Pope Ed in trouble again

Q.            What have the Alberta Government and the Catholic Church got in common? A.            They are both in denial and have a shoot the messenger policy on issues of morality and ethics. The Pope refuses to acknowledge that pederasty has been prevalent in virtually every place where his church has operated. Denial of abuse towards innocent and vulnerable young people in its care has been going on for almost as long as they have been in business it seems.

 

Premier Stelmach refuses to acknowledge the massive damage being perpetrated on the ecology of our once beautiful province. This time the victims are birds, indigenous peoples and wildlife which is being deprived of a functioning living space and hence the right to life.

 

The Pope is receiving his comeuppance because of the sheer size of the problem and the persistence of victims. Premier Stelmach is getting his for similar reasons, this time the persistence has come in the form of the Corporate Ethics. Of course C.E. is only the latest to start making Stelmach’s life difficult, the list is getting longer by the day. Concern has been forthcoming from the likes of National Geographic magazine, to Jack Layton, to Professor David Shindler, to Andrew Nikiforuk, to mention only the best known.

 

In both of these cases the institutions are getting away with it because of their size, wealth and power. It is not a new phenomenon, that of power being been used to exploit the weak and vulnerable, it’s just that the scale is so enormous now and the consequences so profound.

 

As these enormous social and environmental errors become more public through the modern media, the problem of countering them becomes commensurately larger. The Catholic Church chooses to simply hope they will go away while throwing a small bone or two to the aggrieved parties. The provincial government thinks it can buy its way out of the growing distaste in the world to “dirty oil”.

 

Both of these institutions will learn a hard lesson over time ­ the more you deny there is a problem, when the problem is blatantly apparent to a blind man on a galloping horse, the higher the actual cost in the end. The Pope has resources he can tap into but the costs to the Alberta government will come from government revenues and from of taxation, and that means our pockets. How much longer must the Alberta people pay for such incompetence and lack of vision?