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Candidates owe voters an explanation

What you’ve published does not indicate that they will ask people why they drive to pick up children from school.

Re: CRD Traffic Safety Commission investigates school travel planner (News, Oct. 15).

I still haven’t heard anything to understand CRD/Oak Bay’s school transportation concern, that they want to spend taxpayer’s hard-earned money studying.

What you’ve published does not indicate that they will ask people why they drive to pick up children from school.

There are many legitimate reasons, including concern for their safety (in the absence of enough police, and the school system’s inability to stop bullying), after-school activities of various kinds (sports, music lessons, language lessons, etc.) and choice of school (students may go to an out-of-neighbourhood school to get particular programs that cannot be offered at every school, or even to escape bullying – yes, sometimes schools move the victim instead of educating the perpetrators).

What is the CRD’s actual concern?

Hopefully is it vehicle use per se. We know from basic physics and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents that carbon dioxide from human activities cannot cause much more climate warming than it already has, and the runaway warming is not occurring despite alarmist theories.

(The failure of alarmist theories, aka models, is illustrated by no significant sea level rise according to government data bases, no hot spot in the upper troposphere, and Antarctic cooling while the Arctic warms as it did in the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings farmed southwest Greenland. Not only is the data not there to predict climate, there are explanations for variation, including aspects of earth’s orbital variations including timing of perihelion and tilt as well as raw variations in the sun’s output – we should hope that another Maunder Minimum does not occur, as colder is worse for humans both directly and for growth of our food.)

Election year is a good time to ask incumbents why the CRD is spending money on such activities, and what wannabe officials would do. And why the school district is not doing the study, which might reveal limitations of what it is doing – though they already should know.

Keith Sketchley

Saanich