Thank you to everyone who has written letters and showed up at CRD meetings to speak against the province’s desire to see a highway pushed through our precious watershed in the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park.
The insanity of this proposal shows that the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure is completely out of touch. Watershed, park, rich ecosystem should have been enough to end the discussion. Thank goodness for organizations like the Wilderness Committee and Sierra Club BC for ringing the alarm bell or the public may not have known about this until after it was approved. We must remain vigilant as this is not the end of the story.
I delivered these words to the CRD this week and encourage you to voice your concern to your MLA, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, at 250-387-3198 or emailing tran.webmaster@gov.bc.ca, plus telling Premier John Horgan at 250-387-1715 and/or emailing premier@gov.bc.ca that we are in a climate crisis that is only going to get worse unless immediate action is taken. One such action is to stop investing in fossil fuel infrastructure.
The Times Colonist: CRD parks committee agrees: no Malahat bypass through wilderness area
If there are billions of dollars available for transportation infrastructure shouldn’t it be for an integrated transit system that works for everyone?
The Sooke Hills Regional Park and watershed needs to remain protected and not become the site of the next highway paving over paradise.
How many thousands of trees have been cut and millions have been spent on the Malahat in the past five years alone on so-called safety upgrades and yet crashes are still occurring and occurring on new stretches of this highway?
Perhaps it’s time to invest in traffic calming by having visible police presence monitoring speed and doing more roadside impairment checks in the high accident zones given the statistics around the reason of many of these crashes.
We don’t need another McKenzie Interchange disaster that has carved away large tracts of Colquitz River Creek Park, where active salmon bearing streams have now become silt and toxic dumping grounds and thousands of trees have been removed and blasting continues, or another $24 million+ McTavish Road Interchange, the site of numerous crashes since it was completed.
Let’s not pretend that if this project is given the go ahead that it won’t be destructive and costly and besides, there is no guarantee it won’t create more accidents.
Where is the transparency the public deserves on these types of destructive and costly projects?
We are in a time of climate crisis. The carbon footprint of putting in another highway is staggering. The destruction of functioning ecosystems that provide us with clean water, fresh air, beauty, biodiversity, beauty and habitat for birds and animals, can no longer be tolerated. This is old school thinking.
We need to view our forests and the ecosystem found in Sooke Hills Regional Park as a treasured public asset worthy of being protected and preserved. The health benefits this park area provides to the entire CRD is not to be underestimated.
This is a park after all. Does that not mean anything any more?
Why are we racing to destroy what makes this island special? Do we want to be known as an island that once was beautiful, healthy and a sought out destination?
Can we not slow down now and again? Yes, occasional highway closures are dreadfully inconvenient, but climate change in its full force will be even more so.
We need to do our part to mitigate climate change and need to walk our talk if we intend to take climate change seriously. Thoughtful and creative approaches are needed, not old school destructive highway infrastructure, when there are so many other ways we could spend the money.
For all these reasons, and many others still to be heard today, please be climate heroes and reject this destructive and costly highway proposal. Thank you!
I moved to Canada in 1989 and I have to say that from my perspective nothing has improved in terms of transportation in the last 29 years. There is still way too much money invested in expanding road work for individual transportation and not enough money flows into public transportation, specifically here on the island.
As a contrast I just would like to mention that China has built incredible efficient high-speed rail all over the country, connecting most major cities with trains that go as fast as 350 km an hour and all this has been built in the last 10 years only and they now have a network of roughly 29,000 km of it, which is absolutely mind-boggling!
The E & N rail corridor just seems like such a natural for some of our transportation problems. Even if it means negotiating and paying First Nations for land, it would seem cheaper than these megaprojects like Mackenzie. In England, one or two simple roundabouts would have solved the problem. The roundabout can have 5-6 roadways coming off it and people drive around until they know which one to take. What we’re getting is total overkill.
For 16 years I worked for the Wilderness Committee and TLC as a park activist helping to protect a corridor of wild forests and marine areas stretching from Saanich inlet , through the Sooke Hills to Sooke Potholes and East Sooke Park.
This bold initiative now protects over 100 Sq kms on the Capital Regions Western horizon. A conservation vision large enough to provide viable longterm habitat for our regions native plants and animals, to protect the Capital Region’s stunning green back drop and provide outstanding access to the natural world right on our doorstep, to provide a defined boundary to manage and contain urban sprawl, and to buffer and protect our drinking water supply.
Protecting Sooke Hills Wilderness Regional Park and all of our Sea to Sea Greenbelt from a proposed highway route through the heart of it is exactly where the rubber hits the road on climate change emergency action in our region.
It is the most obvious and urgent opportunity to demonstrate real climate change leadership. If our leaders can’t get this right what hope can the youth who spoke so passionately to the CRD about climate action have in any of them.
Fragmenting the greenbelt’s critical habitat, comprising the safety of our water supply and spending millions on a highway (fossil fuel burning infrastructure) would make a complete mockery of the climate change energy declaration.
Twenty years of public energy, time, heart and millions of dollars paved over by a government that dares to call its self green? I’ve seen all the highway ‘bypass’ options proposed. All of them right through the water supply lands, and the greenbelt. One right along the west bank of Sooke Potholes Regional Park. Astonishing!
We elected leaders to lead us, not to lead us astray. Please stand up to this brown Provincial government and show them what climate change leadership actually looks like.