Tankers pose little threat to whales

Dear editor:

Elizabeth May needs to pick her fights more thoughtfully when it comes to saving the whales. She should leave the acting to Justin Trudeau who is the undisputed drama queen.

She was front and center with a yet another condemnation of the Trans-Mountain pipeline claiming that increased tanker traffic will kill off the endangered southern resident killer whales. Any excuse to stop a pipeline, no matter how flimsy, is a good one.

The orca population in the Salish Sea has been fairly constant over the last 50 years in spite of ever increasing shipping activity.

The critical issue is the salmon population and the interference of ship’s propeller noise with a hunting whale’s ability to locate salmon.

A ship is a ship and a propeller is a propeller, no matter if it’s an oil tanker, a container ship or an adoring whale watcher.

It seems that the high RPMs generated by smaller boat engines, like the whale watchers, create more difficulties for them than the lower RPMs created by a large ship.

I’ve been whale watching. It was an enjoyable experience, but it seemed we were actually harassing the orcas to get a better look.

It’s tough to track the funding announcements for the orcas, but we’ve now committed some $200 million to save them. That’s around $2.7 million for each of the 74 whales; better than the average lottery jackpot!

Let’s hope that some of it trickles down to the whales after paying off the people and processes in between.

There were some 3,219 ship arrivals, including tankers, in the Port of Vancouver last year. That doesn’t include BC Ferries and pleasure craft.

The Salish Sea is also transited by many more ships and tanker movements to Seattle which are beyond our control.

We shouldn’t fret over the one tanker per day that Trans Mountain will add to the existing volume of shipping, which the orcas have obviously adapted to.

We might, however, put the kibosh on whale watching boats which are a fairly recent addition to the mix.

If the orcas could talk they might tell May and friends that, instead of playing tanker games, they’d prefer them to go crusading against B.C. coastal communities dumping 45 million cubic metres of sewage into their home every year.

And they’d probably give us the flipper and tell us to stop exploiting them and where to stuff our $200 million. John Thompson Kaleden