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Letter: Site C decision sends relationship into tailspin

Letters to the editor
By Letters to the editor
December 21st, 2017

To The Editor:

Dear John Horgan:

Without beating around the bush, this is a “Dear John” letter, both literally and figuratively.  I know that we have only been hanging out for the past months, but my relationship with the NDP goes back quite a ways, long before you came on the scene.  Unfortunately, we have come to a place of irreconcilable differences and I feel that it is time to move on.

This Site C decision has sent our relationship into a tailspin.

No doubt you will raise the issue of “We have to stay together because of the kids”, but that is just another reason why I have to go.  Your vision and my vision of the kind of world, and the environmental and economic debt we want to leave to our kids are very far apart. 

And talking about vision, John, I feel a little short-changed on that account also.  I know, I should have been a bit more realistic, but I was hoping you might come around.  Your idea of looking ahead to the future is standing on a hilltop circa 1850 and looking to a point 100 years from then.  I need something different.  What I need is someone with both feet planted in the present and working towards a world 100 years from now.

It is very difficult to see how you are so easily swayed by the yahoos at BC Hydro who cooked this whole thing up in the first place in conjunction with Christy Clark and company.  And now I find out that you actually  believe their current number –crunching that Site C will be on schedule for completion in 2024 and on budget (recently revised upwards)  at $10.7 billion.  John, I am turning 67 in the coming year. In all my time, I have never seen one of these mega-projects completed on time or on budget.  Have you?

Oh John, how I wish things could have turned out differently between us.  But I would like to get together with you for lunch sometime in the future and talk about the good times that we used to have.  I am reviewing my schedule, and 2024 is looking pretty open.  I am thinking, if Site C is completed on time and on budget, I will pick up the tab.  But if it doesn’t, you buy me lunch. 

And while we are at it, why don’t we invite Michelle Mungall, the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources to join us for dessert. She could pick up the tab for that.  My relationship with Michelle goes back to when she was involved in municipal politics here in the Kootenays, but that’s just another relationship that’s gone sour. Guess I am not having much luck lately.

I agree with you that the Site C decision was a difficult one. Unfortunately for us, you made the wrong one.

Yours truly,

Hayward Kirsh

Kaslo, BC

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