To The Editor,
What I Wanted? Yes and No!
I wanted to see an end to “False Majority governments” that saw a party – any party – again come to power with less than 50% of the support of Canada’s electorate. Such governments do not represent the will of the people.
Be they led by a Harper, a Trudeau, a Scheer or whoever comes next all these False Majority governments continue to give us is more of the destructive and divisive type of wasteful build up under the one, then tear down under the other type of go-nowhere governance that has unfortunately become the norm.
One that simply further entrenches our divisiveness and reinforces the growing polarization that pits neighbour against neighbour. They breed little more than cynicism and growing despair among our youth.
False majorities at best – or should I say at worst – produce the short term bottomline returns of the exponentially richer and richer corporate élite whose lobbyists (aka pimps) have the ear of both Liberal and Conservative ”war room” strategists.
In my books and the books of the majority of Canadians who bothered to vote, neither Trudeau nor Scheer earned or deserved the customary four year rah-rah-rah chest pounding that False Majority governments produce. It’s evident that a clear majority of Canadians are tired of the more of the same old same old longer term lose-lose for all.
Given such, the best I could hope for – and got – was a minority government.
Was it what I wanted? No.
With a recession well in sight and a helter-skelter ecologically unsustainable future little more than at best a decade away, our days of kicking the can down the road are coming to an end as the end of the road is well in sight. Or at least it is for those who care to look beyond the extra gruel our newly elected have offered to add to our bowls as an enticement to look no further than I, I, me, me, my.
On a go-forward basis, what I want and demand from our newly elected MPs is that they work across party lines on the development and implementation of an agreed-upon 10 year climate action plan that will bring us the systemic changes that our environmental crisis calls for if they have any respect for the reverence of life beyond their own.
It`s called an agreed-upon, made in Canada, Green New Deal.
If this can not be agreed to, it is my contention that MPs that fail to do so are little more than robotic shills who cannot think beyond Party scripts and the lining of their own pockets.
I’d like to believe the failure of MPs to push for and come to an in-Parliament agreement on a progressive 10-year climate action plan that is in keeping with the IPCC’s warnings will see us back to the polls in a year or so and not simply back to the streets in ever-growing numbers.
An incremental approach that leaves us tinkering at thge edges of this very real existential crisis will get us nowhere. A lot like sitting on the deck of the Titanic listening to the band as it went down.
Gary Champagne, Ottawa
