Plenty of water, not enough action
The Comox valley is blessed with an abundance of glacier-fed, drinking-quality water.
The Comox Lake reservoir sits at about 90 per cent of capacity. This will easily provide water for fish and people until the rainy season.
On average, B.C. Hydro takes 84 per cent of the reservoir for power generation. Fish get about 14 per cent, people about two per cent.
However, enough water is spilled in the rainy season to provide water for millions of homes and to irrigate thousands of acres.
Wasted water that spills into the ocean. The issue is water storage.
The province funded a sustainability study in 2008. Nothing has been done in 16 years to prepare for today’s concerns about water storage and water security.
Farmers and ranchers are victims of a lack of action by the provincial and local governments.
There is plenty of water and plenty of inaction. Sixteen years frittered away.
Phil Harrison
Comox
Clean water will always be with us
Re: “Sequoia should be saved as climate changes,” letter, July 5.
The letter refers to water as “a precious, non-renewable and life-sustaining resource,” and states that using water in a splash park would “waste” water.
Water is renewable and is never wasted. It flows down to the oceans. From there, the sun and winds evaporate the water.
The invisible vapour rises to the cold air above us where it forms clouds of tiny drops. The clouds dump the water back to earth in the form of rain. This is a truly marvelous natural cycle of cleaning the “used” water.
All the water that ever existed on earth is here now and will remain. The resource that nature renews is clean water.
Maybe future generations will have to build distillation plants along our coasts and pipelines to bring clean water inland.
In the meantime, we should strive to capture the naturally distilled rainwater that often falls in excessive amounts in the wrong places.
David Stocks
Saanich
Remove empty buildings, bring in parks, gardens
There are no excuses for cutting trees these days. It is morally wrong. It tells residents that developers are myopic, as well as crass.
For Victoria, the capital of beautiful formerly forested B.C., it’s also bad for business.
That landmark sequoia at Centennial Square is a welcome relief from the pavement and steel the city has borrowed from elsewhere, and a reminder of what waits for tourists and travellers elsewhere on the Island.
If we stop destroying them, that is.
Victoria cannot afford to lose any more trees. Cooling the new civic square will be much more expensive in terms of water and electricity than the proper arrangement of trees.
Making up for lost sequestration of carbon in any other way is expensive unto the seventh generation.
Is it damaging a building? Modify or move the building. There are enough empty buildings even in the tourist precinct to shuffle their inhabitants around.
Better yet, start removing empty buildings and replacing them with parks and gardens. That is what people come to Victoria to see.
Not stumps. Not the same splashpads they just left.
Save the sequoia.
Barry Davis
Sidney
It’s up to all of us to push for leadership
Re: “Can ambitious political leadership restore our health system?” commentary, June 30.
Ken Fyke advocates for changes to how primary care is delivered to ensure that all citizens have access to care. It’s a worthy if seemingly impossible goal with so many citizens without a family doctor.
While ambitious political leadership is required, so is citizen involvement.
As citizens, each of us has an essential role to play in driving changes to health care, specifically how primary care is delivered.
With an election coming, we can ask the candidates in our riding, regardless of political party, if they’re committed to working across party lines to support the necessary changes to how primary care is delivered.
Those elected can then be held accountable.
Citizen leadership will drive political leadership.
Linda Petch
Victoria
Non-profit developers will help housing supply
Study after study, and city after city, has shown that increased supply alone will not lower rents. Clearly, the B.C. government’s other rental programs are not helping sufficiently, either.
The only way affordable housing will increase is when it is built by non-profit developers. It must be managed by non-profit organizations.
If private developers are allowed to build housing and governments want to subsidize a certain number of units and make sure that non-profit organizations manage those units, that is another tool that will help.
At the very least, there has to be vacancy control that will allow landlords to raise rents only a certain amount between tenants. This could be 5%-10% of the existing rent.
There has to be some kind of compromise that makes vacancy control a reality.
Judy Lightwater
Victoria
Protect seniors’ savings in retirement homes
I live in a retirement home for active seniors. Such homes are essential to B.C. communities, especially during the housing crisis.
They provide seniors with security, help in emergencies and, most important, community.
When a senior chooses a retirement home, their condo or house becomes available for a B.C. family.
But the senior gives up the security of home ownership. In our uncertain economic times, B.C. needs legislation that fairly protects the savings of seniors while allowing retirement-home owners a reasonable return on their investment.
Marilyn Mahan
Victoria
Need to consider more than economic factors
Re: “All the promises add up a mountain of debt,” editorial, July 5.
So the Times Colonist has a problem with Premier David Eby’s promises for more housing and shelters in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, more mental health and addiction treatment in the midst of a mental health and addiction crisis, newer and safer schools for children who are in old and unsafe buildings, and more aid to universities that give us an educated citizenry that contributes to society?
And the only conclusion the editorial comes to is it will create debt. Not a peep when hundreds of millions of dollars a year are given to the oil and gas industry on a wing and prayer that it will create jobs (most of them temporary; some of them permanent) and generate some sort of trickle-down effect into the rest of the economy.
A healthy and happy population is good for the economy but a GDP-only lens will never catch that very real and measurable benefit.
I don’t know about anybody else but I’m tired of this clearly broken-down model of how our economy is organized that has never been validated as a viable and sustainable model that should benefit the many as opposed to the few.
The news is there are sustainable and viable economic models out there that have been researched and validated.
We just don’t hear about them because they do not favour the ruling classes over the rest of us. Instead, we continue with a broken-down model that is neither fair or sustainable and all the time believing this is all there is. How sad to be us.
Lorna Hillman
Victoria
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