This section of your paper usually produces much useful info and opinions by local concerned citizens, and the Dec. 21 Courier missives by Martin Barker and Edward Field were particularly readable. But it’s the latter’s lengthy and informative letter on freighters that prompts comment from me, a very ancient mariner.
The immense contribution that bulk and container cargoes make to our Canadian economy and lifestyle and the daily volume of this traffic that plies in and out of Vancouver is not really recognized by most of us. Mr. Field’s astonishing statistics are therefore an education. Yet the presence of one or two empty vessels every week, waiting their turn off shore, has for years prompted local grumbling that the vessels are not only marring pristine water vistas but also represent threats to marine habitat.
This specious argument may now perhaps be allayed by the province’s recent political decision to limit waiting time for anchored commercial vessels. Hopefully it will help quell further anti-freighter comment. I personally like ‘em … and so do many Chemainiacs!
Meanwhile, of greater significance in our priorities to protect the marine environment should be those gargantuan visiting cruise ships, which dock in Victoria. With their thousands of crammed-in passengers, plus the multitudes of crews to serve them, they continue to despoil our Canadian territorial waters by the uncontrolled emptying of their vast garbage and sewage tanks. Now, to stop that practice would surely be a worthy piece of legislation of much more consequence than the move to monitor and expedite new freighter arrivals.
And finally, on the subject of taking responsibility for waste management, let’s remember that, after years of infighting by Victoria and the five municipalities down there, and threats of travel boycott by many Washington state communities, the combined Canadian personal and industrial effluent only started making its way through the $477 million sewage treatment plant in Esquimalt exactly three years ago!
That has put an end to the irresponsible dumping of raw waste from the whole region that had been blighting Victoria’s waters, and its reputation, up and down the west coast since 1894.
William Greenwell,
Chemainus