Cannings got to the party a little too late

Dear Mr. Cannings.

That was a great column (“Hundreds of people died from the heat,” July 14) in the Herald/Courier.

However I fear that you are a little late to the party.

I for one have been banging my drum and sounding the alarm about climate change for over 50 years and it's done very little to change public policy.

As Greta Thunberg recently said about you "leaders"... "You have the world’s eyes on you, so you started to act. Not acting as in taking climate action, but acting as in role playing.

Playing politics, playing with words, and playing with our future. Pretending to take responsibility — acting as saviours as you try to convince us that things are being taken seriously.

Meanwhile the gap between your rhetoric and reality keeps growing wider and wider.”

Not only did your party agree to the Liberals extremely weak Climate Legislation, Bill C-12, any Green Party amendments, put forward by Elizabeth May, arguably one of Canada's foremost experts on the environment, were dismissed, reworded or disregarded.

The current climate crisis in B.C. is indeed appalling, but a wake-up call. Really sir, you a scientist, should have been awake and yelling about it quite a long time ago. Your column would have been better with calls for specific policy changes: no more pipelines, no more clearcutting old growth, decarbonizing the grid and electrifying transportation, etc. Without any actual calls to action, it falls into saying the right thing, but doing nothing.

I note that you said this summer is a baseline for the future. Too bad you and your ilk didn't do anything in the past to prevent this crisis.

One other thing Greta said in her speech to the Austrian Summit, which is particularly ironic considering the folks at Fairy Creek who are laying their bodies on the line to protect the crucial life support biospheres of the remnants of old growth in B.C.: ‘When the protests get too loud, you make the protests illegal.”

Jill Tarswell Salt Spring Island