Right in the centre - A few points to consider
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- Published on Friday, February 28, 2020
By Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner & Press
There are many issues before us today and most of them are disturbing.
•The sex offence trials of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have been disgusting, to say the least. These two men, and many others, give people in general and men in particular, a bad name. That anybody would do what they did is a disgrace and almost enough to make me into a proponent of capital punishment.
•You can’t excuse their behaviour in any fashion. As men in leadership positions, much better is expected of them than they exhibited. Epstein is dead and it sounds like death is stalking Weinstein. There will be few to grieve.
•The shutdown of the Teck mine project in Alberta is a very sad thing. Canada, and the world, will need oil for a long time to come and this project would have helped fill that need and create huge economic spin-offs for 40 years. The reasons for the shutdown are many and complex, but the bulk of the blame rests with our federal government who have swallowed the lie that we are in “a climate emergency”.
•Canada is certainly not in a climate emergency and neither is the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean that the climate isn’t changing, it is, and always has. What it does mean is that there are political forces at work who are massaging this whole climate issue to gain political advantage. It is wrong and could lead to economic collapse if left unchecked.
•Canada, and the world, will likely change from oil, gas and coal, to electricity in the decades to come but we do not have the capacity to produce or distribute all the electricity needed to make the changeover as quickly as the climate alarmists insist is needed.
•As a county, dare I say nation, we have allowed our descriptive language to slip a bit too far. Canada is a nation. Quebec is not. The various geographic, cultural and hereditary groups are not nations. It is ludicrous for them to call themselves nations. Admittedly, at one time, hundreds of groups may have been nations, but the key word is “been”, past tense. We are now one nation, Canada, and all the former nations became part of Canada when we developed as “One Nation” and began to receive publicly funded heath care and education, publicly funded infrastructure, policing, national highways and railways, and publicly funded protection from the national military and police services. When groups, claiming to be nations, demand that the RCMP leave their nation, does that mean if there is a fire, a murder, a kidnapping or search and rescue needed that the RCMP have to stand down? I somehow don’t think so. We are one nation made up of many ethnic and culturally diverse groups, but we are “One Nation” plain and simple. I don’t want to go back to the grimy hovel of a long torn down Montreal tenement house that my people came from and I doubt that others want to go back to their living conditions of 100 or 200 years ago either.
Development, in all its aspects, as a nation is the key. Like I have said many times, the past is a place to learn from, not to live in.
Disclaimer: The writer serves as a volunteer chair of the Manitoba Community Newspaper Association. The views expressed in this column are the writer’s personal views and are not to be taken as being the view of the MCNA board or Banner & Press staff.
