With the results of a community plebiscite firmly in hand, Kitimat Council took to the task of processing and responding to the results.
That reaction took place on April 14 at a special meeting of council.
Council’s decision of the night regarding the vote was to draft a letter to the federal government and cabinet, copied to the B.C. Premier as well, urging the government to consider the results of the plebiscite before making any decisions on the Northern Gateway project.
The motion was made by Mario Feldhoff and carried unanimously.
“The people of Kitimat have spoken. There’s not unanimity in the community…but the federal cabinet needs to be made aware of the vote,” he said.
The letter, he added, needs to include specifics on how the vote was conducted locally.
“The letter that we write should communicate the question that was asked, the voter eligibility criteria, send numbers of turn out,” he said. “We need to communicate this officially to senior levels of government.”
There was no debate on this motion before it passed.
There was no other action taken on the results, save for a notice of motion from Phil Germuth for the next council meeting, which is scheduled for April 22.
His proposed motion is that Kitimat formally oppose the Northern Gateway project.
The District of Kitimat calculates that the voter turnout for the town’s plebiscite relating to the Northern Gateway Pipelines project was 62 per cent.
That’s with a total voter turn out of 3,071, leading to a “no” victory with 1,793 votes.
‘Yes’ votes totalled 1,278.
The question asked: Do you support the final report recommendations of the Joint Review Panel (JRP) of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and National Energy Board, that the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project be approved, subject to 209 conditions set out in Volume 2 of the JRP’s final report?
