Mood, Waters, Wines and Barnes: Big oil and gas must not be sponsoring Winterlude

As Ottawa’s very first skate-less winter season on the Rideau Canal ended, locals held a vigil to grieve the world’s biggest skating rink– which didn’t open due to warm weather condition. The future of this UNESCO World Heritage Site is on thin ice.

The Rideau Canal Skateway is the centrepiece of Winterlude, which welcomes us to “experience the very best the Canadian winter season needs to provide.” It is for that reason dissonant, as ice sculptures melt in the streets and the canal stays shuttered, that Enbridge Gas, Canada’s biggest methane gas circulation business, is among the celebration’s primary sponsors.

Methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas with as much as 80 times the climatic warming capacity of co2 over the next 20 years. Enbridge’s growth of its nonrenewable fuel source facilities throughout an environment emergency situation is actually melting the snow and ice that Winterlude depends upon.

Prior to nonrenewable fuel source business, winter season sports were typically sponsored by Big Tobacco. The death knell for tobacco sponsorship of sports can be found in 1983, when Olympic skiers and “Crazy Canucks” Ken Read and Steve Podborski contradicted medals for their efficiency in the championship games Export “A” Cup. The next year, Canada’s health and sports minister revealed an end to tobacco sponsorship of amateur snowboarding. In 1985, the federal government obstructed any amateur sports company that wanted to get federal financing from accepting tobacco sponsorships.

Like huge tobacco, huge oil and gas has a long history of utilizing public relations to leave liability for their lethal items. Multi-billion dollar marketing, marketing, lobbying, and sponsorship budget plans are utilized to get away tax, purchase social licence, angle for billion-dollar aids and improve earnings. The social and health expenses of both tobacco sponsorship and nonrenewable fuel source false information are incredible.

Tobacco marketing was prohibited due to the fact that of the frustrating clinical proof of the health effects of those items. Now research studies reveal that contamination from burning nonrenewable fuel sources triggers as much as 34,000 sudden deaths in Canada each year.

The ecological effects of burning nonrenewable fuel sources are indisputable, most just recently laid bare in the United Nations’ latest IPCC report, which alerted about unsafe levels of warming within the next years. Regardless of these understood damages to our health and environment, winter season sports are still utilized as a signboard by huge polluters. It’s time to quit.

Some prominent sports and cultural sponsorship have actually currently ended over environment modification issues. Following public protest, Channel 4 dropped oil huge BP as a sponsor of the Paralympics this year. As an Australian analysis discovered, ending such sponsorships injures nonrenewable fuel source business far more than professional athletes, as lots of business would gladly action in to fill desirable sponsorship realty.

We motivate winter season professional athletes to withstand huge oil and gas the very same method the Crazy Canucks did versus Big Tobacco. In the meantime, we get in touch with the National Capital Commission, the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, The Department of Canadian Heritage and Canada’s ministers of sports and health to do the ideal thing.

It’s time to drop Enbridge Gas as a sponsor of Winterlude. We are on extremely thin ice if we stop working to safeguard winter season sports and the climate-safe world they depend upon.

Robb Barnes is the Climate Program Director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, previous executive director of Ecology Ottawa and a homeowner of Old Ottawa East. Leah Temper is the Director of the Fossil Fuel Ads Make United States Sick Campaign at the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and a previous local of Hintonburg. Eugenie Waters is an Ottawa family doctor. Ali Wines is the Executive Director of Protect Our Winter Canada.