Activists Demand an End to Fracking at BC NDP Convention

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.