Editor:
As a kid in the 1950s, I clearly remember my mom explaining to me the phrase “Hewers of wood, drawers of water.” She dryly remarked that our “natural resources have given us the wealth that many in the world would love to have … so eat all of your peas.”
A recent Vancouver Sun op-ed reveals a 2016 reality check about who we now are economically as well as politically. “B.C.’s oil and gas sector employs less than one per cent of the province’s labour force … and less than five per cent to annual GDP. Professional, scientific and technical workers in B.C. now outnumber oil and gas workers by a ratio of 36 to one. There are four workers in agriculture and four in forestry for every one in the oil patch.” Resource extraction is still an important part of our economy, but B.C. and the world have radically changed directions.
Christy Clark’s pipeline vision of 100,000 “clean” jobs is a complete politically inspired fiction. The jobs are not there, and they are not coming. The National Energy Board recently projected that Canada’s economy would have to reduce its greenhouse gas goals by 47 per cent to accommodate just one LNG terminal. Clearly economic and climate reality cannot reach the constricted collective imaginations of the Pipeline Party’s political agenda, even while in 2015, wind and solar created more jobs in the world than all of the fossil fuel industries. Recently at a Liberal Party corporate fundraiser crowded with pipeline promoters and real estate speculators, you could pay $10,000 to pass the butter to the premier. They want to continue their economic and fossil fuel campaigns as if there is no tomorrow. Carry on the way we are, and they may be right.
Neil Bryson, Halfmoon Bay
