Last Wednesday Tzeporah Berman presented a compelling case formajor commitment to replacing our greenhouse gas economy with a green one.
It offered an alternate view on the need andsupport of the Liberals push for IPP diversion of river power projects than that presented the week previous by Rafe Mair and Joe Foy of Saveourrivers.ca and WCWC.org.
In a nutshell her argument is that we in B.C. have a resource that must be used along with others to replace fossil fuel power sources if we have a hope in hell in arresting or even slowing the climate change juggernaut that is undeniably happening.
I tend to think that Tzeporah Berman is right. All alternates to fossil fuels that are currently practical to develop must be considered - but under what terms? The Liberals have given us every reason to believe that whatever their ultimate goals are, they have already concluded that the entire wild salmon ecology of the Georgia Strait basin is something of a write-off.
What other conclusion can a rational person come to considering their abysmal and utterly unjustifiable coddling of the salmon farm industry and its destructive effect on our wild salmon stocks? Will this philosophy extend to the IPP hydro gold rush? The power generatedappears destined to flow to the U.S. Are we about to lose sovereign control ofour resource to foreign corporate interests under the terms of NAFTA chapter 11? It sure as hell looks like it.
Considering the existence of a $28 million communications bureaucracy, the Liberals are doing a lame job of answering these questions, and one gets the feeling that at best they consider us too dumb to worry us with the details, or perhaps as Jack Nicholson would say "We can't handle the truth."
Anyone capable of tabling Bills 30 and 42 (centralized land use decisions and gag law respectively) can'tplacemuch value in theterm "By the people, for the people." Perhaps they really are nothing but corporate lapdogs as much evidence suggests.
I voted for these guys once. They have a long way to go to convince me to do it again.
Bruce Kay
Whistler
