Be a health minister, Terry Lake, and take a stand on Ajax

LETTER — When several hundred people showed up at Terry Lake’s office in his early MLA years to protest the proposed railway-tie incineration plant, he made sure he wasn’t there and refused to take a stand to protect the health of the people he supposedly represents.

When he became the environment minister — around the time one of Europe’s major polluters, KGHM, was setting up in Kamloops — one would hope Lake would strongly represent the people’s environmental concerns about the project.

Instead, he can be seen hobnobbing with the company’s external affairs manager at election time and naively stating, like our city council’s fence-sitters, that it’s best to wait for the environmental assessment of the KGHM Ajax mine proposal.

I say naively because he knows that, due to his own government’s gutting of Environment Ministry resources, such an assessment will be incomplete and inadequate.

Then Lake becomes the health minister — once again he has a chance to help protect our health — but appears to show no interest in doing this.

Our doctors are saying — and have scientific evidence to prove it — the current Kamloops air pollution regularly spikes above the World Health Organization’s acceptable levels.

Therefore, a mine, with its arsenic, heavy metal dust and carcinogenic diesel fumes, would only create more illnesses plus add 11 more deaths to our annual mortality rate.

Be a health minister, Terry and listen to your doctors. Take a stand for the health of the people you represent.

BRUCE STEVENS

Kamloops