Trudeau keeps letting us down

Open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

I was delighted to see Stephen Harper go and have you as our new PM. But “sunny ways” are not working now as far as many of us in B.C. are concerned.

We are alarmed and rather angry by your position in favour of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline. Kinder-Morgan does not have a good clean-up track record, and our coastal fishery and tourism are too important to be sullied by bitumen.

Why should we have our coastline jeopardized by tarry oil spills just to please shareholders, oil-company owners, and the premier of Alberta?

You may say that you care about us in B.C., but you don’t live here, and we won’t vote for you if you keep advocating for this bitumen pipeline which will increase bitumen shipping traffic in often dangerous waters.

We also know that our coast lies in a subduction-plate earthquake zone. Experts have said it’s not if, but when, the big one will strike.

I was in Alaska four years after their 9.2 earthquake which happened in 1964. A large modern part of seacoast Anchorage had fallen into the sea, and only pointed parts of rooftops were sticking out of the water. It was a sobering sight. Then we went to coastal Valdez, which was partially wrecked and a section of that town had to be moved. We saw places where the earth had heaved upward or dropped eight metres. I wonder how a pipeline would survive that.

Kinder-Morgan already has had trouble with leaky pipelines.

You talked the big talk about caring about climate change, but we have a hard time believing you because of your stance on this pipeline.

You also stood like a high priest repeatedly promising that the past election would be the last with first past the post.

We believed you, and you got our vote. Then a feeble attempt was made to provide a questionnaire to wiggle out of this promise. That was our first big disappointment, but your anti-environmental pipeline stance is really making us assess our future voting choice. Marilyn Hansen

Summerland