Almost one year ago, this piece was submitted as a comment to another article. It still makes as much sense as it did last December so I feature it at the top.

An open letter to Christy Clark

Dear Ms. Clark,

PLEASE, puhleese get off your LNG horse, or at least change direction.

The bloom is off the rose!

Remember Northeast Coal? Before your time, but nevertheless we spent millions creating infrastructure whereby a few coal miners prospered greatly until the bottom fell out of the coal market. They got rich and the taxpayers ended up with the infrastructure.

Remember the aluminum ferries? Different regime, but a disaster nevertheless. Especially when the half billion dollar investment in the shipbuilding industry was ‘sold’ for nineteen million dollars instead of capitalizing on the infrastructure we’d created.

Remember the hydrogen fueled bus experiment? Current regime! We spent more on diesel fuel trucking the hydrogen from Quebec than the busses used to haul Whistler folk around town. Why didn’t we set up our own hydrogen manufacturing resource? Why didn’t we study the economics of hydrogen fueled busses before plunging into this experiment?

Don’t let the same thing happen to the LNG ‘industry’!

100,000 new jobs? We don’t have enough people to fill the jobs we have! Besides, the oil and gas people have their own contractors who have their own TFWs – they don’t hire many locals. Speaking of which, why don’t we hire TFWs (Temporary FERRY Workers) from Washington State. They have manager to worker ratios of 40:1, we have ratios of 6:1; and we pay them twice as much! Yes that’s right; one manager for every forty employees and we can only manage six.

Back to LNG. That one trillion dollar thing? Don’t sweat it. I too get confused after 6 or 7 zeroes and I have a similar education to you (was at McGill in ’54, UBC various times, SFA/SFU for wrestling and TRC/TRU for various events, although I did manage a degree). Besides, you never said who would get the trillion dollars.

I think its time to come clean and admit circumstances have changed (because LNG has tanked since you made those promises). Time to concentrate on CNG, as you recently did with BC Ferries. Wouldn’t it be great if we could ship it coast to coast – as fuel for railroad locomotives! Then there’s the mining and transportation industries that could capitalize on cheap fuel. (Think too of the benefits to the environment, and First Nations.)

Oh, and one more thing – all those skilled trades jobs you are funding. We don’t need a whole bunch of welders and pipefitters (TFWs, ya’ know). But we do need doctors and nurses, etc. Managers, well we can get them from BC Ferries.

I’m just a lonely man, lonely and blue (cue music). But you have dozens of aides. Perhaps, if they got their heads together, they could improve on this post.

Have a very Merry Christmas!

John’s Aghast
December 8, 2014