“The jet fuel is the foot in the door.”
That was the stark warning from Coun. Harold Steves, as city council made one last noise in opposition to the proposed jet fuel delivery plan for YVR.
The long-awaited decision on whether to grant the airline consortium proponents an environmental certificate is due in a matter of days from the B.C. government.
Steves, however, said a green light from the province would open the floodgates to other pending proposals affecting the Fraser River.
“If this is approved, we can expect the Kinder Morgan proposal and the coal shipments to be approved,” Steves told fellow councillors Monday afternoon. “…what we’re witnessing is the industrialization of the Fraser River. The tunnel replacement is the next step.”
Coun. Evelina Halsey-Brandt went a step further and accused the province of “totally ignoring” council and the people of Richmond in their staunch opposition of the plan to barge aviation fuel up the south arm of the Fraser, offload it at a terminal in southeast Richmond and then pipe it up Highway 99 and across the city to YVR.
A suggestion was made by Coun. Linda McPhail to arrange an 11th-hour meeting with the city’s three MLAs to reiterate council’s concerns.
Mayor Malcolm Brodie, however, said such a meeting might be futile, adding that one of them (Teresa Wat) is in China, one is the Speaker of the House (Linda Reid) and one is a parliamentary secretary (John Yap) they don’t often speak out against government policy.
Coun. Bill McNulty also expressed his disappointment that none of the MLAs turned up at a press conference at Garry Point Park last week, which was organized by local protest group VAPOR.
“I’ve yet to hear from one citizen that we’re wrong in our opposition to this,” added McNulty.
Brodie, several city councillors and Delta-South MLA Vicki Huntington joined VAPOR members last week on the banks of the Fraser River to make one last appeal to the government’s environment minister, Mary Polak, to refuse the certificate.
Polak is due to announce the government’s environmental review decision on or before Dec. 24, almost three years into what was supposed to be a 180-day process.
Plan proponent VAFFC has cited the current supply to the airport — via truck tanker from Washington State and a pipeline from a Burnaby refinery — is unreliable and insufficient to meet future demands.
