Your October 23, 2013 issue was interesting in that your letters included several against columnist Tom Fletcher’s “conservative clap trap” about teachers while also printing his new column about oil spills, about which the same could be said. Even if, as he claims, “The Sierra-Greenpeace-Forest ethics-Dogwood gang” are foreign bank-rolled, who do you suppose pays for all those pervasive, if lovely, TV ads with scenes of pristine forests, babbling brooks, and lively fish that will be “protected” by the Northern Gateway Pipeline? How about the ocean?
Citing a U.S.-based Nuka (whoever they are) study, Fletcher points out that Alaska oil has been safely “shipped along B.C.’s North Coast for 40 years.” But the tankers are well out to sea by then and are irrelevant to our tortuous inland passages.
He also manages to turn a Dogwood study showing that ocean conditions are such that half the time “there would be no immediate way to respond to an oil spill” into there being no reason to curtail tanker traffic. Would you bet your life and those of myriad seals, fish and birds on such odds?
Finally, Fletcher wonder whether it’s better for “spilled oil to sink rather than wash up on beaches.” How about neither? Even though he concludes that a “spike in oil-eating bacteria… leads to an increase in fish populations.” Shall we spread oil for our diminishing salmon runs?
The oil interests, Stephen Harper and our own premier must love this guy. And I suppose it’s one way for the Sooke News Mirror to generate letter writers.
Dick Momsen
Sooke