Dear Editor:
An open letter to MP Terry Beech:
What do you say to seniors in a retirement home who are worried by the thoughts of the Kinder Morgan pipeline in their neighbourhood?
How do you explain that by tripling the capacity of a tank farm they can see from their building and has a one in a million chance of endangering their grandchildren’s adjacent elementary school and their families’ lives in nearby subdivisions that you are improving their safety? They will see the plume of toxic smoke approaching before they are to be emergency evacuated.
What words can describe how vastly increasing the CO2 emissions from the Alberta tar sands can protect their great-grandchildren from the disastrous effects of climate change?
Can you patiently tell them that by increasing, by the hundreds, the number of tankers carrying poisonous toxic sludge to Asia through the Salish Sea, that you are actually protecting our precious oceans?
They may be listening quietly and not angrily carrying placards in the street, but they are still scared and deserve an explanation.
They may be elderly, but they are not stupid.
Barry Bennett, Burnaby
