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Aim at real target, not VAFFC

The Editor, Thank you for your ongoing attention to the fascinating shenanigans behind the Vancouver Airport Fuel Facilities Corporation's (VAFFC) new port and jet fuel storage scheme, involving sending huge tankers up the through our estuary.

The Editor,

Thank you for your ongoing attention to the fascinating shenanigans behind the Vancouver Airport Fuel Facilities Corporation's (VAFFC) new port and jet fuel storage scheme, involving sending huge tankers up the through our estuary. We get a lot on this topic in Richmond, but it affects the whole region.

The VAFFC is the easy, but still hazy target in this discussion. As far as I can gather, the main local linchpin (and silent partner) for this project to proceed appears to be our friends at Port Metro Vancouver. Ostensibly, they are the folks who ensure that all our outgoing and incoming goods flow smoothly through our ports. I emphasize "our" because they appear to be a multi-billion-dollar, quasi-crown corporation, answerable to the feds.

Their own website doesn't make clear this accountability relationship to Ottawa (perhaps necessarily). But, they wield a lot of agenda-setting power. These are the folks who quietly bought a patch of riverside viable farmland a few years ago for "you", for future options, which now have been revealed to be the proposed site for the jet fuel dock in the South Arm.

Though Environment Canada disagrees with the present proposal, and are perhaps closer to representing our interests, when push comes to shove, they are probably not as powerful as Metro Ports. The Ports' trump card over agricultural (and food security) biases is the economy/jobs rhetoric.

The following quote has circulated before, but its out-of-touch silliness bears repeating. Robin Sylvester, CEO of Metro Ports, said, "Agriculture is emotionally important, but economically [of] relatively low importance to the Lower Mainland. And in terms of food security, [it] is almost meaningless..."

Who then do we trust to safeguard Lower Mainland farmland in an uncertain future? Federal decisions can overrule provincial and civic with regards to land use. Read: the ALR can be made redundant if deemed a "nuisance".

But not without fisticuffs. What's preferable? More industrial jobs to bring in foreign goods, or local environmental and food security?

There are many angles to this story, but to me it looks essentially like a convoluted game of land, money, gas and spin. We, the people, are mere bystanders, while a powerful, quasi-governmental arms length organization is set on land grabs that aim to sell the common good up the river, without a paddle.

Its easy to sit in an office and spin the roulette wheel much harder to swim up a toxic river to birth your young, or find some land to grow food on if the dung really hits the propeller. I put my money on food over imported steel and plastic accessories, and you can't eat the "jobs" Sylvester promises.

Unlike the salmon, I hope this idea in its "current" incarnation will die in the water, but we will still inevitably have to face the previously little considered fact that this fuel already crosses the region in pipelines some from the Blaine refinery (which had a fire last week) and some from Burnaby.

Who knows what mysteries lurk beneath our feet? There is no win-win solution, but perhaps revisiting the earlier proposal of a North Arm dock with a larger tank facility on the airport lands itself is not such a bad idea. No one from either side of the debate seems to have publicly addressed this gap in the arguments.

When the agenda is steered by special interests, there is less attention to the full range of options. The main beneficiaries of this current "cheaper" option are the VAFFC and Metro Ports, not the rest of us.

Glen Andersen, Richmond