To the editor:
On Dec. 11, 2012 you printed a letter by Jennifer Tassone (PM Appluaded for Oil Company Deal Decision) and then printed a “kind of” rebuttal to her letter written by Robert Cichocki on Jan. 22, 2013 (Canada Could Learn a Lesson from Norway). I say “kind of” because Mr. Cichocki leaves far more facts out of his anti-capitalist tirade than most left-wing writers.
From a left-wing point of view all of our trade agreements are bad, anti-Canadian or anti-worker. The fact that we need more trade agreements in order to diversify our interests around the world is somehow lost on Mr. Cichocki.
How these left-wing views can create jobs is beyond me.
He rants on that Canada’s government railroaded the Canada-China agreement through without debate. Nothing at all is mentioned in his diatribe about the fact that all parliamentary rules had been followed including posting the proposed agreement for the required two weeks. Because the Opposition didn’t read what was posted nor used any of their scheduled debate time is somehow the government’s fault. I don’t think so.
Mr. Cichocki has argument about comparing land mass and population. Well, it’s a simple fact that Canada has a little more than three persons per square kilometre. Norway has 14 people per square kilometre. Canada’s land mass ranks second in the world while Norway ranks 67. We should not forget the logistical costs of moving every consumed product around the huge land mass of Canada.
I wish Norway well and if there is something we can learn from them we should be grateful. They have huge natural resources all close to the hungry European market. I don’t think they had environmentalists walking and picketing out on the North Sea when the drilling rigs were at work. I haven’t heard of groups like the Tides Foundation paying First Nations people to undermine the North Sea production.
Does Norway ban all oil tankers from its shores? I think not.
Our world is littered with the ashes of utopian socialist experiments. For almost a hundred years we have seen country after country fail because of the views Mr. Cichocki expounds. One cannot pick a tiny country in the North Sea with its unique resources and use it as a utopian template.
Thank you, Ms. Tassone, for a very clear outline of Canadian reality.
Laura Livingstone,
Kelowna
