According to a recent story in THIS Magazine, Canada Steamship Lines has been routinely dumping excess cargo, much of which is toxic, into the Great Lakes for decades. CSL’s links to Prime Minister Paul Martin are well-documented.

This disgusting, polluting practice, known as cargo sweeping, is decidedly illegal according to a number of national and international laws and agreements.* The Great Lakes are a primary source of drinking water for millions of Canadians and many more Americans.

We think a company owned by the Canadian Prime Minister should:

Respect The Law, and
Respect Our Water

Tell the Prime Minister what you think of Canada Steamship Lines’ cargo sweeping practice — go and sign our online petition at this link. Your name will be included in our full petition, delivered directly to the Prime Minister’s office.

Remember also to copy the text of the petition and send it, with your name, to all the addresses below. Let’s make this coming election ABOUT SOMETHING other than tax cuts!

Opposition Environment Critics:

Bob Mills, Conservative, [email protected]
Joe Comartin, NDP (Great Lakes Ecosystem critic), [email protected]
Nathan Cullen, NDP (Environment critic), [email protected]
Bernard Bigras, Bloc (Environment critic), [email protected]

A bit more background:

Canada has not yet signed onto the Marpol V Accord, a UN sponsored international agreement effectively banning cargo sweeping. Why not? Is it because our own Prime Minister cannot live up to the Accord’s principle that our water resources are precious?

For more information about cargo sweeping in the Great Lakes, read Sweeping it Under, by Alex Roslin in the September/October issue of THIS Magazine.

PLEASE COPY the link for this petition and distribute it widely.

*Standards, agreements and/or existing laws being potentially violated include: Canada Fisheries Act, U.S. Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships, Ontario Water Resources Act, Ontario Public Lands Act, Marpol V Accord of the United Nations International Maritime Organization, NAFTA.

Please Note: When we say please sign our petition, we mean John Degen and Mason Wright’s petition. The only affiliation between our petition and THIS Magazine is that Mason and I happen to be bloggers here, and we both read the story in THIS and were disgusted enough to create this funky online movement.
Ship image and online petition created by Mason Wright. Petetion written by John Degen. Thanks to Phillip Smith of Community Bandwidth for coding consultation.