Good Sunday Morning!
I am in Toronto for the big Pride Parade, marching with our Ontario Green cousins and many of the federal Green candidates. We always have an awesome Brazilian Salsa band with the Green contingent at Toronto Pride as Mike Schreiner and I dance down the street. Being able to do that, being able to travel to Sidney and celebrate with volunteers in our big volunteer appreciation event on Friday night in Sidney and get back to Toronto and feel able to do so and remain strong and healthy brings me to other reflection this June 29th,
Today is the second anniversary of the day I nearly died with a hemorrhagic stroke. And it constantly reminds me that I am among the luckiest of the lucky, Once I finally had a doctor, after seven years without one, and once I got medical care on July 5th, 2023 after suffering a massive excruciating headache during the Claremont high school graduation on June 29. On July 8th my doctor explained this to me emphasizing that I needed to know I had been incredibly lucky. The way I came to think of it was that it was as serious as a gun firing in a crowded room, with the bullet lodging harmlessly in the wall. It was a serious event, but it did no damage at all. So I know I am very lucky to be alive. Every day I awaken with that thought. I am so lucky. I intend on living as long as I can. I want to see my darling 8 month old Lily graduate high school. I equally want to do the hard work now we all need to do to ensure a livable world for the children of this planet – current and future, and all creatures- human and non.
On Cape Breton Island last week, on the craziest of crazy weeks of my life, fighting C-5 from the road in multiple places, getting to Marc Garneau’s funeral and then to commitments made previously in Nova Scotia – well I wrote you about it last week. Complete madness. But I did catch a break. On Thursday the Liberals switched up the House calendar moving off Bill C-5. For a few hours I did not have to be on-line into parliament. In that time I was able to visit one of my favourite places on the planet – the beach at Margaree Harbour. My parents moved us to Margaree in 1974, a village of 42 people on the Cabot Trail. I waitressed and cooked for many years in our family restaurant on an old Bluenose fishing schooner. I worked the hours I work now, only seasonally. I opened the kitchen at 7 am and worked until after the dinner service – seven days a week for the summer season. And once a summer I would take an afternoon off to swim at the Margaree Harbour beach. Once I had started practicing law, no longer living in Margaree, coming home meant taking a big chunk of time in the summer. And swimming in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence became a sacred thing. My little girl grew up with that village. I would leave Ottawa seasonally and run Sierra Club from Margaree by phone and fax from our cottage, walking to the beach with Cate. We would scout out what friends and families were on the beach for the day. Invariably it was easy to ask some group of friends with kids her age if she could hang out with them for the day while I went back to work. Incredibly, in this day and age, The Lawrence’s General Store in the village centre ran a tab for me. Cate could walk up the hill from the beach and ask Fletcher Lawrence to add a cold drink to mommy’s tab, and maybe some chips and snacks. Fletcher would actually double check if a treat seemed out of the ordinary, with junk food, he would check “Does your mother let you have these?” On Thursday last, as Cate’s partner Lily’s amazing dad, walked Lily up and down the beach in the shade of their umbrella against the hot sun while she slept, Cate went up to the store to get us cold drinks and snacks, and then we two went for a swim.
The water was bracing but gorgeous once we were in. We had been swimming a while when Cate asked with alarm, “Mum do you see anything alive in the water?” I had on my prescription goggles. I could see everything clearly. The water was crystal clear., eerily without silt or floating kelp. “Mum, where are the jelly fish? I don’t even see much seaweed.” I looked for the small crabs usually to be found skittering along the ocean floor. I looked for the tiny fish, fries of capelin and other common varieties were usually to be found, sometimes in little clouds of teeny life darting away as we swam. In the past we would frequently see a lobster hiding out below. Nothing. No sign of anything living at all. The jellyfish are a favoured food for the migrating, “at risk” Leatherback turtles, amazing creatures that winter in the Caribbean. One of the threats to the leatherback has been plastic pollution as a floating plastic bag looks like a jellyfish to a hungry turtle. I started worrying. While it is nice to swim without being vigilant about running into a jellyfish, if this was more than a one-off event – a recent storm that had moved life farther out from the beach, maybe I could relax. Back on shore I asked old friends who had also decided Thursday was the perfect beach day. “Have you noticed, has there been a decline in what you see alive in the water?” yes, it seems. And some offered it had been a few years now.
The science about the threat of climate change to the life of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is clear. Due to global warming, ocean currents have shifted. The endangered Right whale has relocated altogether from its preferred habitat in the Bay of Fundy and is now entangled in fishing lines in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The Gulf of St. Lawrence had traditionally been known as hosting the richest biodiversity of any Canadian coastal region. Even after the collapse of the North Atlantic cod that decimated the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence kept a multi billion dollar multi-species fishery alive. The lobster harvests are still good, but the warning signs in published scientific literature have described the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as the marine version of the canary in the coal mine. The rich life of the Gulf was sustained by the re-charge of cool, oxygenated water from the Labrador Current. But over the last decade or so, the Labrador Current has shifted as has the Gulf Stream. The ocean along coastal Cape Breton is now recharged by the warmer de-oxygenated Gulf Stream. I do not know if scientists are tracking our jellyfish and pre-commercial crabs. I need to ask and look. A large shadow fell over our perfect beach day. What if, I keep thinking as I watched Lily, legs limp in her deep slumber as they bounced in her harness firmly strapped to her dad, safe from the hot sun. At least the ozone layer is repairing itself because the Montreal Protocol actually worked. What if my dear Lily I cannot take you here when you are older to see an ocean alive again, repairing itself? What if this was our best ever last beach day?”
I weep, and I fight. That is what grandmothers must do.
This week saw the completion of the bulldozing project for omnibus bill C-5.
The PMO used the same “programming motion” approach used in the House to shorten debate and apply forced votes in the Senate without the usual time to study and instead to push the bill through, again with Conservative support. Indigenous senators, like Mi’kmaq leaders Senators Brian Francis and Paul Prosper tried and failed to be allowed to amend the bill, So too did brave independent Senator Marilou McPhedran fight, as did Senator Pau Woo. They tried, and like me, Bloc and NDP MPs in the House, they were bulldozed. So much for “Sober Second Thought” this was the equivalent of binge drinking and getting behind the wheel. Reckless. . Some Senators started calling it the “Trust me” bill. Because we all must love Mark Carney for his brain and for writing in his book Value(s) that there is such a thing as a carbon budget and it is being rapidly exhausted. Surely he has a plan. He must have a plan, and assuming it is a plan to protect climate, it must be kept very secret or Liberals could never have succeeded in getting the Conservatives on board. Thanks to Conservative support, the Liberal minority government now acts like a massive majority, with unprecedented new powers. The “Trust me” bill, only Carney does not ask for our trust. He gained a minority government with brilliant image projection. Once the election was framed as a binary choice for Prime Minister, faced with the loathsome Poilievre and sparked by horror at Trump, whose actions continue to escalate in abuse of all norms, Carney was an irresistible choice. The grown-up in the room. We are in re-runs of “Father Knows Best.”
What we can and must do now is keep up the pressure for meaningful work toward Indigenous reconciliation, to protect biodiversity and hold atmospheric carbon to as low a level as is possible. It may no longer be possible to hold at 1.5 degrees global temperature rise as we pledged to try to do -all nations – back in 2015 in Paris. But every fraction of a degree global temperature rise avoided means saving millions of lives, and who knows how many ecosystems?. In this modern version of “Father Knows Best” we need a powerful counterbalance. A Mother Earth – Mother Nature- Eco-warrior who teaches father a thing or two.
Meanwhile- to one and all HAPPY CANADA DAY! hope to see you somewhere on my MP route! Beacon Avenue to water taxi, Salt Spring to Saturna!
Elbows up- arms outstretched.
Love,
Elizabeth
Saanich-Gulf Islands Greens
https://www.sgigreenparty.ca/