Dear Editor,
We are almost completely without words as we try to comprehend with disbelief this week’s actions to gut and massively alter the Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division, removing the managers who were focussed on actual forest health – managers of biodiversity, of ecosystems and habitats, and the head of the wildlife division. Where will the oversight come from to ensure that our wildlife habitat and populations are protected and monitored and who will enforce hunting and fishing regulations? The destruction of the Wildlife Division will only result in a wild west, free from oversight, threatening the very core of biodiversity in Nova Scotia.
But if that devastation isn’t enough there were further attacks. Food inspectors and agriculture labs that ensure food safety for Nova Scotians. Then going after Tourism, Culture, Communities and Heritage with the closures of mainly rurally-based visitor centres and small museums. Comments about modernization and computer searches don’t fly and do not and will not replace the human hospitality this province is renowned for. They are clearly underestimating the impact the heavily-visited Visitor Information Centres have on the traveling public to NS.
Nova Scotians did not sanction your governing party to disembowel what we in Nova Scotia hold as important or to blatantly disregard our treaty obligations and reconciliation.
The fully transparent direction of this current administration to favour greed of industry over the well-being of its citizens is short-sighted, antiquated, and blind, disregarding where we are at this time in our human and natural history.
We will leave you with a quote from the late Senator Murray Sinclair’s memoir Who We Are: Elder Crowshoe explained to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) that “Reconciliation between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Canadians, from an Aboriginal perspective, also requires reconciliation with the natural world. If human beings continue to destroy the natural world, then reconciliation remains incomplete, a perspective repeatedly heard at the TRC hearings, that reconciliation will never occur unless we are also reconciled with the earth.” In other words, he who tramples on the earth tramples on himself!
As lifelong Nova Scotians, we expect so much better.
Jennyfer Brickenden/
Scott Macmillan
Halifax / Hillsborough