As I look out over the jobs they are promising and promoting, I scratch my greying head about the full impact of what they will deliver for my grandchildren
This has been a good year, as all are if you choose to look at what’s good.
By the time you read this, I will have had the stitches removed from my left kneecap, following a recent “cleanup operation” where Dr. Baggoo hauled out the wires that kept my kneecap together after the February ski collision that shattered both my legs. I’m looking forward to being back to most of my pre-injury activities in 2014. I learned a lot from that accident, most profoundly from a very elderly patient in the bed next to mine in the orthopedic ward at Lions Gate Hospital.
“God’s plans are not my plans,” she would moan through her pain through the night.
She taught me to make sure God’s plans are my plans: there is nothing else.
In May I entered the restaurant business as chair of the Bank of Dad for my eldest son’s healthy fast food restaurant (promotion alert: Smak, 1139 West Pender), where his partner and my youngest daughter also work.
But the most important good news is that I have two grandchildren on the way in 2014. My horizon has shifted out a generation, and the view is different now.
It hasn’t shifted my agreement with the No. 1 priority of BIV’s newsmaker of the year, Premier Christy Clark: “protecting and creating jobs for B.C. families, fighting for their economic future.” Not surprisingly, the top two priorities of Prime Minister Stephen Harper are also creating jobs and supporting families.
Yet as I look out over the jobs they are promising and promoting, I scratch my greying head about the full impact of what they will deliver for my grandchildren. Some things don’t add up. It’s like we’re spending wildly on our credit cards without ever opening the bills.
The prime minister is actually tearing up the bills accounting for ecosystem impacts. The recommendations of the $26 million Cohen Commission of Inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River have disappeared into a “no comment” abyss.
Federal libraries loaded with data on freshwater fisheries, acid rain and Arctic drilling impacts have been closed, a move a retired top government scientist compared in a Tyee article to Rome destroying the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt.
Federal scientists with evidence of harm to wild salmon from fish farms have been forbidden to speak in public. A company that published a map that whited-out islands that present a high-risk hazard to shipping oil is deemed to be credible. International scientists who overwhelmingly point to human activities as the cause of catastrophes that will overwhelm my grandchildren are ignored in public policy decisions.
When I look out beyond the impressive number of short-term construction jobs involved in shifting our economy to a dependence on fossil-fuel exports, I see automated pipelines and terminals owned by foreign interests, with a tiny number of long-term jobs.
Kinder Morgan promises 90 after its twinning; Fraser-Surrey port will add 25 once it’s built and my children and grandchildren have paid for the billion-dollar bridge to make it worthwhile; Enbridge originally promised 75 permanent jobs in Kitimat until that number got photo-shopped out for something bigger. This is not a job plan that works for B.C.’s children.
My newsmaker of the year is Chris Hadfield, the Canadian musician, fighter pilot and international space station commander. In his heart-stopping musical collaboration with the Barenaked Ladies, he sang: “Push back in my seat, look out my window. There goes home. That brilliant ball of blue houses everybody anybody ever knew … You can’t make out borders from up here, just a spinning ball within a tiny atmosphere.”
My grandchildren need jobs that heal that tiny atmosphere. •
