Dear Editor:
I would like to commend Peter Christensen for his well-expressed thoughts shared by many in our community regarding Patagonias interference with our economy. I would also like to commend Sweetgrass Productions on their visual masterpiece that made me drool with anticipation for one of the worlds finest lift-accessed spiritual experiences!
However, my main reason for writing is to respond to Steve Tersmettes letter headlined, Call for boycott rife with hypocrisy, which appeared in The Pioneer.
In it, Steve chastises a group that traveled to Europe the delegation of locals who visited Europe went there to look for active and positive participation in our economy; something that clearly needs a bit of a boost.
The fact that some of the ambassadors are well-connected to the provincial government is a misguided criticism. They went on their own dime and, unless you are taking your cues from Columbia River-Revelestoke MLA Norm MacDonald, acting in the best interest of our region and searching for good folks ready, willing and able to invest in our communities should be top priorities to people in and connected to government.
It is no secret that Wildsight, far too many Canadian organizations, and their American partners (Patagonia included) have designs to cut a sans-human swath directly up the gut of our region.
That swath runs directly through our living rooms, the place where we raise our kids, the place where we want them to be able to raise their kids and, most importantly, the place we all call home!
Never in history has there been a bigger push to drive us out of our mountain homes and herd us back into stacked-up human settlements in cities. There are far too many initiatives that mesh with this goal Y2Y being far and away the most predominant.
The first steps to achieving this goal is to slow or stop development and economic growth in areas like ours to force the aforementioned herding.
Ive been toldThe Pioneerhasfielded complaints from local groups and others about having a pro-development agenda.
Why else would anyone accuse a newspaper of being too pro-development other than to drive an agenda that does not favour development and economic progress?
In the end, the only thing rife with hypocrisy are people who demand a never-ending stream of public sector spending for health care, education, infrastructure, public safety, social programming, etc., while standing shoulder to shoulder with multi-million dollar American corporations, NGOs and other groups hell-bent on keeping a firm chokehold on private sector growth.
Time to connect the dots, folks. We can either support well-managed economic growth and welcome people who want to participate in our economy in a positive way, or we can team up with super keen American corporations who are vocally arrogant about meddling with our prosperity and who will stop at nothing to repel investors to stifle our growth.
You only get to check one box!
Dave McGrath
Invermere
