What You Can Do

Policies

The Population Institute of Canada campaigns for policies to achieve environmentally sustainable population levels, globally and in Canada. The issue is population numbers, resource demands and the environmental impact created by different levels of population at various levels of affluence and technology.

PIC recommends the following population policies:

Globally, that full access to non-coercive family planning should be universally available, that couples should be encouraged to stop at one or two children to lessen the impact of family size on the environment, and that this should be part of a holistic approach involving improved education and equal rights for women.

In Canada, that our high-consuming population should be stabilized at an environmentally sustainable level determined by the country's in situ carrying capacity. Population levels should reflect a balance between birth and death rates, immigration and emigration, and greater efforts should be made to reduce teenage pregnancies and to encourage couples to have smaller families.

Action

  • Write to your MP

    If your MP is in the government, you can ask him/her to support policies aimed at reducing immigration to levels equal to emigration which reflect Canada.s realistic carrying capacity, with due regard to our climate, to ever-increasing urbanization, and to the resulting environmental impact.

    You might outline the case for environmentally sustainable population policies - for Canada and the world as a whole . and express dissatisfaction with the government.s failure to tackle teenage pregnancies or to introduce a numerically balanced (.zero net.) migration policy.

    You could urge adoption by CIDA of international aid specifically targeted on non-coercive family planning, and not exclusively on reproductive health programmes which in any case now receive only modest support.

    Your MP may be contacted through:

    Members of Parliament
    webinfo.parl.gc.ca

  • Write to the Prime Minister (no stamp required) as follows:

    Office of the Prime Minister
    80 Wellington Street
    Ottawa, ON, K1A OA2
    email: pm@pm.gc.ca

  • The Minister Responsible for the Canadian Overseas Development Agency (CIDA) or his/her deputy, the President of CIDA, may be contacted as follows:
    Canadian Overseas Development Agency (CIDA)
    President of CIDA: Paul Thibault
    www.acdi-cida.gc.ca
    email: info@acdi-cida.gc.ca

  • Write to the Media

    Letters to newspaper editors or columnists in response to articles dealing with population issues can have an impact, including on government policies. Making the linkage between population growth and environmental degradation adds greatly to that impact in an era of increasing environmental sensibilities.

    PIC members are drawing attention to the effects of population growth globally on poverty and the environment both at the macro and micro level. The correlation between family size and poverty is hard to refute. In the Third World, large families are typically associated with generations of people unable to rise above a degree of grinding poverty that renders daily life a misery.

    Relentless urbanization and associated suburban sprawl are consuming valuable arable land and forests world-wide. Everywhere, one sees environmental degradation hand in hand with increasing populations.


Websites, blogs, local newspapers and TV stations can also be approached.


  • Engage your church, synagogue, mosque or temple. These entities are concerned with the spiritual but also the temporal life of the faithful.

Bring Population Issues into your Environmental Campaigning

You can sign petitions or join demonstrations about climate change, destruction of wildlife habitats or other environmental issues and campaigns against "green field" development proposals, underscoring, in fact, that pop policies bringing to the attention of the petition initiators that population policy for Canada could help make the development you are protesting against unnecessary.

Environmentalists need reminding that unrelenting population growth is a key factor in the rapidly destabilizion of our climate and the destruction of the natural world on which we and all other life depends. This message can be conveyed by various means including Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, etc. where stimulating dialogues can ensue.

Support Family Planning Charities

In Canada and abroad, reproductive health organizations that focus on education and meeting the public's contraceptive needs deserve continued support.

Canadian Federation for Sexual Health
430-1 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, ON  K1N 7B7
www.cfsh.ca
email: admin@cfsh.ca

Give Talks on Population and the Environment

PIC has material to assist in this regard, and may also provide speakers on request.

Recruit More Members

More members, more resources, enable PIC to extend and intensify our work.