Tag Archives: Petronas

An open letter to Premier John Horgan of British Columbia

An open letter to Premier John Horgan of British Columbia   

12th January 2018

 

 Premiere Horgan.

 

 

A few years ago, I attended a screening of a movie called “Gasland” at the Edward Milne Community School in Sooke, BC and you were in attendance.

 

After the movie you spoke ardently and vehemently against fracking, announcing how you intended to fight it happening in BC.

 

Whatever happened to you that you could change so radically in such a short time?   Did your promise of that evening mean anything at all to you or were you just courting those in attendance for the viewing? 

 

During the previous regime I asked Rich Coleman numerous times to tell me where the water for the Petronas LNG plan was to come from and of course, he did not reply – no surprise there.   Then we hear that the answer he should have given was from hundreds of illegal and as environmentally unsafe dams as the infamous Mount Polley Mine tailings pond dam were being erected on almost every body of moving water in northern BC.   Are they still up?  I bet so as it appears you have been drinking the Petronas cool aid even after they pulled out claiming it didn’t make business sense to continue.  What makes LNG Canada think they can do what Petronas decided not to do, and I noticed that in announcing the joint venture between Shell, PetroChina Company, Korea Gas Corporation and Mitsubishi Corporation, Andy Calitz, CEO of LNG Canada, said the consortium would work closely with the provincial and federal governments but made absolutelyno mention of even considering the people of BC either aboriginal or settlers.

 

Of course not, we do not matter do we, Mr Horgan?

 

We are very used to BC politicians lying to us, manipulating us and flat out ignoring our wishes for decades, but particularly during the dictatorship of the Libertarian/Conservative government which you just replaced.

 

The vast majority of people in BC believed that you would be different.   How wrong we were!

 

Of course, we were happy that you asked the BCUC to hold public hearings on the Site “C” fiasco, and I was one of the presenters at the Victoria meeting.    Of all those who presented whilst I was there only three presenters who argued that this unnecessary and overpriced dam should proceed to completion. It was clear that they were representatives of the construction companies and therefore financially biased.

 

I read the reports from the BCUC and as they were not asked to make a clear recommendation they did not, but it was very clear to me that they and the vast majority of presenters thought this was a mistake from the start and should be scrapped as soon as possible to save billions of dollars being spent for an unneeded and yet limited amount of Hydroelectric power.

 

You have with your decision pandered to the corporate interests over the interests of the people of BC, put BC Hydro on a par with all those crooked power companies in the SE of the US where billions of dollars are being charged to their customers for power plants that have not been built and will generate no electricity.   Just as with BC Hydro future usage is being charged for now, and when that is gone without the increase in usage and no extra hydro available from an incomplete dam we can bet that you will approve yet more rate hikes to pay for a price overrunning and way behind schedule dam.  

 

This is not the way to start to mend BC from the years of BC Liberal (Libertarian) destruction Mr Horgan.

 

So, Mr Horgan, what price truth and honesty?   What is the value of your word and what makes you any different from the infamous Christy Clark who so diligently continued Gordon Campbell’s intentions to destroy BC by giving away all our carefully crafted commons to private enterprise?

 

I have difficulty in believing anything you have said recently as you have proved that you do not represent the people of BC.   I would like to think we could go back to the polls very soon, however, I happen to think that neither Rich Coleman or Andrew Weaver are any more interested in what the people of BC want to do with our once beautiful province than are you.   

What a mess.

 

Jeremy Arney

PO Box 52008, 

RPO Beacon

Sidney, BC

V8L5V9

250-216-5400

 

 

Actions, not words, are the ultimate results of leadership.

Bill Owens

 

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

Winston Churchill

 

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever:

Clarence Darrow

What kind of a crock are we being sold now?

19th October 2015,    

The New Prime Minster of Canada, Justin Trudeau:

Welcome back Canada!   Sunny days and sunny ways! We will enter a new partnership with First Nations, Inuit and Metis, we will consult with and listen to the Canadian people. No more first past the post elections.

 

                                                                          BUT

 2017:

The next election will be first past the post.  

Our First Nations, Inuit and Metis are still waiting, mostly in third world conditions or worse with youth suicide increasing, and education and health issues such as clean drinking water almost nonexistent.  The one sitting I watched on CPAC of the new Commission into the murdered, missing aboriginal women seems to be stuck in repeating what has already been said, and what is needed is action not talk.

The Prime Minister holds town hall meetings around the country and answers questions the way he thinks is meaningful and valuable, but are all total BS.  If he or his Ministers actually listened to Canadians, there would already be preparations for the next election to be some sort of PR; there would not be an absolutely unnecessary and destructive Infrastructure Bank of Canada; BC would not be planned to be the cesspool of Canada where environmental protection is abandoned for corporate profit; there would be real efforts made to merge into new energy and keep oil and bitumen in the ground.

The Foreign Minister would actually try and get on with other countries not support US war efforts, we are Canadian not Americans and we can and should stand by our own standards.  It is time to give love and peace a go, and leave other countries to decide their own ways, hopefully more sunny than ours.

Fisheries and Oceans would actually protect all our shores and seas, lakes and rivers instead of simply bowing to corporate pressure to allow such things as the Quesnell Lake being now a direct tailings pond for the Mount Polley Mine, drilling off the Maritimes for a product we should be getting away from not endangering our east coast, and the fish farms in the Salish Sea which are killing the wild salmon. Worse yet approving a LNG project in BC which has now been abandoned as inpractical because their daming all moving water has been found out, and a Cite C dam being built for that project!

Preparations should already be under way to make the now privately owned wheat board prepare rail cars for the summer crop, good luck with that one !   We no longer have a national railroad which if history serves me well was a prime reason BC joined with Canada! 

We have nothing left to sell now as international corporations have been given the right to everything so we have to mortgage our children’s futures to the needs of international corporate profit, and of course the obvious eventual benefit of those giving the country away.

And yet here we were being sold the idea that 2017 is the glorious 150th year since confederation.  What are we celebrating again?  Oh yes 4  provinces Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Bruswick, got together to create Canada as a confederation (or seperate tax base) and eventually other provinces or territories were created and added to that.   As far as I am concerned BC didn’t join until 1871 so it’s a bit premature for us, and I am more convinced every day that we should be looking at 2021 as the year we separate BC from a country which plainly does not value us as a partner in our own environment..

I did not come to Canada with the idea of starting and raising a Canadian family only to hand them over into the clutches of those corporate buzzards which were destroying the UK when I left it.   Granted that under the reign of the BC Liberal Party (Teaparty/Libertarians) almost all our many commons were given away to corporate profit and our crown jewel (BC Hydro) had been made bankrupt, but we can rescue that situation here in BC, as long as big brother is no longer big brother but a trading partner.

Canada has already shown the way to prosperity and then abandoned it by using the Bank of Canada, and we can and should, when we separate, create our own Bank of BC – not the one previously created as a regular bank which was sold to HSBC –  but one owned by and designed to serve the people of BC in funding their municipal and provincial needs with a BC currency named by our longest time residents, and still return a dividend to BC.  As it is we have a monopoly called the BC Municipal Finance Authority which of course obtains funds through corporate banks and lenders at high interest rates.  We do not need to join the rest of Canada in the never-ending spiral of debt with compounding interest owed to international investors, banks etc., without any chance of ever paying it all off.   Sheer madness!

The more I think about it a sovereign country called British Columbia sounds pretty good to me right now.

Peace,

Jeremy

 

A great relief for BC?

So now things are bubbling and boiling so to speak in BC.

There has been a fiasco going on under Christy Clark who promised huge royalties and great wealth for BC from the NE Gas exploration, fracking and piping to the coast of cheap LNG for overseas consumption.  Anyone who really looked at this project could see it was put up job and would never really happen. Our federal environmental and resources departments as well as fisheries and oceans were supposed to examine the business case for such a development before giving approval but in typical pretty boy fashion they acted for the cameras and not the people of Canada or BC.   Not only did they approve this fiasco but they also approved the site C dam being built (without that approval anyway) designed to provide “free” power to Petronas.  Can you spell competency?

Fracking takes huge volumes of water and many times I have asked Rich Coleman, the “Minister” in charge, where this water was going to come from and he of course never replied. Now we find that almost every bit of moving water in northern BC has already been dammed by a Petronas offshoot.

CBC did a small incomplete report on this as well.

This has been done without approval of any regulatory body but with the obvious knowledge of Clark and Coleman. No wonder he wouldn’t reply to my requests.   Change of power and suddenly the provincial engineers can talk about what has been going on.

Now Petronas has pulled out.  What a relief for BC and for the people of NE BC who can think that maybe their drinking water will be safe to drink and the earthquakes will not increase.

Next ramification is that repulsive, unnecessary and dangerous site C dam.  What now is the point if that electricity is no longer needed solely for Petronas?  Can you imagine that anyone would deliberately bankrupt a crown corporation for the benefit of a corporation from Malaysia?    How much would be the bribe for that do you suppose?  A Board seat for both Christy and Hamish maybe?   Again the question must be asked why did the pretty boy ministers rush to approve this monster? was it because it was altready being built by one of their corporate heros, Ms. Clark?

Note to John Horgan:

It will take a lot of guts to cancel the site C dam and refurbish that whole area, but it would be welcomed by all of BC.  We do not need that power, never did, in fact our personal consumption of power is still falling.  If we did need more hydro power we could insert extra generators into our existing dams.  It is also time to stop paying all those run-of-the-river power companies for not producing any power as we do not need it (about $50 million a year in non-production profits), and stop BC Hydro buying from them at the absurd price gifted by one Gordon Campbell, let them sell what they can if they can on the open market.

The fact is that W A C Bennet built BC Hydro and dams that today would not probably be acceptable, with the idea that the people of BC would never be short of cheap efficient delivery of electric power. He even had an agreement with the seven western states to buy from us on a twenty-year fixed price.   He was not to know that a broken-down actor and a drunk from Quebec would get together and create an investment agreement (FTA) which would mean that his price would last as long as that investment deal.  You see there can be no increase in power costs across the border without both the President and PM agreeing so we are stuck, and NAFTA reinforced this.  California, being broke, still thinks we are gouging them!   Luckily it would appear that “The Donald” is determined to do away with NAFTA and we can then charge what our power is worth today.   Oh, by the way, run-of-the-river power is unacceptable to the Californians on the grounds that it is not environmentally green.

BC, just like the rest of Canada, needs to make sure that those we elect to REPRESENT our needs do just that and maybe just maybe with this precarious situation in BC we might have that happen.    It’s up to us to see that it does.

Peace, but get involved as it is your life.

Jeremy