the purchase of zero emission Electric Vehicles.
• Invested in a Trans-Canada Electric Vehicle recharging network.

Trudeau’s Failures:

• Approved the Trans-Mountain pipeline.
• Has not fulfilled his 2015 campaign promise to end subsidies to fossil fuel industries.

It’s worth noting that despite being the most significant progress in tackling the climate crisis in Canadian history, Canada’s Carbon Tax is still not high enough to meet our commitments to the 2015 Paris Climate accords, which itself is not strong enough to prevent dangerous global warming.

The American & Global Impact of Trudeau’s Policies

While the climate rebate in it’s current form may not be aggressive enough to deliver the results that the dire situation calls for, once a system of taxing and penalizing polluters, and rewarding Canadians with the revenue has been set up, it will not be difficult to raise the tax on polluters/rebate for Canadians. The key roadblock is political, in that the Conservative Party and their allies in right-wing media have pounced on the Climate Rebate as a key election issue, and in Trump-like fashion are spreading false information to discredit the rebate, and turn Canadians against it at the ballot box.

If Trudeau can survive the Conservative challenge on Monday, especially if it results in a Minority government that includes the NDP and/or Green Party, there is a near certainty that the next four years will see significantly accelerated action on the climate emergency, especially when the planetary crisis itself seems only destined to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

While the average citizen living in Europe or the United States may not care about Canadian politics, there is no doubt that politicians and heads of state will be paying attention to the results of Canada’s election to see how citizens react to the kind of real world action on climate change that actually starts to impact people’s bank accounts for better or worse.

In the United States in particular, educated Americans/Democrats regularly look to Canada as a real world example of successful policies around Universal Health Care and intelligent gun safety laws. There is no doubt that Canada’s Climate Rebate, if it survives Monday’s election, will find it’s way into debates among Democratic leaders on how best the much bigger American economy can start to drastically cut GHG emissions in a way that will be popular with voters.

What If The Conservatives Win?

If, on the other hand, Andrew Scheer becomes Prime Minister, by cancelling the climate rebate not he would effectively be detonating an approximately 85 megaton dirty bomb across Canada, spewing out poisonous gas and liquids that will sicken all of us, give more of our family members cancer, and accelerate the pace of the ecological apocalypse already underway. The same goes for his 30 megaton pledge to scrap the Liberals’ clean fuel standard, in what would be an equally idiotic move as Trump’s cancellation of Obama’s vehicle emission standards and Clean Power Plan.

So just vote Liberal, no matter where you live, is that what I’m saying? No. Canadian politics is like a really cool 5-way chessboard, you really have to use your brain to make the right moves, and manifest the best possible outcome on election night, and everything depends on where you live.

THE BIGGEST ISSUE FOR CANADIAN ANIMALS THIS ELECTION IS ALSO THE BIGGEST ISSSUE FOR CANADA’S HUMAN POPULATION.

But before you make your decision, if there’s one issue that affects the greatest number of human and animal lives, that I think you need to consider before marking that X, it’s this:

The#1 cause of suffering and killing innocent animals in this country is also intimately connected to the #1 and #2 causes of death for Canadian humans.

That’s because the leading killers of Canadians (cancer and heart disease), are very much connected to the foods that we build our bodies with.

While cancer can sometimes strike for completely random, genetic reasons, we know that whether or not you develop heart disease is almost entirely connected to the food you put into your veins and arteries, to the point that plant-based diets have been demonstrated to be able to reverse and even cure heart disease if the switch is made soon enough, nearly eliminating one’s chances of getting a heart attack.

50,000 people across this country won’t be saved by their doctors and will die from heart disease, this year alone. 80,000 people won’t survive cancer in Canada this year, and biologists estimate that 90–95% of all cancer deaths are due to lifestyle and environmental pollution. For context in 2019 so far there has been a grand total of zero deaths from terrorism.

Meanwhile, it is estimated that in Canada alone, right here in slaughterhouses in our major cities, approximately 665,000,000 animals will be stabbed, shot, electrocuted or beaten to death so that humans can eat their cholesterol, and carcinogen-filled bodies and bodily fluids.

Literally uncountable billions of marine animals will be pulled out of the sea, oceans that are shockingly actually running out of fish, and having their own delicate webs of life torn apart on an already overheating planet. The end of life as we know it in the Earth’s Oceans would also inevitably lead to the end of life as we know it on land.

So let’s pretend for a second like this has nothing to do with animals. Even if you only care about human life, the government’s highest priority right now in terms of literally everybody’s well-being and survival, should be motivating, educating and inspiring Canadians to fill our bellies with plant-based deliciousness instead of dead animals.

Lo and behold, Trudeau’s government made the biggest progress in Canadian history on exactly that, changing our food guide to be almost entirely plant-based so that fewer Canadians drop dead from preventable diseases, with a side effect being that changing the way our nation is educated about nutrition will save the lives of unknown millions of animals, and many billions of dollars in health care costs that could result in us getting a serious tax cut.

Where do the Conservatives stand on this? Well, when it comes to the biggest issue for animals, whether we’re going to mass slaughter them or not: while mountains of science show us that not only is it not necessary for humans to eat animals’ dead bodies, or to drink milk from a mother cow, but that eating carcasses, and drinking the blood and pus-filled milk of a different species might actually be very detrimental for human health, Andrew Scheer wants the Canadian government to go backwards, pretend to be ignorant of the overwhelming science, and encourage humans to put other animals’ corpses and cow’s milk into our bodies.

And because this position, that one medical science professor recently described as “intensely stupid” is not based on any science or evidence, we’re left to assume it must have something to do with the fact that Scheer became Conservative Party leader with strong backing from the dairy industry, and that he made the announcement while at a conference pandering to an industry based around some of the most extreme forms of animal cruelty and killing on the planet.

HOW TO VOTE FOR ANIMALS ON MONDAY: A RIDING-BY-RIDING-VOTING GUIDE

Let’s keep things simple: There’s only two kinds of ridings you could live in, no matter where in the country you are: battleground ridings where two or sometimes 3 parties are fighting so close that they’re within the margin of error, and nobody knows who’s going to win on election night.

Or ridings where one party is clearly going to win, ahead by double digit margins, so your vote is going to be more of an official statement then it is going to be a deciding factor in who holds power over the next 4 years.

If you live in a battleground riding, your choice is simple, out of the two, or sometimes three closest contenders that are nearest to victory, just help whichever party win that has the best policies for animals and humanity. In the example on the left, with the Greens clearly best situated to defeat the Conservatives, strategic voting actually means Liberal and NDP supporters backing the Green Party.

And generally speaking, how do we know which Party is most progressive? On every policy I just spoke of and even on that much longer list of important environmental and animal issues, the spectrum of left to right is literally a spectrum from best to worst on every major issue.

The Green Party is the most progressive in almost every way of the major parties, followed by the NDP & Bloc Quebecois, then the Liberals. For all of the reasons stated above (and see a complete list of the progress made by Liberals since 2015 below) The Conservatives are the worst choice for animals in every riding in Canada.

Which is why the bottom line here, in preventing a Trump-like unnatural disaster on election night, is that if the Conservatives have a chance in hell of winning your riding, please vote for whoever is best situated to defeat them. In most battleground ridings in Canada, the situation will look something like this BC riding, where Green Party and NDP supporters who want to prevent that 85 Megaton Conservative dirty bomb from going off will need to support their Liberal candidate.

If two parties that are not the Cons are head-to-head, simply vote for the better one (the NDP in the case of this Hamilton riding), and in the very likely event of a Minority government coming to power on Monday we’ll hopefully get a historically progressive Parliament where Liberals, Greens and NDP have to work together in a coalition to take emergency action to deal with our planetary emergency.

If you live in a riding where the Conservatives have no realistic choice of winning, as is the case in downtown Toronto, and your vote is very unlikely to change the outcome on election night, I recommend voting for the Green Party in order send a message to Trudeau that he needs to pick up the pace of action on the climate emergency.

If you live in a non-battleground riding where the Animal Protection Party, aka the real Green Party is running, you should definitely support them to send a message to the current so-called Green Party that if you’re in any way serious about addressing ecological Armageddon, that doesn’t just mean talking the talk about fossil fuels, it also means walking the walk when it comes to not supporting the industry that is the #1 cause of habitat destruction, mass extinction, water consumption, water contamination, ocean dead zones and is responsible for more GHG emissions than all of the world’s cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world combined, I’m of course talking about animal exploitation industries.

If the approximately one million people who are expected to vote Green this election all took the environmental crisis seriously, and switched to an Earth-friendly, animal-friendly plant-based diet, over the course of a year you would save approximately 1 billion sq. meters of forest, 3.3 billion kilos of carbon dioxide, 1.5 trillion litres of water, and the lives of about 150 million innocent animals.

And that’s the kind of enormous difference you can make every day, no matter what politicians do or say.

Ok so I hope that explains who animals would vote for, if they were as informed as you are now, about the situation in Canada.

If you’re still confused, or you need help finding your riding, and polling data go to VoteForAnimals.org and there’s a step-by-step guide from the global and national issues to how they translate to your local voting booth.

Vote For Animals Official Site

A COMPLETE LIST OF THE TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT’S HISTORIC PROGRESS ON ANIMAL PROTECTION & THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Direct Animal Protection Laws

• Canada has made history as the first G20 nation to ban the shark fin trade
• Outlawed whale and dolphin captivity
• Enacted a major crackdown on animal fighting and loopholes in bestiality laws

It is worth noting that this most recent Parliament made the most significant progress on the animal protection front in recent Canadian history, and much of it was thanks to a vegan Member of Parliament from the governing Liberal Party, by the name of Nathaniel Erskine-Smith.

More Action on The Climate Emergency

• A $5,000 Electric car rebate enacted by the Liberals has already begun driving up the sales of zero emissions vehicles:
• Trudeau has also invested in a Trans-Canada electric vehicle re-charging network to make electric cars viable from Coast to Coast:
• Made major investments into public transit, including the electrification of bus fleets:
• Signed a moratorium on oil tanker traffic to BC’s Northern Coast:
• Enacted a Clean Fuel Standard that will lower emissions by 30 megatons by 2030, equivalent to taking 7 million cars off the road.
• Home energy retrofits will also help reduce demand for electricity, and accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels:

Wilderness Protection

• In addition to the massive expansion of Marine Protected Areas in the 3 different Oceans that grace Canada’s coast, that together total over 500,000 sq. km (approximately the size of the nation of Spain).
• Trudeau has embarked in a significant expansion of protected wilderness on land as well, and invested $1.3 billion towards the protection of endangered species within those ecosystems.

Other Environmental Progress

• Trudeau also restored Ontario’s 50-million tree planting program that was cut by Premiere Doug Ford
• If elected to a second term the Liberals will be enacting a ban on single-use plastics

Find the fullriding-by-riding voting guide@ https://www.voteforanimals.org/

To stay up do date on this campaign you can follow Vote For Animals Canada on Facebook or Instagram