Crowd protests port expansion
Surrey Leader
By Jeff Nagel
Black Press
Apr 04 2007
A banner-waving crowd of more than 400 rallied against Gateway Saturday afternoon in Delta, vowing to fight to defeat the $3-billion transportation megaproject.
The cause united Conservatives with New Democrats, Greens and Marxist-Leninists and drew people from as far away as Vancouver and Lions Bay.
But unlike previous protests targeting the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge, most speakers focused on the impacts of port expansion and the planned South Fraser Perimeter Road to carry trucks and cargo.
“Who in the hell says we want to be Canada’s great gateway to the east?” demanded broadcaster Rafe Mair, setting the tone for speaker after speaker who challenged the assumptions underlying a federal-provincial strategy to tap rising trade with Asia.
“When does this end? When everything’s all concreted over?”
Tory MP John Cummins said Deltaport’s expansion, in concert with the Tsawwassen First Nation treaty, will turn hundreds of acres of agricultural land into industrial or container marshalling yards.
“Nobody is talking about what the impact is going to be on our communities,” he said, predicting a massive rail yard on what’s now East Ladner farmland will spell “the end of a good night sleep” for locals.
Cummins said the treaty will condemn Tsawwassen natives to live with a port in their front yard and a container storage yard in their back yard.
It will all add up to much more air pollution in Delta and across the region, he said.
“Fifty years from now it will be a rare day that you’ll be able to stand in a farmer’s field in Delta and be able to see the North Shore mountains,” Cummins predicted.
“It will look like Los Angeles. It will look like Long Beach. That’s what we’re going to end up with.”
Transportation minister Kevin Falcon has vowed Gateway will proceed.
But former Vancouver Coun. Gordon Price said it was a long battle before Vancouver city council ruled out a planned freeway expansion into downtown in 1972.
“It took five years before it ever happened in Vancouver,” he said. “It may take that long again. But it can be done.”
UBC transportation professor Dr. Lawrence Frank took issue with Falcon’s claims of air pollution and climate change benefits from relieving congestion.
“There aren’t many nations in the world that will say their contribution to Kyoto is through expanding their highway system,” he said.
Frank said it’s “useless” to suggest sprawl can simply be controlled through regulation.
“The only growth management tool we currently have is congestion,” he said. “It’s the only thing that stops outward growth at this point, except the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is precarious.”
Delta Coun. Vicki Huntington took aim at the environmental assessment process, charging Deltaport’s plans have been divided into smaller parts and kept separate from the South Fraser Perimeter Road to avoid scrutiny of cumulative impacts.