One often hears from Victoria about the progressive agenda espoused from this otherwise attractive city. It is most manifest in the New Democratic Party government of John Horgan and his Green Party cohorts.
They talk a good line, as does the largest city in the province, Vancouver. But their progressive talk is not followed up with great action.
Take the most glaring example: The coal terminal near Delta. It receives coal from the Interior by railway and the coal is then shipped overseas to the ferocious coal appetites of China and India.
A $40 billion fossil fuel plant is being built at Kitimat.
The province, in one of the most stupid court cases ever undertaken by a province, tried to usurp federal power regarding the Trans Mountain oil pipeline, only to be quashed by the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
This province speaks of those non-economic, environment-destroying solar and wind alternatives for power, and all things non-fossil. Sustainability is dripping all over the place. It even has a carbon tax.
Yet, here we are with an LNG plant on the coast, coal mines in the Interior and the largest coal port in North America just south of socialist, alternative energy Vancouver.
Victoria is not to be outdone. Victoria tore down a statue of the country’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, history be damned.
But what really caught my eye was an article in the July 28 Times Colonist lauding a recent contract completed at the Point Hope Shipyard: A 231-tonne coal stacker for Neptune Terminals (another coal exporter) in North Vancouver. Steel-making coal is shipped to Europe and Asia from Neptune.
The stacker created more than 150 full-time jobs over the past 18 months.
It boasts a height of 30 metres and a boom of 47 metres. Total economic impact of $23.6 million.
The problem is that Victoria council passed the Victoria 3.0 Economic Action Plan in May.
One of the things referenced in the plan was: “The actions laid out in the plan will build an economy that enables everyone to flourish and that will set Victoria on a path to low-carbon prosperity.”
See, you can’t make this stuff up — and you don’t have to .
It’s all there in black. Black as coal, that is, and soaked in hypocrisy.
Brian Peckford
Parksville
