by Carol Sellers I was greatly disappointed to see City of Powell River Council assenting to a motion to stop all further expansion of crude oil pipelines and bitumen tanker traffic.
The city is a community very much well-served by a healthy oil and gas sector. We depend on an excellent transportation system of ferries and planes. We enjoy our fishing boats and our small boat pleasure craft. Our thriving logging industry is a much safer place to work and more productive than years ago. As well, just across the Strait of Georgia is the Canadian Air Force Base at Comox, which must use prodigious amounts of fuel to help protect our country.
If the kind of reasoning now in vogue, to prohibit our oil and gas sector from selling its products, had been around when the first pipelines were built, we would not have the thriving West Coast population we now have. Our young people care just as much about having well-paid jobs and careers as their parents did when they were young, and the oil and gas sector certainly has been providing good jobs and careers across Canada.
Having lived most of my life on a farm in the Prairies, I have seen first-hand the astonishing changes that took place as the oil and gas sector developed and brought its huge benefits to agriculture and to society in general. Benefiting we who live in Powell River, we have access to reasonably-priced airline flights to anywhere in the world, food from all over the world is affordable on the grocery-store shelves, and our highways are paved with asphalt, to mention a few. Most of us appreciate the social programs, health care, and pensions and benefits for retirees, which in part come from the taxes paid by people working in the resource sectors of Canada, including oil and gas. Canada, a large northern country, has a very high standard of living, and I feel that a good deal of credit has to be given to this very important industry.
Council should take a good look at what kind of image they are presenting to prospective companies and investors they are trying to entice to come to our city. In my opinion, disparaging and discouraging one of our most important resource sectors won’t help matters.
Carol Sellers and her husband retired to Powell River 10 years ago.
