My wife and I went to the open house about the Woodfibre LNG proposal put on by the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) on June 18. It was a sham. There were posters along the walls about the assessment process, and representatives of Woodfibre were there to try to answer questions. But it was bedlam. My wife, who is an audiologist, estimated the noise level as 120 decibels. It was like being at a rock concert. You could barely hear someone in a group as small as two, even if they shouted. You could not know what the person more than about a meter away had asked, or what the answer was.
Obviously under these conditions there was little real conversation, and you could not tell if your question had already been asked. You also could not know if the answers were true. One woman told me she had asked the same question of two different Woodfibre personnel (how far must other boats stay away from an LNG tanker as it moves down the sound?) and got two very different answers.
I and many others, some of whom had come a considerable distance, had expected a question-and-answer session, allowing real discussion. Such a Q&A session was impossible at the “open house,” and apparently the EAO people who were there do not plan to have any. When asked about such “town hall” meetings, the EAO response was that people just grandstanded at them. The answer to that, of course, is to not allow grandstanding; i.e. no speeches.
Future EAO meetings should have an unbiased moderator who does not allow speeches by the audience, only questions. That is what happens at federal National Energy Board hearings (like Northern Gateway); anyone who starts making speeches is cut off promptly by the chair.
Putting up posters on walls about the EA process is unacceptable as an “open house.” The current EA process is broken and needs to be fixed. We need to have fair Q&A sessions. “Small group” meetings with the proponent, as suggested by Woodfibre, also are not enough for the public at large to really understand what the proposal entails, and what plans there might be about how possible dangers will be met. Without such open and fair public meetings, Premier Clark will appear even more to be under the control of the LNG industry.
Hugh Kerr
Garibaldi Highlands
