Victoria airport lands $3 million in federal funding, according to a headline in a recent edition of your paper. Geoff Dickson, CEO of the Victoria Airport Authority, went on to say “the VAA will reinstate lost air service, attract new air services and build passenger demand…”
In the same edition you published an editorial calling global warming “the greatest crisis the world has seen in modern times”
We well know that emissions from air travel are one of the great contributors to global warming. Indeed environmentalists who travel by air are mocked for their inconsistent ideology.
Shouldn’t the VAA be actively trying to reduce air travel? What am I missing? How is this unelected VAA able to act in such an environmentally negative way in another summer of raging forest fires, drought and ‘heat domes’?
The VAA consistently acts in defiance of common sense. They keep acting independently of the community they serve. It seems to be hopelessly stuck in the old way of doing business in which all growth is good. In the modern world, wracked by the effects of climate change, we have to do things very differently, as highlighted in your editorial.
I suggest one important step is to reform the whole airport authority model and update the way we conduct aviation affairs. Meanwhile, we have to curtail the activities of the current CEO and the board.
Bert Slater
North Saanich
