It’s no wonder Canadians no longer swoon over Justin Trudeau, if they ever did. That overloaded trope was always annoyingly sexist anyway. Nobody needs these elections and we are tired.
From the confirmation of the nameless graves of indigenous children to the terrible fires, the catastrophic evacuation of Kabul, and protesters blocking ambulances at hospitals, it has been a hellish summer.
Still, one hopes Canadians will have clear eyes on the sobering consequences of the election we face as a nation on Monday. The government waiting to be sworn in will be either liberal or conservative.
What people are reading
Can we focus now?
This pandemic is still with us. Alberta, the flagship province that most embodies the CCP’s zeitgeist, just declared a state of emergency when its ICUs collapsed and 24 people died in a single day.
And this summer, nearly 600 British Columbia residents perished in a heat wave that sparked wildfires that devastated more than half a million hectares, including entire towns. Plural.
“If there is a lesson that we should have learned as a nation these last two years, it is the indispensable role of the government,” writes @garossino for @natobserver.
Climate and Covid must attract our full attention as citizens.
We will not see Covid’s back in this country without vaccine mandates. Final point.
We must establish climate policies that meet or exceed our Paris commitments by 2030. End point.
There are excellent reasons to vote for the NDP or the Green Party. There are no defensible reasons to vote for the PPC, whose masterful tantrum campaign dominated news coverage. the let go The CCP’s mantra has proven to be grossly inadequate in dealing with moments of great crisis.
Which brings us back to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals.
If there is one lesson we should have learned as a nation in the past two years, it is the indispensable role of government. It was good government that delivered CERB benefits to millions of Canadian bank accounts within weeks of the close of 2020.
It was good government that established emergency access to capital for Canadian businesses and nonprofits, and assured the public that the federal government would help them until the end of the pandemic.
It was good government that procured more than enough vaccines to immunize the entire nation in a timely manner, and it is good government to impose a vaccine mandate whenever possible.
It is good government to introduce a national child care plan of $ 10 per day.
(Is no good governance to fight residential school survivors in court).
We should forever put aside the notion that taxes and government are inherently bad. We could not have survived Covid without them, nor will we conquer the climate emergency.
On the climate score, it is debatable that the Trudeau administration’s performance has long been underestimated. This is a somewhat self-inflicted wound, as the party’s own focus on Justin Trudeau obscures the outstanding leadership of Catherine McKenna and Jonathan Wilkinson in Canada’s infrastructure and environment portfolios.
In particular, former BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver endorsed the liberal climate platform as “a plan that reflects the urgency and scale of the crisis.” Weaver was lead author of the IPCC’s 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Scientific Assessments, and a former editor-in-chief of the Weather diary.
And respected independent experts Mark Jaccard and Katharine hayhoe They have also given liberals high marks, while expressing dissatisfaction with the NDP and the Green Party’s plans to achieve laudably ambitious goals.
Dr. Jen Winter has also criticized the vagueness of the NDP, although she is less enthusiastic in his assessment of the liberal platform.
For this, these scholars have been subjected to relentless personal attack on social media, but with little substantive response, with the exception of this energetic response to Seth Klein’s Jaccard on these pages.
What is missing from Jaccard’s assessment is an analysis of power, particularly as it relates to its development within the Liberal Party. That is a problem because, without that framework, one does not understand how and why liberals constantly promise to do things in an election (campaign from the left) and then fail (to govern from the right).
Jaccard, not to be left behind, quickly replied:
Above all, don’t be fooled by ambitious targets with vague policy statements. Insincere climate politicians learned early that naive voters would reward them for promising dramatic GHG reductions in a short time, which they subsequently never achieved once in a while. the position has been a hoax on the part of politicians from across the political spectrum: conservatives, liberals and the NDP. “
Among progressives and climate activists, liberals abandoned credibility with the purchase of the TMX pipeline. Yet environmental law professor Martin Olszynski offers the intriguing view that this move averted a crisis of national unity in the West.
Does anyone else wish we had paid much more attention to this level of debate and less coverage of the anti-vaccine howls in this election?
Right now, in this election, and for the rest of our lives, the weather is too important to be an electoral afterthought.
While many scholars conclude that the Liberal Party’s political commitments show the best way to deliver on our Paris commitments, Seth Klein is right that we must do more. Fire, flood and tornado alarms sound louder each year.
And methods matter more than feeling.
It is totally fair game to pressure the NDP and the Greens to produce credible pathways to the goals they promise to the voters. In our all-too-common cynical response to liberal climate policies, we’ve had a blind spot about the failure of progressives to produce robust and achievable mechanisms for change.
In the decades to come, when we look back at this fateful moment, we will not for a moment wish we had done less. We will regret every year that we cede power to the CCP, which put climate activists on a terrorist watch list and subjected them for years to a vindictive CRA witch hunt.
Count on this voter to support every ounce of pressure we can put on the Trudeau Liberals to deliver more and better results on the climate. Perhaps a minority government is the best control voters have.
When you go to the polls, remember that we will have a liberal or CCP government. Vote like you are going to make a difference, because you do.
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com