Resignation – Reg Gillies, Evans Avenue
What part of “no” don’t they understand? Well, that did it [“Council chooses option,” June 29]. I give up. After 11 years, hours of meetings, report reading, research and a cabinet drawer full of files, I quit.
At least one councillor injected a note of sardonic humour when she suggested a rider to the vote on the latest madcap scheme with Catalyst Paper Corporation, to pass it back to the JAC [joint local-technical advisory committee] for approval. Right, so our glorious chair can vote it down, only to vote it in a few days later.
At the public forum held while I was away, the taxpayers voted overwhelmingly to stay away from a Catalyst partnership. What do our elected representatives do? Vote us right back into another one. “But this
is different,” I hear the cry.
Let me see. The plan for starters is to pump the Westview harvest along the foreshore into miraculously available mill pump station A and C, a scenario the mill has consistently refused.
Then, as I have pointed out on no less than three occasions, we have somehow to jump over or circumvent the highest-pressure natural gas line in the world. Contact with the Fortis BC (formerly Terasen Gas) area manager informs me that they have no knowledge of this proposal whatsoever, are very interested and any design ideas require a search permit before any proposal is planned.
All this is past history. That pipeline was shelved for a far more expensive route taken along Marine Avenue to somewhere close to the original clarifier for pre-treatment. Along the way, two staff employees applied for a grant on behalf of the City of Powell River for joint treatment at Catalyst’s mill, an arrangement, it was claimed, which had the approval of the JAC committee. That was an outright fabrication. This application, as we are all now aware, had not been seen by a single councillor. Yet, these people are still on the payroll.
This goes beyond a very bad and expensive joke, and I wish no further part in it.
Unemployment solution – John Hildebrand, Hazelton Street
I never took economics 101 in school, which leaves me at the mercy of plain common sense.
More and more I hear the cry for the government to raise interest rates because inflation is starting to rear its ugly head. People are buying too many things. Hello? Isn’t this the reason that the interest rate was lowered, to stimulate buying? Which in turn creates jobs?
A long-time unemployed person finally gets a job but can’t afford to put gas in his vehicle for transportation, let alone insurance. He uses transit just after the fares have gone up. He finally gets to work only to hear his boss say that if the interest rates rise, he will probably be laid off again. A radio is playing in the background talking about our globally recognized superior banking system with record profits and promises of dividend hikes and increased bonuses.
Who are the interest rates for and who or what are we protecting by raising them? Any family with an income of up to $40,000 spends all of its money on necessities but over that, the money is saved or invested, except for the very wealthy who take their money off shore or invest in capital gains securities, neither of which help the job market. Interest rate hikes hurt only the very class of people—the lower and middle class consumer—that will ultimately lead us into job creation through sheer necessity.
Here is a concept for the solution to the unemployment situation [“Partners launch retention program,” June 22]. Obviously the only jobs in existence are the jobs that now exist. Only, they are held by the wrong people, the ones who are near retirement. Take all the money that it presently takes to fund the whole unemployment picture and offer voluntary early retirement, with bridging until 65, to those closest to retirement until those businesses need to hire.
