public helpless

After more than 50 hours without electricity we got a few hours’ reprieve on June 29 and then several more hours of outage.

I finally phoned SaskPower for information, only to get a recording. I then phoned the company’s emergency number to get a message that was almost 24 hours old. I phoned the provincial legislature to get my MLA’s number only to get a recording, and another recording when I phoned their operator. Ditto the pre- mier’s office and operator.

This was at 11 a.m. on a week day. No one was answering calls anywhere, and no one was informing any of us or our village what to expect. There were some ambiguous interviews on radio about power outages, and that was it.

Hold on to your hats, because this is the future of climate change. We can no longer trust our infrastructures to deal with the increasingly drastic weather, and no one is doing anything about it.

If we would ask for realistic royalties from the multinationals plundering Canada and Saskatchewan, creating only a handful of jobs and lining the pockets of the do-nothing Wall Street gamblers, we may be able to ease some of the pain of the extremes in weather that now are a part of life. But our governments are afraid to offend the lob- byists who run our country by asking for more.

With the world the way it is today we need a strong and democratic public sector to get things done.

Ivan Olynyk Meacham