¡Hasta siempre Comandante!

Fidel Castro was one of the few great leaders of our time.  My most striking memory of Cuba was a sign I once saw on the road from Varadero, where we had just landed, to Havana, our principal destination.  It simply said: “Welcome to Cuba.  The first law is love.”  Now I’ve been pretty well all over the world--North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, not Australia but New Zealand.  But it was only in Cuba where I’ve seen or expected to receive such a welcome.  There are those who vilify Fidel Castro because he limited people’s freedom.  There is some truth to this claim.  He limited the freedom that people in Cuba had had to exploit their neighbours.  Those who felt begrudged by this left for latitudes in which there is wider scope for such freedom.  But there is by far too much emphasis put in those latitudes upon what Isaiah Berlin calls negative liberty--the liberty to wall oneself off from the rest of society and to do whatever one pleases within those walls.  Fidel Castro embraced a more positive type of liberty--the liberty to mold a life in which we are accountable to and responsible for one another.  As his name implies, he bore fidelity to that ideal his whole life through.  Well done, Fidel, you faithful servant of humankind.  ¡Hasta siempre Comandante! 

Join the Battle

10 November 2016

The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, P. C., M. P.

Prime Minister of Canada

Langevin Block

Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2

Dear Prime Minister

I am writing concerning interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose’s comments reported by the CBC today that, in the light of Donald Trump’s election to the American presidency, it would be “complete insanity” for Canada to implement a carbon tax.  According to her statements quoted in the story, Ambrose’s principal criterion for determining environmental and economic policy seems to be avoiding what she considers to be competitive disadvantage in respect to the United States.  Because, she reasons, “Americans would never do” so, adopting a carbon tax in Canada “makes no sense anymore” (www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-environment-energy-ambrose-1.3845889).

By extension, then, it would seem to make no sense anymore for Canada to pay any attention to conclusions of scientific bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased” (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf).  Indeed, it would seem to make no sense anymore for Canada to pay any attention to any scientific evidence or rational thought whatsoever.  Better to let our policies be informed by ideological fantasies that do not reflect mainstream Canadian values held by some outside our borders whom no Canadian ever elected to represent them.

I urge Canadians to stay the course in pursuing the objectives to which we pledged ourselves at the CP21 Agreements in Paris last year and to extend our efforts to live sustainably—within the limits of the ecosystems of which we are inextricably a part and with the commitment to justice and social equity that the notion of sustainability should imply.  Laurier thought that the twentieth century would be Canada’s century.  Perhaps he missed the mark by one hundred years.  Canada has much to offer in terms of vision and leadership, but only if we as a people have the moral courage to accept the challenge.

                                                                        Yours truly,

                                                                        Jay A. Cowsill, PhD