Inspirational and good news.
Hey people in Ontario, if you can vote you should vote!
Things Are Good supports anybody you want to vote for except the Tea Conservative Party. Vote for the Ontario you want to see, vote with hope and optimism. Vote for a party that will actually make the province a better place to live!
NDP
Green Party
Liberal Party
Ontario Conservative Party 😉
In addition to the links above Torontoist has great primers on issues in this election.
The CBC is reporting that Ontario will close four coal power plants. Previously, the government had to readjust its targeted closure of all coal plants to 2014, but it’s good to see that coal plants are closing down regardless.
OPG will close two of eight coal-burning units at its Nanticoke station near Simcoe and two of four units at its Lambton plant near Sarnia by October 2010, Smitherman said at a news conference in Toronto on Thursday.
The utility also closed Toronto’s Lakeview Generating Station in 2005. Once the next four units are taken off-line, Ontario will have reduced its coal-burning capacity by 40 per cent.
In Ontario a handful of grocery stores stopped being part of a franchise so they can support local grown food from farmers in their communities. It’s great to see the grocers taking such a bold move and that their customers support them in the decision.
For his part, Peter Knipfel says he’s discovering more about what’s growing locally. At his store, he says grape tomato sales have tripled since the switch to a local producer.
“We are now a group of nine stores that probably have a little bit of buying power to buy larger quantities of local tomatoes, larger quantities of cucumbers from, say, some of the Mennonite farmers that are producing it at Elmira market, for example,” he says.Mary Copp has shopped at Kropf’s store in Elora for 30 years. She says she noticed the changes immediately. “I think it’s great because we look for local, and you can get it here. You can’t get it at [chain-store rival] Zehrs … well, sometimes you can, but not as much.”
Shopper Linda Tompkins of Chesley agrees, “I don’t want food from some place else when we’ve got food right here. Support our farmers.”
Still, Warriner predicts that while that more consumers are asking for local produce, they will always be the minority. The University of Guelph professor says like organic produce, local will always be a niche market because mass production generally leads to cheaper prices.
Co-op members concede some of their wares are more expensive than those of the competition, but add that on average they are competitive. “We’re not saying we’re the cheapest but we’re certainly not the most expensive either,” says Knipfel.
Kropf adds that the ability to offer locally produced food is ultimately about quality first, price second.
Thanks go to Dan Harrison for the scoop!
First of all, happy Earth Day!
Here’s a neat idea for Canadians: have manufactures pay for waste management of their products. To our European (and some other) readers, this is not a new or crazy idea, but here in Canada this concept is revolutionary. For Earth day The Toronto Star has examined how Ontario can get manufactures to make more environmentally friendly products through legislation – and things are looking good.
One of the most obvious steps is Extended Producer Responsibility, the European concept that the manufacturer must cover the full cost of properly recycling or disposing of a product at the end of its life cycle.
The merits of EPR are simple: It entices companies strictly for cost reasons to redesign their products so they are easier and cheaper to recycle.
European rules, for example, forced Apple to create a computer without lead – leading to lower costs at the end of its life.
In its purest sense, EPR challenges companies to make product lines that lead to zero waste, because no waste would mean no charges at the end of the day.
The requirement may sound radical in Canada, but elsewhere, especially throughout the European Union, EPR is a familiar feature on the regulatory landscape.
The Ontario government recently announced that a patch Canada’s boreal forest twice the size of England will be protected. The De-Smog Blog describes the greatness of the boreal forest and what the recent announcement means.
Canada’s Boreal Forest is important when it comes to global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s Boreal forest is the world’s largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon, exceeding even the total carbon stored in the Amazon.
North America’s Boreal Forest stores up to 11% of the world’s terrestrial carbon. Roughly 56% of all the carbon is stored in peat. The remaining carbon is pooled in above-ground vegetation, rocks, and soil. At 186 billion tons, Canada’s Boreal carbon storage alone is equal to near 27 years of the world’s carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels.
You can download a comprehensive fact sheet on global warming and Canada's Boreal Forest here. (pdf)
Last year, 1,500 scientists from 50 countries called on Canadian governments – federal, provincial and territorial – to protect the 5.6 million square kilometres of boreal forest in Canada, which holds about 186 billion tonnes of carbon.