No doubt the failures in his first term must be shared with, or even primarily laid at the feet of, Republican hyper-partisan refusal to meet half-way. With the fiscal cliff in view, those Republican law makers should now be chastened by the failure at the polls. The president has no time for a victory lap, he must get right to work.

In the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and the summer of parched earth and lost crops, the president must listen to his science advisor, Dr. John Holdren, and the head of climate science at NASA, Dr. James Hansen, and actually lead on climate. The world needs the U.S. to join the European Union in moving aggressively to a low-carbon economy. Barak Obama got a second chance. Let’s hope that the rest of us did too.

Elizabeth May is Leader of the Green Party of Canada and Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands.
Originally published in the Huffington Post.

The post No Time For a Victory Lap, Mr. President. Your Planet is Calling. appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I was pleased when the hon. member for St. Paul’s mentioned a book that I think is critical to this debate: The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by British researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It is a substantial body of work and its data shows a wide variety of indicators such as rates of violence, successful child rearing, infant mortality, crime and health outcomes.

In every one of the indicators that they checked, wealthy countries like the U.S., U.K. or Canada, where income disparity is wide, they found that people were less well off than in those countries where, relatively speaking, people were more equal. The strength of the middle-class then is a key to our health as a society.

I would like to ask my hon. member what other insight she took from that book.

Hon. Carolyn Bennett: Mr. Speaker, I think the other piece that comes from The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone is the issue of social inclusion, that we are all in this together and it does not pit one level of society against another, as our leader said this morning. This is actually about being all in the same boat and people coming together with their neighbours.

We know that social inclusion is important just as not smoking is to health outcomes. The fact is that inequality begets division and jealousies.

We are calling on the government today to admit the problem of the diminishing middle-class, the bigger gap between the rich and the poor, and the damage that does to our country and to its spirit of getting along.

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