I was walking through the excellent ASI Exchange event the other week and came upon a booth from Industry Canada. They were preaching the benefits of business eco-efficiency and their new web site for guiding businesses in this endeavour. I, being the eco-convert I am, was eager to see what Industry Canada had to say. And then I came face-to-face with the Government of Canada’s bureaucratic brand of doublethink.
The brochure was titled “Eco-efficiency: Good Business Sense”, and it got off to a great start:
“Eco-efficiency is increasingly becoming a key requirement for success in business. It’s the art of doing more with less, of minimizing costs and maximizing value. Eco-efficiency promotes the creation of goods and services while optimizing resource use, and reducing wastes and pollution.”
Sounds great, sign me up! The brochure outlines a simple three step program for starting to incorporate eco-efficiency into your business:
- Assess yourself
- Create a plan
- Perform a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed plan.
Again, all good. I was pretty impressed until something odd happened. About halfway through the brochure, the brochure was entirely upside down - some thoughtless printer had messed up this flawless document! What a shame, to have this work ruined by having a production mishap insert the pages upside down. And, not only that, when I righted the brochure, I realized the mishap had managed to garble the text so severely that it almost looked like another language. The text now looked almost French. In fact, it looked exactly like French.
Hmm. Waitaminute.
Yes, you’ve got it: Industry Canada had printed a combined English-French version of the brochure - duplicating the entire content in a language that, despite being an official language, is not the mother tongue of the majority of British Columbians. And wasted a lot of paper, ink, and energy, not to mention money, in the process. Can you say “do as I say, not as I do”?
To be fair, the government is required to print all documents in both English and French. Fine, no problem there. But wouldn’t it make more sense, ecologically speaking, to print the French version separately? How can government expect business to get this new eco-religion, when the government itself hasn’t been baptized?
Come on guys, get your act together.
And what, pray tell, is a “star lemon”? Why, it’s a star shaped like a lemon, of course! No, wait. That’s not it. It’s a lemon with a cross-section in the shape of a star. Yeah, that’s it. No more spending hour after hour getting your drink and plate 
It’s especially funny talking to the cashiers at Urban Fare about some of the products they carry. It must suck working 8 hour days for minimum wage only to watch some lazy-ass empty-nester blow their RRSP nest egg on fruit that’s $5 a pop, $500 a pound coffee, and $100 watermelons.