A question of priorities

While reading my Saturday Globe, a number caught my attention. An article on pollution reported, "Ontario public health authorities estimate pollution from the United States causes about 2,700 deaths annually." I realized this number was familiar because it's remarkably similar to the oft-quoted number of deaths resulting from the attacks on the twin towers in New York on September 11th, 2001. The difference, of course, is that the pollution kills 2,700 people every year, year after year, not just once.

The gist of the article was that the Bush Administration is proposing to weaken the pollution laws applying to hundreds of the dirtiest coal-fired plants in the United States. This struck me as perverse. The president is waging an international war on terror as a result of the 9/11 deaths while backing off on a far more deadly phenomenon. If American pollution is killing 2,700 Ontarians a year, presumably it must be killing even more Americans. The death toll must be vastly greater than anything resulting from terrorist attacks.

Bush seems to have chosen the wrong war. If his concern is for American lives, to say nothing of Canadian lives, sensibly his target should be pollution, not terrorists.