PIC
An educational, voluntary NGO open to all.
Campaigns & Lobbies: to lower human numbers to sustainable levels by voluntary, universally available family planning.
Goals: to reduce poverty, to reverse environmental degradation, to facilitate gender equity & human rights. Established in 1992, PIC’s headquarters is in Ottawa.
We Aim – to Engage, Empower, Inspire
We challenge taboos by highlighting the harmful social, economic & environmental consequences of population growth.
We foster education & activism to: reduce climate change-related CO2 emissions; husband resources, protect biodiversity and provide a decent standard of living for all, goals unattainable with ever-increasing human numbers.
We encourage recognition of the inter-relationship between population, industrialization, pollution, food production & resource depletion as highlighted in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and its sequels. For a sustainable future, one must consider exponential growth & its limits, overshoot & collapse, recognizing that endless, unchecked economic growth renders a sustainable future impossible.
We believe in sustainable populations & their associated steady state economic policies. “For a sustainable future” countries must limit – in some cases reduce – population levels to what can be supported within their own sovereign territory, without environmental degradation.
We urge individuals to consider the impact of population on the environment & resources in their decisions on family size.
We lobby government to increase support for reproductive health & education in Canada and as a significant, integral part of overseas aid.
We are concerned that Canada’s population is increasing rapidly – one of the highest growth rates in the developed world. The negative impact on cities, agricultural land & biodiversity is ever more evident. Canadians are among the highest per capita consumers of energy and producers of CO2 pollution anywhere.
History
Founded in 1992 by the late Dr. Whitman Wright as the Ottawa Family Planning Project (then Global Population Concerns), PIC is an incorporated NGO, supported solely by membership fees & donations. It neither seeks nor receives financial aid from government nor from any private corporations or religious bodies.
Since the Canada Revenue Agency considers PIC to be a campaigning lobby group, it does not enjoy CRA tax-exempt status on donations or bequests received. PIC is managed and operated for the most part by volunteers.