Back in the day, when my wife and I were racking up 40 years of combined ocean-going merchant marine service between us, New Zealand was known for having a human population of three million along with 70 million sheep.
Presently their human population has risen to around 4.5 million, while the sheep population has declined to around 32 million. Still a whole lot of lamb chops, but we have recently wondered if a large number of those sheep have found their way to British Columbia, whose human population is coincidentally identical to New Zealand’s.
Knowing the penchant that sheep and lambs have for blindly following the leader and for quietly being led to the slaughter, we now hear the constant bleating of two-legged B.C. sheep of a green-ish hue. The bleating is occurring in so many letters to the editor, in blogs and in social media, with nauseating and erroneous repetition about “inevitable oil spills from tankers plying our pristine, wind-swept coastline”, or words to that effect.
It only took a few environmentalists’ misperceptions about tanker safety to start the misinformation campaign ball rolling, and the aforementioned B.C. two-legged sheep simply flocked behind them. Would be nice if there were some facts to go along with the opinions of the two-legged bleaters; maybe they could start by considering another country with a population size comparable to B.C. That would be Norway, where the very prosperous capitalist welfare state has trillions of dollars in the largest reserve per capita in the world. About a third of the Nordic nation’s huge revenue comes from state involvement in a booming oil and gas industry, of course.
Let’s hope B.C.’s silent majority, many of them readers of The NEWS, will become more vocal, and support the Northern Gateway and LNG pipeline proposals, before the poutine really hits the fan.
Bernie Smith
Parksville
