Bruce Strachan's last comments were certainly in line with what you would expect from the right. You need to blame someone, so pick someone who's not part of business. Because my car uses gasoline the source has to be "unstable and unsafe." How ridiculous. I guess if a plane crashes he'll blame the passengers for getting on the plane or maybe even the relatives who asked the passenger to get on the plane.
I worked for Intercon Pulp for 35 years and to my knowledge, no Intercon employee has died there as a result of an accident. That's quite a feat for the forest industry. It comes from regulation, and a company and safety committee that's committed to making sure everybody goes home after a day's work. I thank Canfor and now CanforPulp for going beyond the regulation to make sure I could retire alive and well.
Making sure that what happened in the Gulf doesn't happen here, is going to be based on the same principles, regulation and a group of people within the company that make sure the regulation is followed. This is not rocket science. They did not follow best practices, otherwise the relief well would have been there to reduce the spill to a minimum, as is required in Canada. They didn't fix the problems they had with the shut off equipment because it would cost a days production at $500,000. They were headed for disaster. Murphy just made sure it would happen.
The same two companies that have the problem in the Gulf were after the Harper government to relax the regulations on relief wells, and they would have got that from Harper if the Gulf problem hadn't shown up.
While I would hope that most business will do the right thing, unfortunately they cannot be trusted to do that all the time, no matter if it's the banking industry or the oil industry. Evidently Harper and Flaherty were deregulating the banking industry in Canada when the last downturn hit, thankfully they were too slow, and that saved our bacon.
We need to protect ourselves from this kind of thing. Look how much taxpayers have put out to pay for the banking fiasco, it's in the trillions and who will ultimately pay for the Gulf episode. We pay the bills when we buy the products. There we go again it's all our fault.
Peter Bowen
Prince George
