Dear editor,
I think it is absolutely essential that we admit to each other the obvious.
When people who want a just and sustainable world split their votes between two parties, we all get dammed rivers to subsidize power for compressing the gas of a fractured B.C., giant forestry corporations cut free to do whatever they choose in the woods, expanded fish farms that conceal the spread of disease to wild stocks, highways that massively overgrow the Lower Mainland, deeper cuts to education and the continued privatization of our health care, the selling off our public assets and an indifferent eye to the needs of society's most vulnerable.
I don't agree with the media reporting that, "It's the economy, stupid." A prime example: Pierre Trudeau motivated and changed Canada with his idea/ideal of a Just Society.
Through that frame he not only got elected relentlessly but he moved Canadian society to cherish multi-culturalism and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and Canada as a peaceful nation.
It's not the economy; it’s the frame. The failing of the NDP was that they make no effort to frame their values outside of a wimpy "Better."
I pray those who want a just and sustainable society can all learn a valuable lesson from this: If we continue to divide ourselves into camps that can't work together we'll get the same results in the next federal election.
And the Harper Conservatives are the B.C. Liberals on steroids!
Already they have declared environmentalists generally as enemies of the state, they have gutted the Fisheries Act so we are left with a handful of waterways with commercially lucrative fish runs and relegated the rest of our aquatic environments to cesspools of industrial waste and exploitation; they've set Canadian mining companies loose on the world's people and environment, creating a joke of accountability called a Corporate Social Responsibility Act that calls on Canadian mining companies to act responsibly — if they want to.
They turned elections into an outright fraud and confined Canadian foreign aid to corporate interests. They've run a dagger through the heart of the idea of Canada as a peace-loving nation, are at war with our public broadcasting system and are actively selling us out to corporate power (trade) agreements that will confine us as to acting as pawns to foreign and corporate interests.
We have a short time to take the lessons of last week's disaster and build relationships that will ensure that what has happened to our province will not happen to our country and Earth.
It is time for people who long for a just and sustainable society to come together and talk with each other and make our co-operative spirit more effective than the power schemes of those who would divide us.
Norm Reynolds,
Courtenay