Editorial
What this climate crisis can teach us
Premier Legault’s offer of a $200 grand buyout for flooded homes is one response. A gas-tax exemption would have helped our relief effort immensely. But in the big picture, Outaouais’s triple-whammy – flooding, 2017; 6-8 tornados, 2018; bigger floods, 2019 – comes at a significant moment.
One, this supports Legault’s claim that climate change requires government action and strengthens his stand against another major pipeline across Quebec. The National Assembly agrees. With this, not talk, the CAQ commits to positive steps toward extreme-climate abatement.
This is today’s game, and even Albert knows it. There’s big money in the climate-change revolution – from $5 broccoli, millions in electric vehicles, to inter-provincial billions with the federal government back in its on-again, off again climate game plan.
Two, the Chalk River Nuclear Facility is upstream from us, thanks to its need for unlimited fresh water. This includes a huge radioactive dump to which SNC-Lavalin and partners intend to ship nuclear wastes from across Canada. The dump is reported under construction, meaning radioactive waste may eventually be stored within reach of a swelling Ottawa River. That is the same water spreading across Fraser Beach, Wychwood and Deschênes. A good plan?
Three: Legault and company are acutely aware of the importance of holding onto Hydro Quebec as provincially-owned. Every Quebecer owns Hydro Quebec. Each resident, even those with homes under a quarter-meter of water, owns a portion of Hydro Quebec. There is a corporate-energized campaign to privatize Hydro Quebec underway before Legault, but the world-wide need for non-petroleum energy means that the sell-off of this legacy of René Levesque shouldn’t happen. Hydro-Quebec assures us a profit, plus cheaper and secure access to green energy.
And there’s a double insult: radioactive nano-particles can be dispersed through the tumbling waters and up into our air. If aerial bacteria counts are high in our flood-times, where are aerial radioactivity counts?
Fourth positive: Now’s the time to build the Hydro-Quebec Electric Car company and install an electric-vehicle power network across Quebec. Quebec has the expertise to design, manufacture, power, and even create that energy – on Hydro Quebec’s model. With us, all citizens, as shareholders. Impressive lessons!
Back to water: Sunday afternoon, April 28, most Aylmer homes and buildings protected, or close to ... but with immense exhaustion.
From homeowners to our reps in government, their staffers, the local businesspeople, school kids and working people, all who contributed muscle to move those sandbags. Aylmer’s again famous for its community strength. National media is all over us!
Yes, given our costs, Legault could have left us a gas-tax exemption, plus the $200,000 buy-out. But he did make a rare commitment: “ . . . we cannot keep doing this; we have to solve it.” That’s just what the millions of protesting school kids also said recently and what the “Extinction/Rebellion” crowds said to the world, using central London as their media. Aylmer has its role in the front ranks of this Climate Revolution. We are proving it today.
