Regarding the guest column by Gord Addison, “Saying no to FortisBC housing plan won’t stop the project, Squamish council.”
The suggestion that FortisBC will bring its 600 workers to descend on Squamish, scooping up all remaining rental accommodation if council doesn’t grant the corporation a temporary use permit to establish a workcamp, implies that FortisBC is above the rules.
This is deeply troubling: that a private monopoly gas company would forge past a municipal permitting process to expand its fossil fuel network.
Permits are important; they’re designed to safeguard.
Justice For Girls has raised the alarm about communities with resource extraction projects having higher rates of violence, disappearances and murder of Indigenous women and girls. They’ve flagged that FortisBC’s proposed violence prevention strategies for the proposed workcamp – private security, an employee code of conduct, and anonymous tip line – are ineffective, with the harmful impacts of these projects disproportionately falling to Indigenous women and girls.
Permitting provides regulators with the ability, theoretically, to mitigate community and environmental risks by listening to public concerns, and it’s essential that all levels of government implement the Calls-to-Action from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry.
As for Woodfibre LNG being a fait accompli, that certainly is not the case. Investing in fracked gas is an uphill battle, with liquefied natural gas export terminals facing an increasing risk of ending up as stranded assets. Countries are already accelerating their transition to cleaner energy, and global demand for gas is expected to peak in 2030 and then crash as more stringent climate policies come into place.
Readers may also want to know about another permit for which FortisBC has applied: to release up to 1600 cubic metres of effluent daily into Átl’ḵa7tsem / Howe Sound.
Rhiannon Fox
East Vancouver,
My Sea To Sky
