As I’ve mentioned, this website has been activated and I will be contributing 3-5 articles per week. They will, not always but mostly be about matters environmental and I want you to know why.

During the May 2008 election I campaigned all around the province for the NDP (obviously didn’t do much good!) and was often asked how a former Socred Minister could do this.

The answer wasn’t too complimentary of the NDP as I would explain thusly: “The NDP might make a hell of a mess fiscally so that a new government will have to clean it up but here’s the point – fiscal mismanagement can be fixed by a new government but you can never get your rivers and your precious salmon back once they’ve been destroyed”.

Even though I’m no longer young, I take the long term view. This is not easy to do when you look just a short way down the path and realize you’re not going to be here! I have, however, a theory that to stay young in heart and mind you must be concerned with issues that will be around long after you’re gone. I try to walk through life in the shoes of my 30 year old grandson and namesake and deal with life as if I were going to be here with him.

I consider the environment to be, apart from war, the most important issue in front of us. That’s why the great filmmaker Damien Gillis and I have joined up to form The Common Sense Canadian (www.thecanadian.org)

We cannot learn from or forget our past when every tree was there to be cut down and every fish to be caught,

As Tallyrand said about the Bourbons when they were restored to the French throne: “they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. That’s us, folks!

I’m not optimistic that we can change sufficiently to save what’s left of our globe but I comfort myself with the thought that people take a long time to catch on but when they do, action happens big time.

But what other choice do we have? Are we to throw up our hands and say to hell with it – and let Gordon (Pinocchio) Campbell continue destroying our rivers and precious wild salmon? Do we consent to this just because it seems an impossible task to resist?

Of course not! We have a moral duty to perform and perform it we must.

But cheer up! If you had predicted in 1989 that the Berlin Wall was about to come down and that the Soviet Union would soon disintegrate you would have been institutionalized as insane!

There was no way that Britain could have resisted Hitler in June of 1940 yet they did and we know the results.

The great Churchill has set the rallying cry for all of us

“Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense”.

Please, everyone, join the fight.

Please make use of this website and make your comments. I intend to reply from time to time.