Dear editor,
The following is an open letter to Premier Horgan and the BC government:
I was an NDP supporter who was hoping that you would have cancelled the Site C Dam.
Maybe if you found a way, the political will would follow. “Where there’s a way, there’s a will,” (Ken Dryden).
Disappointed, I’m beyond questioning the specious accounting trickery. I’m left with the bewilderment about destroying farmland that could feed a million. The bewilderment leads to speculation about motives. Who is pulling the puppet strings that direct us along the path of economic nonsense to the slough of bitterness and betrayal? Is it a Chinese state consortium taking over the generating station contract? LNG? BitCoin mining? That’s how silly it gets if you continue to hide things from your supporters. Was the B.C. Utilities Commission process an empty charade? More speculation.
Hope lies in the idea of the “sacred” – sacred land, sacred nature. That never surfaces in economic discussion, but it is powerful.
I was in the “sacred headwaters” on Aug. 17, 2013, when a small group of Tahltan confronted Robin Goad of Fortune Minerals on Klappan Mountain, destined to become an open pit coal mine. “Enough is enough”, said Pat Edzerza. Fortune Minerals packed up and left. The sacred is a measure of an enlightened culture. Please acknowledge it.
The sacred failed the Arrow Lakes, sacrificed in the 1960s for water storage worth “tens of millions of dollars” (WAC Bennett). A pastoral valley was drowned. Now there’s a sterile reservoir. Nakusp village and a few remnant hot springs remain.
Think of what we lost. Now we are selling the surplus downstream benefits of the water storage. So please revive the notion of the “sacred.” Please don’t destroy another pastoral ecosystem. You’ll end up with a sterile, poisoned, unstable reservoir, a ruined Athabaska Delta, and resentful despair that money cannot heal.
Attend to the sacredness of the natural world. It is not there for us to commodify and destroy.
Here might be the “way” for the “political will” to bring us out of the mess. “Where there’s a way, there’s a will.” Remember the Arrow Lakes.
I will support the NDP again when Site C is cancelled.
John Gellard,
Hornby Island, B.C.
