Misleading statements often made about marine industry

Re: Vancouver’s maritime future must be embraced, Opinion, May 15

Thanks to The Vancouver Sun for printing such knowledgeable common sense from

Dr. John D. Wiebe in his opinion piece. For ever so long large sections of the B.C. media have embraced various misleading statements about the marine industry spouted by politicians and environmental activists, putting wrong-headed attitudes before anything else. Please allow me but three examples: We’ve heard ad nauseam about the inevitability

■ of a catastrophic disaster in Vancouver Harbour and the Strait of Georgia should the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion be built; in fact, there has never been a petroleum oil spill in these waters since tankers began trading here in 1913.

We witnessed utter panic and media misinformation

■ taking hold when a Russian container vessel broke down and drifted for a few hours way off Vancouver Island in the Juan de Fuca Strait in 2015; in fact, a salvage tug was dispatched from Prince Rupert within hours, but that didn’t stop all the ridiculous rhetoric of impending doom about the vessel grounding with “oil-laden fuel tanks.”

We’ve had countless erroneous reports about ■ the Salish Sea already having the planet’s most over crowded shipping routes, with the worst weather conditions imaginable. Entire forests have been chopped down to produce newsprint just to carry this type of nonsense.

We get bombarded mercilessly with myriad doom-and-gloom marine scenarios; professional pundits and amateur scribblers forget that Vancouver would never be the highly ranked city it is today without the historical thriving maritime sector.

Ship and port have become unpleasant-and-dirty four-letter words thanks to the spread of what can only be termed fake news surrounding the shipping industry.

Hopefully, Wiebe’s article will be absorbed by the powers-that-be, but many would have to remove their blinkers to read it.

Bernie Smith, Parksville