Memo to Media: Questions to Ask BC Candidates

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This will be, during prolonged last, a year of a sourroundings in B.C. For a initial time in my memory, leaders debating in a arriving choosing will have to answer questions about a environment.

It will be a bizarre feeling for those who have slugged it out in a trenches given a 1960s usually to be abandoned by a media who cruise that a usually issues are those they have concurred to be so, and no others.

For decades a media’s bulletin has refused to simulate a demonstrable open courtesy that spawned Greenpeace, a Sea Shepherd Society and might others including a Wilderness Committee, a Living Oceans Society, a Georgia Strait Alliance… I’m already removing into difficulty since we can’t probable name them all. we generally contingency plead a good work during sea by Paul Watson, on whose house of advisors we have sat on for some 20 years, and Joe Foy and his colleagues during a Wilderness Committee with whom we have common many a podium.

For decades a media has had a advantage of a tough information and justified alarms supposing by such organizations, and have frequently treated them as “special interests” rather than guardians of all a interests.

Now, however, a sourroundings is so apparently a dire emanate during a heart of scarcely all pivotal choosing issues in British Columbia that any news chairman value their salt contingency take notice. Let me be of help, then. we will make a media’s office easier by providing a accessible anxiety of questions that should be acted to each claimant who comes nearby a reporter’s pad or microphone.

Ask about tellurian warming. Connected to and overarching all I’m going to plead in a rest of this mainstay is a terrible existence we call meridian change. This is a civilization melancholy problem to that a sovereign and provincial governments compensate small some-more than mouth service. We, like a United States and China, seem to cruise that whatever contingency be finished can come tomorrow.

Ask about coal. A provincial supervision can make no explain to caring about meridian change while enabling a augmenting descent and blazing of coal. Yet B.C. ships several hundred thousand tonnes per annum of spark during Deltaport and is augmenting a ability to do so. That puts us in a stay of Mitt Romney. In a past presidential choosing a Republican claimant was job for enlargement of spark prolongation and he was accompanied by millions of dollars of ads by a spark companies.

Ask about pipelines, bitumen and franking. There are, during this writing, 9 due pipelines scheduled to cranky a range and some-more than 600 tankers per year will afterwards be slated to broach toxic, high emissions connect sands wanton and dangerously fracked, high emissions gas to abroad customers. Our provincial politicans seem impressed by this and seem to be saying, “We can’t be opposite everything.” But they destroy to cruise that if they are for any of a projects they will be forced to approve others.

Ask about fish farms. Justice Bruce Cohen has now endorsed no serve licenses in a trail of migrating sockeye, an claim both governments seem prepared to ignore. But it’s some-more than that. The provincial supervision has a energy to permit all fish farms and this supervision seems utterly reluctant to do this. Moreover — and this is a vicious indicate — it refuses to request a precautionary order that would need that field infer a reserve of their proposal, not leave it to bold warriors like Alexandra Morton to infer them unsafe.

Ask about hurt of stream energy projects. We have a private energy emanate where vast companies (Independent Power Producers or IPPs) can literally destroy a rivers to make energy for BC Hydro that doesn’t need it though contingency buy it anyway during hugely arrogant prices. As a result, BC Hydro, if in a open sector, would be bankrupt. The usually reason it isn’t is that it can simply continue to lift rates to a open to cover their losses. At this point, by some estimates, BC Hydro owes $50 billion dollars to IPPs for destiny sales.

Ask about a Deltaport expansion. It is not needed. It is obliterating rural land. It threatens roving birds and Burns Bog.

Ask about a B.C. Utilities Commission. With honour to H2O licenses and IPPs in general, a elect contingency be re-constituted and have a powers reinstated.

Ask about a environmental comment process. It is so badly injured in British Columbia that it can in law be called fraudulent. Those in assign do not concede a open any submit as to either or not a plan should ensue in a initial place; a exception, perhaps, being a BC Hydro routine for Site C. 

These projects, by a time they have reached a environmental comment process, are finished deals. To attend these meetings is a pinnacle of frustration. As we have pronounced in a past, we would rather have a base waterway with no frozen than attend another. To see explanation of what I’m saying, remember that with honour to a Enbridge due line, Minister Joe Oliver and a primary apportion have settled that whatever a EAO (Environmental Assessment Office) decides, a plan is going forward anyway. 

Question a media

This choosing in May will tell us either or not we will safety British Columbia for those to come or simply be a passage by that vast companies can destroy us in office of distinction — distinction that leaves a range incidentally.

We, a prolonged pang open contingency denote that, discordant to media expectations, we do in fact courtesy a sourroundings as a series one issue. That we do caring about caribou, bears and animals of all descriptions, birds and a fauna underneath threat.

When we indicate your journal or listen to a news promote and find it abandoned of vicious questions we wish had been put to politicians, here is a doubt that you, as a citizen, should put to that media enterprise: What a ruin is wrong with you?