Your weekly Sandy Crux-itude.

I swear, if my list of Sandy Crux smackdowns gets any more comprehensive, I'm just going to bundle them up and sell them online for $5 a pop. Hey .... In any event, let's tear yet another of Sandy's vaunted CPoC "accomplishments" another orifice:

Nahanni National Park expanded by 5000 [sic] square kilometers; (Link)

OK, it's hard to see how you can complain about that. Unless, of course, unlike Sandy, you take the time to, you know, read some shit and stuff. Let's start at the very link she provides:

Ottawa is expanding the size of the Nahanni National Park, adding more than 5,000 square kilometres to the rugged reserve in the southern Northwest Territories, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Wednesday.

"This is arguably the most important act of environmental protection in a generation," the prime minister said Wednesday. The government plans to add 5,400 square kilometres of land within the Greater Nahanni ecosystem, barring it from any kind of further development.

All right, then, what's to bitch and moan about here? I'm glad you asked. (Ignore the fact that Sandy can't even get the size of the increase correct -- it's not 5,000, it's "more than 5,000," as in, 5,400. that's simply another demonstration of how Sandy doesn't even read the stuff she links to. What a cretin. But I digest. Onward.)

The above is (as Sandy points out) merely an increase in the size of the park. So how big was it in the first place? Ah:

That would bring the total area under interim protection for the park — home to spectacular mountains and rivers, grizzly bears, lynx, wolves and other wildlife — up to 28,000 square kilometres. All told, the park now encompasses an area four times the size of Prince Edward Island.

Simple arithmetic tells me that beefing up the park from its earlier 22,600 square kilometres by an additional 5,400 square kilometres represents an increase in size of 23 per cent. Sure, that's cool ... but where did that original park come from in the first place? Ah hah. Hilariously, one need only read further down in the same article to which hopeless hack Sandy has linked (emphasis gleefully added):

Known for its spectacular river, deep canyons, huge waterfalls and boreal forest, the Nahanni National Park Reserve attracts adventure visitors to the Northwest Territories every year.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, struck by the area's beauty, established the reserve in 1972 to protect it from proposed hydro-electric development. The United Nations designated it as a world heritage site in 1978.

Yeah, that's rich. While Sandy gets absolutely moist and creamy over Captain Charisma's increase of 5,400 square kilometres, we are apparently not supposed to notice that it was Pierre Trudeau who established the initial 22,600 square kilometre preserve. That's right, boys and girls -- pay no attention to that evil, tree-hugging Liberal behind the curtain who started things in the first place. But wait -- there's so much more.

We can, at least, give the CPoC the credit for coming up with the idea of the increase on their own, right? Well, no:

Justin Trudeau joins campaign launch to expand Nahanni National Park Reserve
Posted on May 11, 2005

Son of a bitch ... Sandy so badly wants to give all the props to her hero Stephen, and those fucking Trudeaus keep gumming up the works. No matter. All's well that ends well. Nature has been conserved, and we're all happy. Right? Right? Well, no, not quite. And, once again, we can simply return to the very article to which Sandy linked but clearly never bothered to read, mostly because she's dumb as a sack of sand, and twice as fucking lazy (once again, emphasis added):

But Herb Norwegian, grand chief of the Dehcho First Nations, which includes the park area in its territory, was not overly impressed with the announcement. He said governments have talked about expanding the narrow corridor along the river to include the watershed since 1972.

"This has been negotiated and Canada hasn't fulfilled their agreement and that's what this is about. It's catch-up for Canada," he said.

While environmentalists welcome the Nahanni expansion, they have been pushing for inclusion of the entire watershed, which would involve up to 38,000 square kilometres. However, that expansion would also likely include the site of a zinc mine with an ore body worth an estimated $2.5 billion.

Yeah, there's the catch -- let's conserve priceless nature, as long as that doesn't get in the way of commercial mineral development. So, to recap, unlike Sandy's fawning portrayal of the heroic Conservative Party of Canada giving a crap about nature, we have:

• The park was, in fact, originally founded by the villainous Liberal Pierre Trudeau.


• The CPoC simply increased the size of the park by about one-quarter.


• Others had already (for many years, in fact) been calling for an increase of some kind.


• That increase wasn't even remotely as large as people had been proposing, and did absolutely nothing to address concerns of protecting the entire watershed, and was clearly designed to not get in the way of commercial exploitation of the area.

Other than that, Sandy, a job well done. If you're a complete idiot.

AFTERSNARK: It is amusing to read the gushing, unrestrained hyperbole:

"This is arguably the most important act of environmental protection in a generation," the prime minister said Wednesday.

Really? That important? Gosh, if that's how they feel about the simple addition of 5,400 square kilometres, one can only imagine how complimentary Sandy would be about the initial creation of the 22,600 square kilometre preserve. Hmmmm ... how curious ... no mention at all. Oh, wait, I see the problem here (emphasis added):

"This is arguably the most important act of environmental protection in a generation," the prime minister said Wednesday.

Exactly. See, if you get to define where you want to start measuring from, just make sure you start measuring recently enough so that the initial creation of the preserve falls outside of your interval; otherwise, you'd have to give that fucking Pierre Trudeau some credit, and we sure as hell can't have that, can we? It's sort of like Republicans who brag about how there hasn't been a single terrorist attack on American soil under Bush for the last six years. (Of course, if you go back seven years, well, there was that spot of unpleasantness in the fall of 2001 so let's cut it off at six years -- it just reads better.)

Anyway, I think you get my point here. Well, most of you do. Patrick Ross, on the other hand, will read this and immediately conclude that I hate nature. It's just the way his brain is wired.