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President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after walking off Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Sept. 26, 2019. The whistle-blower’s complaint accused President Trump of trying to compel Ukraine’s leader to help investigate a 2020 rival, and the White House of trying to “lock down” records of the call.Doug Mills/The New York Times News Service

Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

America’s trump card

Re Whistle-blower Alleges Trump’s Envoys Met With Ukrainian Officials Over President’s Demands For Biden Probe (Online, Sept. 26): Impeaching Donald Trump would only make matters worse. The best, cheapest and least time-consuming way of holding a U.S. president to account is at the voting booth. The U.S. system is not perfect, but it still works.

Douglas Cornish Ottawa

A strike for climate action

Re Skip Work, Save Jobs: The Climate Strike Is Also About Economic Stability (Sept. 25): It seems obvious that economic and social stability isn’t just linked to ecological stability, it’s embedded within it. It’s not as if the economy exists outside of an environment in some hypothetical Platonic sense.

Part of the problem is public perception and cultural myths. Sustainability is often misunderstood – even among those with the best of environmental intentions – as the centre of an overlapping Venn diagram, where people-planet-profit meet. But this is an incorrect model of reality: People and profit can’t exist independently of the planet.

Rather than a Venn diagram, we should think of concentric circles. In the centre, you have economics (profit), embedded within society (people), embedded within a global ecology (planet). How on Earth could it be otherwise?

Mark Bessoudo London, England


Re Masters Of Disaster? (Letters, Sept. 25): A letter-writer is correct that, thanks to advances in science, the cost of renewable energy has been falling fast. However, it is because no one has been listening to the science, as Greta Thunberg argues, that all this technology has yet to be effectively used to mount a global response to climate change.

Climate science should be non-partisan, but it has been used as a political tool, to the detriment of everyone’s health. Remember Bill C-311? The Climate Change Accountability Act from 2010 had set ambitious targets for greenhouse gas-emission reductions in Canada – it was defeated by the Senate without debate.

Today, climate change has been described as one of the biggest health challenges of the 21st century, with a cascade of physical and mental-health effects. Take, for example, the loss of homes, livelihoods and community infrastructure owing to extreme weather, fires and floods. No one is immune to these effects – and any subsequent PTSD, depression or anxiety – as we’ve seen with fires and floods in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

I will be among the thousands of Canadian health professionals marching for climate action. I understand the desperation in the voices of young people around the world pleading for real and immediate action on climate, in the face of continued opposition from those who prefer business as usual.

Fiona Hanley RN, Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment; Montreal

The youth vote

Re Our Youth Care About Our Politics, But We Have To Invite Them To The Party (Opinion, Sept. 21): I have been a teacher for 17 years in British Columbia and the United Kingdom, and I have run for public office in a place where the voting age is 16. In fact, when I was nominated in my parish on the island of Guernsey, I was put forward by a former student who was 17. I didn’t win in the end, but I certainly did notice great youth involvement in campaigning and voter participation.

Not only are young people interested in our elections, they seem to care deeply about politics and are inclined to investigate the issues. I was actually inspired to run for office by another former student who had also thrown in his hat. He had told me, “A lot of people talk about making a difference, but how many of them actually try to make a difference?” They seem more actively curious than many older voters who, from my experience talking to them, tend to vote either according to their pocketbooks or almost absentmindedly – vote by rote, as it were – by casting ballots for the political party they have always supported.

Here in Canada, we should consider lowering the voting age so that young people can fully participate in our democracy. Young people can make a huge difference when given the opportunity – one need only consider Greta Thunberg.

At the very least, we could do with adding a little youthful vigour to the dull exercises our elections seem all too often to be these days.

Andy Barham Coquitlam, B.C.

Where his allegiance lies

Re Freeland Orders Officials To Revoke Appointment Of Syrian Consul In Montreal (Sept. 26): Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland was shocked and appalled at Syria’s appointment of Waseem Ramli as honorary consul in Montreal, after it was revealed that he openly supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Who else would he appoint, an ISIS supporter?

Irv Salit Toronto

Game misconduct?

Re Want To Know What The Leafs’ Core Values Are? See Who They Name Captain (Sept. 26): Columnist Cathal Kelly gets it. So many have trivialized Auston Matthews’s disorderly conduct charge as no harm done. But as a female who has been out alone at 2 a.m., after finishing a work shift, I know what being vulnerable feels like.

What Mr. Matthews and his friends allegedly did – attempting to terrify a female security guard, Mr. Matthews eventually dropping his pants – indeed sounds to me like "a cruel act of intimidation.”

Mr. Matthews may be Maple Leafs captain material one day, but not now.

Susan Harrop Mississauga

A history lesson

Re In Memory Of 1940s Mistreatment, Japanese Canadians Deserve Justice From The Province (Sept. 21): I now know that I grew up on land stolen from Canadians of Japanese descent, which, in turn, had been stolen from the Coast Salish First Nations decades before. I heartily support Jordan Stanger-Ross’s view that full redress for losses unjustly suffered by Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War is long overdue, as is the settlement of First Nations’ land claims.

My father served in Italy with the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, and after the war he exercised his veteran’s rights by purchasing land from the Veterans Land Administration. Only a few years before, this land had been part of a flourishing community of Japanese-Canadian strawberry farms, until it was confiscated. Three decades later, our family profited handsomely when the farm was sold to make way for a housing subdivision.

No one in the community where I grew up talked about what had been done to the Japanese Canadians, and there was not a mention of this abuse of human rights in my grade-school history classes.

Every spring, I would find on our farm a few scrawny, wild strawberry plants, defiantly blossoming and setting a few puny berries. It was not until years later that I realized this was evidence of a shameful part of Canadian history, literally at my feet. These few surviving plants were a silent testament to the injustices inflicted on Japanese Canadians.

Don Barz Kamloops, B.C.


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