Despite snow, sleet, rain and a sudden chill, hundreds of Kamloopsians protested the province's decision to build a factory to dispose of railroad ties. By burning the ties, creosote would be burned releasing toxins into the already polluted air around Kamloops.Michael Crawford told me there was no environmental assessment prior to the provincial decision and furthermore this type of factory has never been built before. Kamloops would be the testing grounds and will be a demonstration for other factories like this to be built.
"The precautionary principle should be: if you expect it to be harmful don't do it," Crawford said. "Why plunk this thing in the middle of 90,000 people who don't already have the best air quality?"
Bob Simpson, MLA for Cariboo North, said to me that the biggest issue for the people is how does democracy work?
City council voted against the creosote plan 9-0 and yet this was not enough to put plans to an end. The people vote in politicians believing they will help and this is not a good representation of this, Simpson explained.
Terry Lake, the local MLA in support of this experiment, should hold a meeting and bring in his experts and justify to the people why this is necessary if he is going to support it, Simpson said.
He explained to me that even if all the requirements are in place; if the people in the community being affected by this don't support it, the province should not force it.
Click here to sign the online petition against creosote burning.
Kamloops Daily News said that about 200 people came out. I haven't got an exact number, but 446 people are on the Facebook group.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, more than 700 people commited to attending the event on facebook. An additional 700 more said they 'may be attending' and when you factor in the people opposed who don't have Facebook, that's about 2000 people.
At the time of this post, the online petition has 889 signatures.
My beef with this is that it's a lot easier to say you're against something than to actually be against it. Facebook, twitter and online petitions should be helping out the activist movement, when all they're doing is hindering it. It's really, really, really depressing.
Now, I'm not part of the group and haven't taken a hard stance on either side of the creosote issue, but the people who have said they're against it should be turning out in bigger numbers, otherwise their response is just lacking.
Let's trade Domtar for the creosote plant. It could be like a fun little game, where we bet on whether our lives will be better off afterwards.
ReplyDelete