The Manchurian Canadian

Mark Steyn -- the greatest, most versatile, and most prolific columnist in the English-speaking world -- alludes incidentally in his latest Spectator column to China's push to acquire Canadian natural resource assets.

China's state-run Minmetals recently proposed to purchase Noranda, Canada's largest mining interest and one of the world's larger producers of copper, nickel, and zinc. Two other Canadian mining concerns, Inmet and Teck Cominco, have also become the subject of Chinese designs. Only days ago, China's state-controlled National Offshore Oil bought one-sixth of Alberta's MEG Energy. And Chinese National Offshore Oil and two other Chinese state oil interests, Sinopec and PetroChina, are angling for further Abertan oil assets.

While Canada's anti-American conspiracy theorists are issuing crackpot missives to letters to the editor pages, wildly prophesying an American invasion of Canada to secure, of all things, water, China has been working to gain control of Canada's largest resource interests. If our wild-eyed, conspiracy-minded anti-Americans were truly concerned about control of domestic resources, their letters would be warning against China.

America is Canada's next-door neighbor and sister nation, its largest trading partner, its only remaining defense in the world, and its very kit and kin, while China is militantly nationalistic, overtly imperialistic, radically divergent and politically Communist, violently suppressing political and religious freedom. Furthermore, when an American business buys assets in Canada or elsewhere it is doing so as an independent, private enterprise; In the case of China, businesses like Minmetals are state-run, so that any assets bought by such an operation are controlled directly by the Chinese government. And then there's China's forced one child per couple policy, one result of which has been that many Chinese couples abort or put up for international adoption until they have a son, and a society in which there are many, many more men than women is not likely to produce particularly pacifist policies.

Steyn also notes that the Canadian government bizarrely continues to donate tax dollars to China for "foreign aid". In fact, the Canadian International Development Agency, Canada's federal foreign aid department, contributes more to China than to any other nation. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin said as recently as last December, "No longer can China be considered simply an emerging market; it has established itself as a world power," and yet he and his government continue to consider China the top foreign aid case of the Canadian taxpayer. As a rule of thumb, if one considers a nation to be a "world power", and if that nation's state enterprises are proposing to buy out one's own largest companies, it is probably safe to strike the nation from one's roll of welfare beneficiaries.

Erring on the Side of Life

Paul Schneidereit has a thoughtful column on the Terri (Schindler) Schiavo case in today's Halifax Chronicle Herald. As ink is still being spilt on this, I'll offer my own belated thoughts on the matter.

I am for better or worse intensely political, but politics did not inform my opinion on this issue. Right and wrong seemed so apolitical and axiomatic to me that I naively imagined 90 percent of the population would see Terri's case exactly as I did. In the absence of instructions to the contrary from Terri herself, there simply was no good reason to extinguish the life of this innocent, healthy, and beloved woman.

Terri was not ill, terminally or otherwise, and she was not in pain, chronic or otherwise. She did not require a pacemaker, respirator, or dialysis machine: Her heart, lungs, and liver worked perfectly. She was not in a coma, she was plainly responsive, and most importantly, she was no "vegetable" to those who knew and loved her best.

Terri had of course never properly declared her wishes for such a tragic eventuality; If she had, and had chosen death for herself, those of us who supported life would have respected her wishes and the case would never have become a national and international issue. It is more than a little disconcerting that a court could determine that Terri wished to die based on hearsay testimony from her supposed husband, Michael Schiavo, and his brother and sister, some seven years after Terri was incapacitated.

Schiavo pursued other women and ultimately got engaged and had two children, which is reasonable enough under the circumstances, but that he then continued to claim sole legal guardianship over Terri as her supposed husband, and that the courts continued to recognize him as Terri's husband and sole master, is offensive.

Only months after being awarded $600,000 in Terri's malpractise suit, Schiavo began his mission to deprive Terri of everything that a few willing judges would permit. He refused therapies for Terri, ordered that she not be treated for infection, rejected Terri's parents' pleas to be granted guardianship, refused new testing for Terri including swallowing tests, ordered that she not be taken into the outdoors and fresh air, and much more.

Terri's mother, father, brother, and sister all wanted Terri's life preserved and had offered to assume full responsibility for her. They wanted her to have the benefit of tests, therapies, attention, and love which had been denied by her supposed husband and guardian.

The President and U.S. House and Senate had ordered the federal courts, under Article 3 of the Constitution, to consider Terri's case de novo -- hearing all evidence, rather than restricting inquiry to the ever-diminishing circles of the findings of previous courts -- but the federal courts clearly did no such thing, rejecting a specific, constitutional order of the elected branches of government.

And if the protracted, two-week death of an innocent American by forced dehydration and starvation does not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment", then the term has no meaning. We accord much more humanity to condemned serial killers and rabid dogs.

My sense of humor is not overly genteel, but I found some of the commentary on Terri's case horrifying. Even one blogger and highly-respected columnist I formerly linked to made great sport of mocking Terri's efforts to speak. That's not libertarian, conservative, or leftist; That's cruel.

I suspect -- and indeed hope -- that much of the support for Terri's death was based on false presumptions that she was terminally ill, in incessant pain, in a coma, or living by machine. Surely many who supported Terri's death were projecting much bleaker circumstances -- possibly from the experiences of their own loved ones -- onto Terri, in the absence of fuller information. One Herald letter to the editor which positively rejoiced that Terri had finally died, and went so far as to invoke God as the resolution of the jubilation, stipulated falsely that Terri required life support to breathe. Surely many were assuming that hers was one of those much clearer cases in which death actually can be for the best. And no doubt many could have known little or nothing of the more disturbing elements of Michael Schiavo and Terri's severe deprivation.

That may explain some of the support for Terri's death, but clearly not all of it. Some were driven to want Terri dead by their political hatred of those who took the lead in supporting Terri's life, in exactly the same way that some have come to support Islamic terrorists and fascists out of hatred for the leaders in the struggle against them. Some supported death for Terri because they have come to regard the preservation of such helpless, innocent human life as a step on the "slippery slope" toward social policies they oppose. And then there are some who wanted Terri dead because they are enamored with euthanasia and saw Terri's case as a potentially useful precedent. No doubt some also assumed the case for death must have been sound simply because the courts seemed to sign off on it, but court support for Terri's death resulted from the confluence of judicial refusal to contest lower-court findings of fact, and a lower court presided over by a judge (Greer) who found in Michael Schiavo's favor far too consistently to have possibly been impartial.

As for politics, it would be surprising if this case was very much on the minds of many American voters when they cast ballots again in a year and a half, and then in three and a half years. In that time, many other issues of greater and lesser magnitude will doubtless come and go, and even 24 hours can be a very long time in politics: Just consider the transformation from September 10 to September 11, 2001.

President Bush's lowest-ever approval ratings have coincided with his support for Terri's life, and for the President and Congressional Republicans to take any other position on Terri's case would have been bizarrely out of character, so the accusation that support for Terri's life was motivated by base political considerations is not plausible. It is worth noting, though, that there are at least two other contemporaneous drags on the President's popularity which could explain the polling numbers more than any position on Terri's case: The record-high price of oil and the renewed attention to runaway illegal immigration, the President's policy on which is far and away the single greatest point of opposition among those who otherwise support him.

The one group of American voters for whom Terri's case could conceivably be a "single issue" after a year and a half is the one group who saw something of themselves in Terri: The disabled, and possibly also their guardians. Terri's helplessness and dependence on the aid and compassion of others must certainly have struck a chord with disabled people, and the relentless and in some cases even enthusiastic efforts to have her put out of someone else's misery must surely have been disconcerting for them. The efforts to preserve Terri's life came to be supported by disabled people and organizations, even to the point of an amicus brief filing in Terri's defense by no fewer than ten disabled advocacy groups.

Disabled voters have typically favored Democrats overwhelmingly, but in the past two presidential elections they have been trending Republican. The National Organization on Disability reports that disabled voters split their last four presidential votes thus:

1992: 52 percent Democrat, 29 percent Republican
1996: 69 percent Democrat, 23 percent Republican
2000: 56 percent Democrat, 38 percent Republican
2004: 46 percent Democrat, 52.5 percent Republican

It should be noted that Senate Democrats allowed Terri's bill to pass by unanimous consent, 47 of the 100 House Democrats in attendance voted for the bill, and even a couple prominent leftist Democrats -- namely Jesse Jackson and Sen. Tom Harkin -- actively supported the effort to preserve Terri's life.

A new Zogby poll has been released which runs counter to the spate of polls conducted Zogby's poll asked, "If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water," and some 79 percent of respondents answered that food and water ought not be denied. That is heartening, although notably Zogby's polls are not quite as reliable as they once were. Zogby was arguably the best pollster in America in the late 1990s, but more recently he has been using experimental polling methods (which is commendable but not yet reliable), his polls have fluctuated markedly, and it seems he has become something more of a poll editor than a pollster, amending his poll's results arbitrarily. This particular Zogby poll may in fact be accurate, and I desperately hope it is, but a grain of salt is in order. If accurate, the poll could be confirmation that most people would have erred on the side of life after all, had they only known Terri's true story.

Dennis Miller distilled Terri's sad case as well as anyone, I think, when he asked how we could say no to a mother who pleads, "I gave birth to her. Let me take care of her."

America More Developed AND Forested

A staggering and vastly under-reported phenomenon is documented wryly in Jonah Goldberg's latest syndicated column, "It’s the End of the World as We Know It......and, yes, I feel fine. As does the U.S.":

...forests are breaking out all over America. New England has more forests
since the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent forested. Today
it is more than 66 percent. In 1850, Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now
it's 76 percent forested and rising. In the south, more land is covered by
forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936 a study found that 80
percent of piedmont Georgia was without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the
state is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added more than 10
million acres of forestland.

There are many reasons for America's arboreal comeback. We no longer use
wood as fuel, and we no longer use as much land for farming. Indeed, the amount
of land dedicated to farming in the United States has been steadily declining
even as the agricultural productivity has increased astronomically. There are
also fewer farmers. Only 2.4 percent of America's labor force is dedicated to
agriculture, which means that fewer people live near where the food grows.

The literal greening of America has added vast new habitats for animals,
many of which were once on the brink of extinction. Across the country, the
coyote has rebounded (obviously, this is a mixed blessing, especially for
roadrunners). The bald eagle is thriving. In Maine there are more moose than any
time in memory. Indeed, throughout New England the populations of critters of
all kinds are exploding. In New Jersey, Connecticut, and elsewhere, the black
bear population is rising sharply. The Great Plains host more buffalo than at
any time in more than a century.

And, of course, there's the mountain lion. There are probably now more of
them in the continental United States than at any time since European
settlement. This is bad news for deer, which are also at historic highs, because
the kitties think "they're grrrreat!" In Iowa, the big cat was officially wiped
out in 1867, but today the state is hysterical about cougar sightings. One of
the most annoying tics of the media is always to credit the notion that
human-animal encounters are the result of mankind "intruding" on America's
dwindling wild places. This is obviously sometimes the case. But it is also
sometimes the case that America's burgeoning wild places are intruding on us.
...

Goldberg cites the UN's March 30 "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment". As is to be expected from the title and organization, it is a profoundly pessimistic report which claims the earth is careening toward oblivion and places the blame for this squarely on human development. So how is it that America -- the world's most developed, wealthy, capitalist nation -- is also home to one of the few positive "millenium ecosystem assessments"? And how is it that America's environment has improved so dramatically without correspondingly dramatic government direction and intervention?

America's cities continue to scrape the skies, its suburbs continue to tame the wildernesses, and its population and economy continue to grow by leaps and bounds, but Americans are intruding less and less onto the natural world, largely due to America's technological progressivism and highly-competitive capitalism, which make possible and encourage a phenomenal efficiency. Leftover chips from lumber production are converted to "particle board" sheets, fish are farmed rather than plucked from vast oceans, deserts with ideal crop-growing temperatures and sunlight are transformed by long-distance irrigation into agricultural oases, and so on, all reducing America's demands on the natural world while America moves from strength to strength economically.

In many jurisdictions, especially including my native Nova Scotia, environmentalist efforts are government-driven, restrictive, and anti-development. Environmentalism takes the form of limitations and outright bans on home and business construction, legislative conferring of "sanctuary status" on vast swaths of land to preclude "commercial exploitation" there, prohibitions against spraying lawns for pests or throwing out tin cans and banana peels, etc. Anti-development environmentalism even holds sway at the level of international relations, as Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin recently presumed to "oppose" the U.S. decision to drill for American oil on 0.0001 percent, or 2,000 acres, of the 19,500,000-acre Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

But the astonishing statistics on re-forestation in the world's greatest economy are the final proof that the best environmental protection is technologically-advanced development, not no development.