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Our granddaughters grew up inside the beltway and one lives in North Carolina. I returned to Quebec almost twenty years ago and this is an alternate universe.

We teach only Darwin in our schools, court rooms, public offices medical facilities and politics.

We don't recognize gender, race or religion as identities.

When I returned to Quebec my birth certificate was invalid. We are not born male or female. We are all homo sapien even Neanderthal genes don't make us Neanderthal. Religion exists only between our own personal ears.

I live north of your Northern frontier and it is every thing we don't want to become.

They blame everybody else for their misfortune.

They were rich and we were poor.

We are rich and they are poor.

We prepared for the future and they rejected change.

Cuba promises its citizens a longer healthier and more productive life.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson

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We have longer, healthier more productive life and we have the freedom you once looked for.

We built a giant multibranch university to turn peasants into doctors and lawyers and business executives and we even get ethical philosophers.

America scares the bejezuuz out of me. I live a few yards from Quebec's share of the Appalachian Trail.

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Evolve or extinction there is no design.

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I am a man of faith. I am not an American.

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My 13yo child is nonbinary and we have taken them out of school and placed them on homebound. I'm terrified for them in the wake of all of this political backlash. I feel helpless as a parent because I don't want to be the reason a district has to tell me they can't change their pronouns and risk not receiving funding. I'm lost... My kid is unique and amazing and loves to read, write, draw, and just wants to be a kid. They don't want this attention and didn't ask for it. I'm in a really difficult place right now as a parent and it's scary.

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Regarding the letter written by a parent to the governor, several concerns come to mind. First, the parent appears to have created unsubstantiated suspicion in the mind of the student towards any material presented by a teacher. How does that facilitate the learning process? Second, the parent asserts being self-qualified to assess learning material while at the same time demonstrating ignorance in writing possessive forms and correct punctuation. If the material presented in written form is evaluated by a person who does not understand proper written form, how is that helpful? Finally, Leo in no way writes in a persuasive way attempting to argue that others should do as he did. He simply tells the reader about his own life experience. We learn by reading about the experiences of others.

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Edna, I live just north of Vermont. We had an election on Monday and we voted for no change in the status quo. We call that conservatism. In Quebec conservatism means:

There is no such thing as gender

There is no such thing as race

There is no such thing as religion

Health education and welfare are rights not privileges

We take care of each other

We call it our social contract

It establishes our ethics and mores

We are a Secular Humanist liberal democracy and we take care of humans and let God take care of Herself.

What the Governor of South Carolina did would be a reason to send our Prime Ministers (we have two) to prison.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and our courts call the Governor's words hate speech. In Canada our politicians serve they don't rule. Hate speech at the top is not hate speech from the bottom.

We are a Full Democracy our Prime Ministers must speak for us and after an election about nothing our reelected Prime Minister is already busy apologizing for the election about nothing.

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