We make no apology for the coverage which this paper has given to the just ended United States presidential election campaign.
It has been a long, bruising, nasty, divisive battle and we are glad to see the end of it. But while the battle was raging, we felt it was necessary to inform our readers what was taking place and to present a Caribbean Canadian perspective on a troubling political scenario.
To the shock and consternation of many of our political pundits, Donald Trump has swept the polls to become President-elect of the United States.
We are not jumping for joy over the result of the election. There are serious concerns about the consequences of Trump’s victory.
Many in our Caribbean community in Canada are worried about his anti-immigrant rant and what this could mean for our brothers and sister in the United States and in the Caribbean.
We saw and read news reports of American citizens who said they would move to Canada if Trump became president. Some say these remarks appeared to have been made jokingly during the election campaign. But today, for many in the United States, the idea of migrating to Canada is no joke.,
Trump is seen by many as temperamentally unsuited to the high office of president and there is the growing fear in our own community that this man will create havoc and instability in the world, possibly sparking major conflagrations.
However, the masses have spoken. Democracy sometimes comes with a high price. In the case of Donald Trump, we hope that it is not too high a price, particularly with respect to matters such as race relations in the United States and United States policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean.
Of course, we are well aware that politicians elected to office, often do not do what they say they would while on the campaign trail. We do not expect to get up tomorrow morning to find that a wall has gone up on the United States border with Mexico.
However, we have to consider seriously many of the issues at which Trump kept hammering away while campaigning.
There are those in our community who feel that a newspaper such as ours should concern itself with purely local run-of -the-mill issues. There are others who believe that community newspapers should be just “good news” organs. We respectfully disagree.
The Caribbean Camera sees itself as an outward- looking community newspaper and for this reason we think it is necessary to provide news reports and commentary about situations not only in the Greater Toronto Area but well beyond its borders with the understanding that these matters could have a tremendous impact on our day-to -day lives.
Whether it is news about Brexit or the goings-on down the road at the Caribana Arts Group meeting, we feel we owe an obligation to our readers to tell them the real story.
We intend to continue to provide the information which our readers need and to publish their opinions on significant issues.