“Hey, Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me

I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to”

- Bob Dylan

For the past year I struggled to write my regular blog. It’s not that I didn’t try. There were plenty of false starts, but my muse had gone AWOL.

The day after my bill to enshrine the right to a healthy environment in law was roundly defeated, with every Liberal and PC MLA voting nay, inspiration returned.

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People who earn their living from the land or sea develop the impressive ability to determine what kind of weather the next day will bring simply by surveying the sky and checking the wind direction. In many rural communities people ask the fisher or farmer in their family what the weather gives, and they can get an instant forecast for the next day. Today, the same thing can be accomplished with a quick glimpse at the weather app on the cellphone in your pocket.

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It has been sometime since I have written a blog. With everything that is going on here in Canada, stateside and overseas, it has been challenging to focus one’s thoughts. That hasn’t been the case for would-be autocrats and insatiable profiteers. They are focussed like a laser beam on their self-serving goals, the rule of law be damned, international or otherwise.

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As Donald Trump is busily trying to overturn the economic order of the world, Canadian politicians of a conservative bent have seized the opportunity to argue that it’s time to accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels to make Canada strong. Drill baby drill, Canadian style.

Big oil has seized the moment to demand that the Canadian laws created to fight climate change be abolished - all of them. Is it any wonder that the climate crisis has failed to find a place in Poilievre’s campaign speeches, and received barely a mention in Carney’s stump speech.

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I remember during last fall’s New Brunswick election campaign how surprised I was to read how much the Liberals low-balled the cost of their election promises on fixing the health care system. Both the Greens and the Liberals made access to health care our number one campaign priority so I knew what it would cost to implement our long-standing commitment to transition to team-based collaborative care practices and clinics and away from solitary family doctors’ practices.

The Liberals said they were going to invest $34.5 million, when our costing reflected a generational investment of $400 million. At the time it appeared they were solely budgeting for bricks and mortar and administrative support. We had budgeted for paying the collaborative care team members, other than doctors already covered by Medicare. There must be money for the salaries of the nurse practitioners, nurses, dieticians, physiotherapists and mental health counsellors on the team. Otherwise, there is no team practice.

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The possibility that exposure to environmental toxins or contaminants can actually cause neurological disorders, birth defects, cancers, or other health problems continues to be an anathema to most politicians and public servants alike. When it comes to updating and enforcing environmental standards that are designed to be protective of public health, the response is snail-like.

When a naturally occurring toxin, industrial contaminant, or pesticide is put forth as the possible cause of health problems in a population, too many politicians turn away. The response can range from dismissal or denial to inaction or foot-dragging, and in some instances – the vilification of those who raise the alarm.

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Just around the corner from me a neighbour installed solar panels on his bungalow. Free energy from the sun is becoming more appealing as the cost of everything goes up. Of course, there is the initial cost of the panels and the labour needed to wire them into the house, but affordable financing puts it in reach.

New Brunswickers are an independent lot. The increasingly frequent interruptions of power from the grid caused the ownership of home generators to go viral. Now we are seeing the spread of solar panels on modest homes. That is new.

Our power rates have reached the point where it is demonstrably cheaper to generate electricity from sunlight than to buy it from NB Power. If the financing is accessible and affordable, as is currently provided by the federal government, then more and more people are going to go solar.

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Last week at one of my regular community gatherings, an elderly constituent asked me what I was going to do about her power bills. She lived alone in a mini-home and like so many other New Brunswicker, her most recent bill had spiked reflecting a jump in consumption for which she could not account. She had brought her bills to show me just in case I doubted her word.

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“When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning.”

(Los Angeles is Burning by Bad Religion from their 2004 Album, The Empire Strikes First)

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