The transportation minister’s recent altering of the law to “allow a provincial agency to buy and develop land for housing and amenities along transport routes” should make the public pause to think.
The move follows on the heels of the housing minister’s stated plans to attempt to take power over housing from municipalities and give it to the province.
The doublespeak involved from politicians at multiple levels is rather glaring. Don’t tell us you are dealing with climate change, when your government is keeping its finances afloat by massive sales of LNG, one of the worst GHG-emitting industries on the planet and promoting urban growth, while not stopping urban sprawl simultaneously.
When it comes to the relationship between the NDP and the LNG and development industries, it is difficult not to see the tail wagging the dog, instead of the other way around. Pseudo-green CNG-powered buses merely offer a convenient greenwashing photo op to mask the agenda’s harmful effects to the environment.
Reliance on LNG was a BC Liberal platform and the NDP has adopted and promoted it wholeheartedly, once they were in power, and having sidelined the Greens.
This plan is not helping deal with climate change. CNG buses, LNG and overdevelopment are helping drive and increase it and neighbourhoods are losing any sense of sovereignty over their futures in the process.
Democracy is not about being told what to do by industry, any more than the dog is supposed to be wagged by its own tail.
Josephine Marshall
Saanich
