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Letter: Christy Clark commiting crimes against our children's future

Dear Editor, We can predict and control a great deal of what will happen in the future because we are designing that future today.
Christy Clark
Christy Clark

Dear Editor,

We can predict and control a great deal of what will happen in the future because we are designing that future today.

The policies we are now putting in place relating to issues such as the environment, climate change, economic policies, job creation, and education will determine the kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit from us and the character and quality of the life they will experience within it.

This is why, with every successive re-election of Christy Clark’s government, my anxiety about the educational and environmental policies she is putting in place grows exponentially.

I have never been inclined to adopt or affiliate myself with any particular political ideology, preferring instead to assess and agree or not agree with selective policies regardless of which political party is promoting them.

It therefore stands to reason that, as a father, grandfather and teacher, who spent 30 years trying to help students learn how to learn, I am keenly aware of the fact that, in regards to both providing our public school children with the support and quality of education that they need to properly prepare themselves for life in a rapidly changing and increasingly challenged world, and in doing the best we can to ensure that the environment they will live in will be healthy enough to help them overcome the economic and social challenges that will be precipitated by ongoing climate change, Christy Clark’s government is totally failing our children in both ways.

By continuing to cut back funding for public education and closing schools while giving substantial support to the private school industry, and by willfully dismantling her predecessor Gordon Canpbell’s progressive and widely respected climate policies and replacing them with a new “plan” that is essentally toothless, politically safe, and self-serving, Clark has once again provided evidence that the long-term welfare of our children and the health of our ecosystem ­— two of the most important factors in determining what their lives will be like in the future — take a back seat to her concerns about being re-elected.

Professor Mark Jaccard, of the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, categorizes Clark’s new climate policies as a “new height in political cynicism” (Globe & Mail - Aug. 22).

As someone concerned about my grandchildren’s future, as well as those of the hundreds of students I worked with over the years, I would go further and call her education and climate policies crimes against our children’s futures.

In the next election, we should think about whether we want to let that continue.

Ray Arnold

Richmond