Hello everyone,

As you have likely heard, the emergence of a ruling progressive coalition in Parliament is possible, perhaps even likely, over the next week or so. Supportive web sites and Facebook groups are quickly popping up (e.g., a petition website at http://www.progressivecoalition.ca).

Yesterday, the Council of Canadians issued a media release that included the following proposal for a progressive coalition agenda:

"We have put forward a five-point progressive agenda to guide the work of a potential coalition government:

1. Agreement to proceed with the renegotiation of NAFTA, including seeking the removal of the Chapter 11 investor-state clause, the energy provisions, and water from the treaty.
2. Implement a Canadian energy strategy, which would address the environmental destruction of the northern Alberta tar sands, reduce eastern Canada's dependence on imported oil, and create the opportunity for Canada to become an international leader in developing new green jobs and publicly-owned renewable energy sources.
3. Implement a national water policy that would prohibit bulk water exports (by removing water from NAFTA), recognize the right to water through the United Nations, and ensure that water remains a public good not a private commodity.
4. Place an immediate moratorium on the establishment of any new for-profit privately-owned health care clinics in Canada.
5. Take immediate steps to introduce proportional representation to address the unbalanced results that come with the current electoral system in Canada."

Dave

CoC-Guelph.ca

Dear Carolyn Bennett,

As your constituent, I am asking you to please act skillfully and quickly to join forces the NDP and Bloc Quebecois to form a coalition government that will better reflect the values of the majority of Canadian voters than the Conservative minority government. Please make good use of the political savvy you have garnered over many successful years in politics to help bring the people's representatives together for the common good.

The very existence of complex life on earth is threatened by what Toronto's own political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon climate call five "tectonic stresses":

• climate change (1-7 metre rise in sea levels in the next 100 years; just think for a minute about the impact of that!),
• peak oil (those high gas prices we saw were just a portent of things to come),
• environmental devastation (including dead lakes, desertification, drought, fires, massive species extinction...),
• population stresses (mass refugee flows, overpopulation, aging in the northern countries...),
• the current economic crisis (only the beginning of what is to come if we are not able to create a sustainable civilization).

We are on the Titanic, and different factions are bickering about where to play bridge while most of the passengers are drilling holes in the bottom of the ship. It is time to set aside partisan differences.

We don't have much time (if any) to turn around the tide that threatens, as a recent US government document stated: "the capacity of earth to sustain life." Many scientists are saying we are very close to several tipping points, if we haven't passed them already.

Please help your colleagues unite for our survival and that of our children, and take swift policy action that can still make a difference.

Please stop the Conservatives from taking advantage of the crisis to push a narrow-minded, heartless agenda.

Grateful for your good work,
confident in your wisdom,

Natalie Zend