Well, folks, the BHC is presenting a one-item mini-edition while vagabonding around Canada. And guess what? We found bonehead nonsense up here, too. And, it is poisoning Americans. Ouch. We have advised it before: invade!

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Helter Smelter

In a highly successful demonstration that corporate malfeasance is not the sole domain of American companies, it appears that Canadian Teck Cominco has been dumping tonnes of mercury into the Columbia River for decades. Indeed, the nearly 50-year long criminal behaviour was revealed by the Spokane Spokesman Review, when the paper filed a request for documents under the Freedom of Information act, a law which has no equivalent in Canada. These douments have revealed that between 1.5 to 3 metric tonnes of mercury have been dumped into the gigantic Columbia river every year since the 1940's. The US EPA and other American agencies are rightly furious about this behaviour but unctious Teck Cominco insists that since the smelter responsible for this is actually in Canada, they aren't subject to US law so, nya, nya. Their obvious belief that Canadians aren't going to do anything is on their sleeve, no doubt falling back on the "but we provide jobs for hard-working Canadians, you can't punish us" argument.

Apparently, reports of the smelter's operations and effects on the river were prompted by a spill in May of 1980. Nothing much seemed to have come of that incident other than an angry letter from the US State department, despite Cominco having sat on the news for five weeks that, yes, they had just crapped three metric tonnes of mercury into the mighty Columbia river all at once. Usually, they distrubute such largesse over the course of a year. In truly callous form, BC waste management officials then made the claim that the spill wasn't so bad and that, indeed, the levels of mercury in the river were the result of Cominco's historic and continuous bad behaviour rather than the single spill. Well that certainly is comforting.

Now, the BHC recognises several ugly truths in this story, the most obvious being that, despite the happy wishes of the pro-privatisation right wing wonks in the White House, Congress and Stephen Harper, the conservative pro-privitisation candidate in the up-coming Canadian federal election, private corporations cannot be trusted to hold the best interests of society in mind when conducting their business. This is historically true and precisely why there are laws meant to prevent such abhorant and dangerous behaviour. Republicans have a generally poor or non-existent memory regarding the vast spectrum of financial and environmental disasters corporations have singed societies with throughout their collective history and this is what usually allows the right to make claims that private companies handle all things better than government. The latest iteration of corporate nonsense spearheaded by Enron should have been enough to quell such talk, but it seems back on the table in Canada, a place which generally does not deceive itself about such things. Weird.

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Greetings from the White Rock.