The following letter was sent to member of Parliament John Weston and copied to Coast Reporter.
With growing bemusement, I read the cover of your recent newsletter, Celebrating Canada.
In it you admonish the Iranian regime for its radical, heavy-handed police force and court and government violence towards its citizens. I agree with many statements you make. I wondered, as I kept reading, how you can disassociate your own party's modus operandi from the tendencies in Iran.
Praising our police force for its balanced approach and then putting on a display like the one in Toronto is shameful. Calling our judges fair and then legislating their voice away with proposed C-15 is abusive. Abandoning Kyoto while calling yourselves responsible is simply embarrassing. Introducing herbal laws, C-51, is outright fascist.
I am continuously and internationally embarrassed as a Canadian by the Conservatives' own violent tendencies, national programs to imprison more of our citizenry and crimes of legislature against the environment and its citizens.
Why is it that our own ruling extreme right feels the need to criticize that which it cannot defend within its own party? Perhaps by showing us bigger elephants we won't talk about the one in the room.
Michael Lacoste
Roberts Creek
