Dear Editor:
Decades ago, ambulance services in many communities were operated by undertakers. This occasionally created a conflict of interest; for example, when these ambulance drivers/funeral business employees arrived at the scene of an accident to find several seriously injured and deceased victims.
In such circumstances, it was tempting – and better for business – to pick up the dead and leave behind the wounded. All that changed when ambulance services in Ontario were centralized and the focus became solely on saving lives (and not succumbing to the financial lure of fatalities).
These days, Canada’s political parties are competing for your vote during a climate emergency that endangers the future of all children and future generations on this planet. Instead of working together and pulling out all the stops to give our kids the best chance, we have politicians eager to muck around in a partisan political dogfight to diss the other guy’s climate solutions or tell us it’s all a hoax. Kind of like leaving the wounded behind at the scene of an accident, instead of concentrating on saving lives and stabilizing our one and only life support system – in this case, planet Earth.
Reliable, peer reviewed science concludes we have less than 11 years left to avoid climate catastrophe, which means our next government will either decide to move boldly and quickly towards clean energy alternatives – or we get locked into many more years of fossil fuel addiction and even more severe climate destruction.
In October, we need to elect MPs who are champions of courageous climate action, but who will also pledge to work across party lines, putting our most precious resource – children’s lives – well above the “same old, same old” story of partisan politics-as-usual.
Liz Armstrong,
Erin