Dear Editor,
Private and foreign state-owned corporations’ plans to extract energy resources from B.C. threaten to change our soil, aquifers, ocean, air, and climate as never before imagined.
Corporations are applying for the rights to extract at stunning speed. Recklessly, the accumulative impacts are not being assessed.
Legislation protecting our environment, crown lands, parks, ALR, aquifers, oceans, and climate have all been “streamlined†to green-light what can only be seen as government-sanctioned plundering of public resources.
Discrediting scientists, silencing bureaucrats, slandering environmental groups, media control, ad nauseum advertising, and undermining First Nations’ rights are tactics of choice.
We are told by extractive industry lobbyists and their lackeys that fast and furious plundering is necessary to pay for our sick grandmas and to provide jobs.
But let’s be real, the monied people behind these projects don’t give a damn about our social welfare. Fracking and bitumen extraction jobs are, for the most part, in very remote locations that offer poor livability. Economic refugees are perhaps willing to sacrifice their souls for these jobs, but our workforce deserves better.
Each year, taxpayers pay extractive industries in the form of provincial and federal incentives, roads, hidden royalties, and tax breaks. All this to destroy the natural treasures that we value and that life depends on!
Once under way, there’s no turning back. I’d say the economic price for the permanent plundering of these non-renewable resources is too high.
There is no economic benefit in sponsoring mostly foreign companies to extract, ship, and process our resources, only to have them sell it back to us at exorbitant prices.
It is not in First Nations’, B.C.’s, or Canada’s interest.
It is simply profit generation for large multinationals.
After our assets have been stripped and our ecosystems trashed, what chance will we then have to create sustainable alternatives?
We have an immediate moral responsibility to plan our actions ethically.
We need leaders who will drive public policy and tax dollars towards assisting Canada’s transition to a climate-friendly economy. Our tax dollars could better result in the creation of stable, innovative green energy and infrastructural transportation jobs.
Our grannies and grandchildren would be better off, too.
Linda George, Gabriola Island