Originally Broadcast on Cortes Community Radio, CKTZ, 89.5 FM
Grace Islet is a recognized centuries old First Nations burial ground on Salt Spring Island BC, that is zoned residential. In an attempt to satisfy both concerns, British Columbia’s Archaeology Branch decided to allow an Alberta businessman to build his waterfront vacation home on Grace Islet providing he put it on stilts that go over the grave sites.
Continue reading The Desecration of Grace IsletEditor’s note for readers outside BC, this pertains to one of the province’s two proposed pipeline projects that would bring diluted bitumen from Alberta.
By Roy L Hales
The Proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline has just hit another snag. On July 4 British Columbia’s attorney filed a motion with the National Energy Board requesting more detailed information on how Kinder Morgan would respond to maritime and land-based spills. There are 70 questions, which have not been adequately addressed. They pertain to two of the five requirements that must be met before BC will support any heavy oil pipeline.
The British Columbia government has just decided that the Penelakut Tribe’s ancestral burial cairns on Grace Islet, on Salt Spring Island, can be desecrated.
By Roy L Hales
The Federal Government responded within 24 hours of Vancouver’s calling for a referendum on Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain expansion project. Not by ensuring BC residents can obtain a proper hearing before the National Energy Board – Vancouver’s complaint – but by announcing stiffer regulations for oil spills. The title for this episode of the Kinder Morgan saga should be “BC’s Pipelines: The Empire Strikes Back!”
By Roy L Hales
Fifty one of BC’s faith leaders have written Christy Clark an open letter requesting she reconsider her decision to approve the expansion of coal facilities on Texada Island. This follows the discovery, last month, that the provincial government secretly approved a plan to expand for a tenfold to twentyfold increase of the material being exported to China. They wrote that coal is “the fossil fuel most directly linked to the rise of CO2 emissions in China” and “making money at the expense of the health and prosperity of the planet is wrong.”
