West Vancouver environmentalists won a victory Monday when their council opposed a liquefied natural gas plant proposed for Howe Sound.
Even Mayor Michael Smith, who once suggested district residents would be commuting by canoe and lighting lamps with whale blubber if not for oil, came down against the facility.
Smith used to work for Exxon Mobil, the Texas energy giant that once painted a thousand miles of Alaskan coastline with 10 million gallons of oil.
The assurances of an impossibly small chance of a mishap must have sounded eerily familiar to Smith, who vowed not to put Howe Sound at risk.
We applaud the mayor and council, but now for the real problem: West Vancouver doesn't have the power to stop an LNG plant.
That decision will largely reside with the federal government, which has consistently downgraded environmental protection and muzzled scientists.
West Vancouver's call for the banning of LNG tankers in Howe Sound elicited an unprecedented rebuke from Conservative MP John Weston, perhaps because a $1.6 billion LNG plant isn't about stirring the economy in Squamish - it's about massive trade between Canada and Asia.
Council chambers were raucous on Monday, even by West Van standards. Coun. Nora Gambioli's comments that senior governments need to let go of their "Neanderthal economy visions," was met with vigorous applause.
If we were to judge from that crowd, we'd guess the district is dominated by staunch environmentalists.
If that's the case, why do they keep voting for Conservatives?
