Published in the Ottawa Citizen, May 8, 2008, p. A17

 

If it Quacks Like a Politician...
by
Pierre Lemieux

Five hundred ducks died at a Syncrude facility in the oilsands region. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach reminded us that 30,000 birds are killed each year by wind turbines in the U.S. Of course, this is no excuse. Anything is good if it saves only one duck's life. Five of the Syncrude ducks were rescued and flown to Edmonton on two corporate flights. As of Sunday, four had survived and, said the Edmonton duck hospital that cares for them, were in stable condition. One of the four has since died. Syncrude says it can't provide (at least on short notice) any cost figure for this heroic duck-saving operation. But a reliable estimate can be made of the flight, personnel, and hospitalization costs. Assuming that the sick ducks' convalescence does not last too long, $10,000 for the whole operation would be a conservative estimate. This does not include the cost of the ducks' planned return to their habitat -- "if they meet stringent release standards," explains a duck hospital spokesman. So, the direct cost of saving a duck's life was more than $3,000. A (human) PET scan in the private sector costs around $2,500. (It is no doubt higher in the public sector, with its legendary inefficiency in producing "free" goods.) The money used to save the three ducks could have financed the PET scans of four little old ladies who have been waiting in public health queues, worried about how fast their cancer is progressing. Alternatively, $10,000 could feed during one year, and save the lives of, 274 hungry Third-World children. None of this takes into account the cost of government surveillance, investigation and repression. Nor does it include the on-going cost of protecting birds in the oil sands (purchase, installation and maintenance of noise canons, and other such expenses) and related PR. Syncrude does not provide cost figures for its on-going chick-loving activities. But a spokesman proudly wrote to me: "It should be noted that Syncrude for years has transported injured birds that have been found by community residents and whose injuries are entirely unrelated to any oil sands activity. In fact, we once transported two owls that had injured themselves in a territorial fight." I don't want to attack oilsands companies, who are dead scared of being crucified on the altar of the green duck religion. But it would be cheaper, and more just, to simply enrol all ducks in medicare. They could then join the queue with all the ordinary citizens. One might counter that all this is normal because, as animal rights activists would say, ducks are people too. What is less known, however, is that people are ducks too. Especially politicians and bureaucrats. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach quacked tough against those responsible for what Prime Minister Stephen Harper described as "a terrible tragedy." Who could say anything else in the present repressive climate? Well, perhaps the naive among us could have expected Mr. Stelmach and Mr. Harper to show some leadership against political correctness. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is a word in Newspeak (the politically correct language of English Socialism) to describe this sort of political gibberish: "duckspeak," which means "to quack like a duck." "Like various other words (in Newspeak), duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning," Orwell wrote. "Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment." In the Syncrude ducks affair, our politicians have shown what they really are: doubleplusgood duckspeakers.