
March 25, 2021 · 0 Comments
By Constance Scrafield – With Your Permission
The tender violence that is a Canadian spring is a big part of the seasonal romance many people love about living here, in such whimsical weather. Really warm temperatures are promised for the week and snow is predicted for Sunday. I have had enough of shovelling for sure. The incipient grass will have to suffer that annual “Make up your mind, weather!” trauma. Historically, the weather messes us about between warm and crummy until May concludes the debate with the 24th when we can plant our tomatoes, once the “danger of frost is past.” Nowadays, one never knows for sure. Anything.
I find myself so overwhelmed with seriousness that I can hardly bear to be serious, like running out of the tolerance for serious or coming into the light after months in the deep, dark well of serious.
Yet and yet…
On last week’s editorial pages, the decade-old civil war in Syria was attacked by Gwynne’s wisdom, a desperate and criminal situation, sending thousands fleeing from their beloved country, where they had beautiful homes, work, deeply cultured lives to live elsewhere. They didn’t want to lose everything they valued to brainless violence.
Then, thank goodness Martina raised the flag against the disastrously destructive proposed Highway 413, slated to blast through Caledon. I wondered, as I read her column, if she knows that the Mayor, Alan Thompson, is very much in favour of the planned highway, ruinous though it would be, as are long-term residents of Bolton: fed up, Martina adroitly noted, with the truck traffic. This is still a major problem, it seems, in spite of the country road alternative around the town that trucks are required to follow, missing the narrow central passage through Bolton.
The plans for Highway 413 are the plans to tear Caledon asunder, to damage beyond repair an extremely valuable stretch of the Green Belt – gone forever – plus irreparable harm to the social structure of the land…
Then, Dan, a colleague since I started writing for this esteemed publication, some 15 or so years since, brought our attention – or voiced for us – the outrageous game of Gas Prices – like playing roulette or something – low, high, higher – don’t make plans to travel far. Of course, all North American cities and their outlying areas are specifically designed to make the car king and us, the eternal victims of oil companies, they who have been subsidized by tax payers – well – always.
The Conservative Party of Canada delegates voted against confirming as part of their party policies that “climate change is real.” While their leader, Erin O’Toole, declared himself disappointed, the statement still stands in the face of rejection by -an albeit small- majority (54% to 46%).
O’Toole is firm that abortion is not on the table either for renewed debate but members of his party are determined to raise the issue again. They do so with official consent too, it must be said – Conservatives are free to drag whatever arcane arguments they like, to rehash in parliament, wasting time over issues that have been settled for a long time.
Abortion, definitely, but the climate crisis as well.
There is no longer room for debate on the extremely well understood emergency in which humanity finds itself now. All that matters now is dealing with the impending climate disaster in the most collaborative and efficient way possible, as we have done globally with vaccines against COVID-19.
There will, of a necessity, come the absolute requirement to cut and slash and that may be the only way: to simply stop the oil industry in its tracks. If there were any wisdom in the world, the oil industry would lead this imperative in order to secure a firm foot hold in the alternative means of providing energy to the world.
Serious soul searching is required, to be sure, and the early birth of conscience too, an end to the black mailing rhetoric about jobs: stop pretending that only dangerous, filthy, health destroying methods of making vehicles move and turning lights on is the sole source of employment for thousands of people.
The production of energy to power the planet will obviously and equally provide millions of jobs globally, whatever form it takes.
Whoa – there I am back to serious. Pretty hard to resist, given the dominance of serious. Hard not to join my colleagues in ringing the bells and shouting “fire!” while watching people stand about, scratching themselves, pretending not to understand or “believe” – is the world actually flat? What use debating about an oil leak, if the house has burnt to the ground?
The days of judgement are coming when this once paradisaical planet bucks the plague that worked so long, so hard to ruin it (that’s us, folks) – bucks us off and it won’t matter a damn whether we have planted a handful of Earth-refugees on Mars or not. Maybe they, living in such an inhospitable orb as Mars is, will finally be the ones to rue how we have treated the idyllic Planet Earth.