Corporate Knights tilt toward Toronto

Magazine dubs dysfunctional city a hero of the sustainability sweepstakes

By Frank Touby —

The city that can’t keep its streets and parks clean, its century-old water pipes from bursting, its transit moving people efficiently…and all the other failings the megacity has wrought its denizens…is now called the top sustainable big city in Canada.

Give a cheer! Toronto has achieved political correctness in the carbon game that itself has been dealt a wounding by disclosures that the scientific “proof” man-made global warming is a fact has been revealed as tainted.

But never mind that bad news about scientists fudging their figures to support a program based on the fiction that human activity has actually brought about climate change. Rejoice that our dysfunctional megacity is first at something that sounds good.

The top-place mention comes in a quarterly magazine called Corporate Knights. It’s designed to capitalize on advertising from big corporations that hope to present themselves as actually being concerned with something other than the bottom line.

That’s of course a ridiculous notion, since corporations have to scramble each quarter to pay their shareholders and their CEOs and the only reason they buy politically correct advertising is in hopes of improving sales or the bottom line in some way.

Sadly for the CK publishers, this isn’t the right time for corporate money to come flooding in and instead it’s mostly governments—including Toronto’s—that buy ads in the book. But that money spends nicely, too.

A city with its own windmill, the award was given to Toronto based largely on the breeze coming from the gobs of politicians and swivel servants: “its commitment to building green and strong public outreach programs, such as Live Green Toronto, as well as its large number of free public arts events and festivals.”

Much of this is setting us up for the windmill of carbon tax or cap and trade that the investment-banking gamblers are counting on. It’s a derivative the banks will print—like sub-prime mortgages—to spin into “products” that create nothing more than a roulette wheel creates, only with less entertainment value.

Since focusing on carbon has nothing to do with reversing pollution—a truly worthwhile but less lucrative pursuit—the whole thing is just another banking gambit.

With no credible scientific evidence that human behaviour is causing climate change (remember when it was “global warming”?), there really isn’t much scare factor to back up these useless gambles.

Pollution is a problem, for sure. Carbon? The building block of life? No evidence anything we’re doing is causing climate change. In fact, from having been a global-warming scare to a climate-change scare, the backers of this scare scenario—the ones who’ll profit mightily if it works—are now hedging on what could be a period of cooling.