Activists Demand an End to Fracking at BC NDP Convention

Once again environmentalists took their grievances to their leaders, this time the NDP for its failure to end fracking in the province.

About 125 activists rallied at the Victoria Conference Centre during the BC NDP convention to denounce its lack of commitment to ending fracking in the province.

We had the numbers to take on the Convention Centre if we had so wished, but that wasn’t part of the plan.

Frack Free BC, an alliance of environmental groups including Dogwood and the Wilderness Committee, has been holding events repeatedly across the province this year in an attempt to sway the party in power away from a platform of wanton environmental destruction, including a campaign targeting the offices of MLAs in July.

I was assuming the role of safety warden today. The original plan was to close the street, but we were immediately threatened with arrest, so we had to settle for blocking just one lane. We just didn’t have the numbers to hold the entire stretch of the road.

These banners were supposed to be held at each intersection. But this works just fine.

Fracking is a contentious energy platform that didn’t live up to its promises of environmental sustainability. Although its effects may not be readily apparent in the metropolitan south, its ravages have been devastating in the north, where the use of obscene amounts of water and toxic chemicals for the purpose of hydraulic explosions have poisoned and depleted aquifers, while the surface devastation is said to exceed that of the Alberta tar sands, if only by causing deforestation. And that’s saying nothing of the adverse health impacts of heat domes.

As I keep saying, simple messages work best.

It’s always “complicated” when one doesn’t want to do anything about it.

“When you drink the water, the land becomes a part of you,” said Ashley Zarbatany of Dogwood, in a speech that compared colonialism to the plunder of the land and the rape of its people, all in the name of profit—even when it comes at the taxpayer’s expense.

This is Ashley Zarbatany of Dogwood, and she’s not happy with today’s NDP.

This gentleman’s voice was powerful enough to drown that of construction work across the street. Sorry, no videos today, my duties came first.

Many more speakers came forward today, to hammer in the same message: the BC NDP of John Horgan and David Eby isn’t the progressive party it used to be. Too often is the party said to have forgotten its roots, down to the way it sidelined Anjali Appadurai during the party’s leadership race. Its erstwhile supporters lament the absence of serious alternatives, down to the Greens not presenting viable candidates in metro Vancouver. Speakers called for rejecting such a false choice by retaking the NDP from devious leaders pandering to perverse corporate influences, in order to preserve our collective heritage and guarantee a sustainable energy policy for future generations.