Dear Editor,
It is election time again! And what a privilege to live in a democracy where the individual is given the opportunity to vote for his or her candidate of choice.
If I may be allowed to express an opinion this early in the campaign: as far as I can see it, the party system as we have inherited it from the 19th (and before) century is more or less meaningless and outdated. Every party today knows that we must look after the poor and unemployed and those having fallen on hard times for whatever reason.
What is important in my opinion are the big issues or our time, and this is where the voter should voice their opinion and question the candidates at the pre-election meetings.
For me, there is one big issue federally. I would like to be assured that there will be no super oil tankers endangering our pristine inland waters of the northern west coast. If that dirty oil should and must go anywhere, it should go by land (pipeline) to the U.S., considering how tenuous the supply from the Middle East. Since the U.S. is by far the most important trading partner, surely we must make sure the US. is supplied with oil and not to feed the three billion people of India and China with oil, so they can rival the lifestyle of a by-gone age of America that is increasingly unsustainable.
Ghandi once said: “God help India if they industrialize American fashion.” He realized that if it takes $1 million of investment to create a pulp mill to create one job, there can never be enough money to create employment for everyone. Hence, these countries with these huge populations must find a solution in a lower tier economic system.
An old-fashioned and undisciplined American-inspired capitalist system that gave our generation an unheard of easy life, but depended on the easy availability of oil and coal, that system is not sustainable, when you consider that China and India combined are almost ten times the population of the U.S..
No dirty Alberta oil in pipelines to the west coast to be shipped to Asia in super tankers three times the length of football fields. The disasters of recent years should be warning enough.
Wilhelm Waldstein
Port Hardy
