Dear Honourable Catherine McKenna, minister of environment and climate change:
Thank you in advance for reading this letter.
Normally, we don’t do anything like this. While we try to keep informed on the matters of the day, and have an opinion, we usually don’t write letters to our MP, MLA or the editor of the newspaper.
We don’t pull out the markers, posters and megaphones and march down Main Street or plaster social media with our opinions.
There’s nothing wrong with those that do, but it’s just something we don’t do.
We’re too busy.
We’re too busy working our jobs, taking care of our kids, cleaning the leaves out of the gutters, mowing the lawn, volunteering at one local event or another. And what time we do have left over, we try to enjoy the great recreational opportunities Prince Rupert and this area has to offer.
Believe us Honourable Minister, we love the wilderness and the ocean as much as anyone — it’s one of the big reasons we live and love here.
Please understand when you are making your decision in the next couple of months whether or not to allow the LNG plant on Lelu Island, there are many of us in Prince Rupert that really want to see this thing happen.
Obviously, there are some wanting you to say no. But there are a lot of us who want you to say yes.
We just aren’t as obvious.
We aren’t obvious because we don’t attend joint review panels, protests, open houses, scour the Internet for hours looking for some egghead point-of-view that either tries to prove or disprove some minor point or decorate our homes with signs.
Again, we’re just too darn busy trying to earn a living, pay our taxes and live our lives.
And one of the reasons we pay our taxes is so smart people like yourself and all the other government agencies can do the hard work to determine if this project is good.
After all these years of back-and-forth, it sounds like all your agencies are telling you it’s good.
We hope you listen to them and, when making your decision, think about the rest of us.
Sincerely,
The rest of us in Prince Rupert