My comment to the Liberal Party of Canada budget suggestions

 CANCEL Trans Mountain Expansion and provide disincentives to current tar sands production,  now, easily meet climate goals ahead of schedule,  and put the billions into a comprehensive green transition, which will be cost neutral, partly because of thousands annually  fewer cases pollution morbidity and mortality ( https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2018/11/21/100-Per-Cent-Clean-Energy-Possible/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=261118   ). Of course the money should also fund a  robust education and training transition to the enormous task of retrofitting structures to current energy standards,  to the  rooftops for distributed solar, to the hilltops for distributed small scale wind, away from the disgraceful , internationally abhorred wastelands of the tar sands on indigenous lands,  so Canadians in every region no longer have to choose between contributing to climate disaster doing somewhat risky (health and injury) work in Alberta, and struggling to pay the bills. 

Canada chose short term jobs over the world's health, by lying for decades about asbestos toxicity. Please don't make the same deadly calculus. Asbestos killed 100,000 mostly construction and other workers worldwide. If we and the other rich countries get this wrong about the tar sands, fracking etc., the blood of hundreds of millions will also be due to our cruel actions. The Canadian government also chose to slant the cod fishery statistics. Fishery workers were suddenly  let down.  

I know this isn't easy. It requires an educated leap of faith in the science and economics as outlined in the Stanford road map, away from extraction and export without value added, away from the North America export of jobs that gutted the US and our manufacturing capacity since the 80s, and stung us in the pandemic, I don't think there is a choice: we can do it in a panic, less effectively when we're forced to, as climate disasters exponentially accelerate, or we can do it right now and lead the US and the  rest of the world on a much easier and less painful path. Massive public education and informed action here and around the world is needed to get support for the hard work ahead. But there will be huge and immediate lifestyle benefits, a joyful reemergence of clean air and some natural biotopes, wildlife and plants, as we saw in the pandemic slowdown,