On his show yesterday, you could hear the exasperation in Charles Adler's voice. I was so moved by this that I wrote him an e-mail, which he read on-air today. Here's the e-mail in full . . .



I listened with undivided attention to your Wednesday segment regarding the 3rd Graders in Toronto protesting oil pipelines. The despair in your voice about has happened to our Great Country of Canada was disheartening. But totally understandable.

With the hope of giving you a little solace, let me take you back to Toronto about 20 years ago. I was working as a mining engineer 400 km north of there, in Sudbury, for the mighty Inco. I used to visit friends of mine in Toronto on a regular basis. I'll never forget the parties I attended with them, often meeting 20 & 30 something yuppies, most from privileged families in & around the city, all with 4+ year university educations. In the normal course of conversation I would be asked what it is I did for a living. As soon as I mentioned "Sudbury" I would get the usual, "Oh, I'm sorry." When I mentioned "Mining Engineering" I would frequently get asked how I could live with "destroying the environment" (their words, not mine).

The first few times I was somewhat shocked to be accused of such a thing. Perhaps many decades before there would have been some credibility to their accusation but while I was working there, and very much more so today, Inco (now called Vale) spends millions upon millions of dollars to restore the environment back to the same or better than it was before.

Eventually I grew tired of the Enviro-Destroyer comment and responded in a manner akin to the following:

"I work as a mining engineer to retrieve nickel & copper from over a mile below the surface. The nickel is a crucial component for creating steel. That steel enabled you to drive or take the train or bus here tonight. It's also the reason why you're able to be in this comfortable, safe apartment building right now. And the copper enables electricity to be delivered into this home so that the lights can be turned on, and so that your TV and radio and fridge and washer and dryer and computer will function. Without me & my colleagues doing what we do, you would freeze every day unless you decided to continuously chop down trees to keep yourself warm. And that one-week holiday to Cuba you just got back from never would have happened unless you had paddled up the St. Lawrence and down the Atlantic in a wooden boat. Excuse me, I need another beer."

I always said such things politely but you can imagine the stunned silence I would receive. Lo and behold these eco-hypocrites would never speak with me again. Undoubtedly their self-doubts about their rampant hypocrisy got pushed to the back of their minds as they wrapped themselves again in the warm blanket of their like-minded fellow sanctimonious urban finger-waggers.

All of this is to say, Charles, that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Uncle Joe referred to such folks as "Useful Idiots". Another term, "limousine liberals" often accurately describes them. Canada's big cities contain most of them. Like an infected big toe, they'll always be with us. True to their hypocritical nature, they relish & demand all of the wonderful social programs that our nation's resources pay for but they'll never stop insisting that we put an end to the extraction of our resources. Isn't that pretty much what Thomas Mulcair was hinting at recently with respect oil? Ignorance has never been more bliss than it is in 2012!

Salutations from Canada's Left Coast,

Robert Werner