Dear Editor:
Re: Whose rights and health deserve protection, editorial, The Record, July 20.
Where there's smoke there's ire, all right. If these folks want us to even stop smoking in our own yards, pleading that they wish to safeguard their children's health, perhaps they should investigate how much airborne poison the production of the styrofoam blocks used on our highway infrastructure improvements created.
One hundred and fourteen tonnes a year were added to our air by just one company, adding to the existing 108,000 tonnes already being emitted by industry in the Lower Mainland.
My family tried to draw attention to this issue (The Province, July 20, 2010, page A14, Money section), and no one seemed to care about air quality.
My family lives next to a major thoroughfare in New West, and more traffic is coming over the bridges on either side of our home every day.
We cannot open our child's bedroom window because of the exhaust fumes and particulates that the diesel 18-wheelers, vanity sports cars and monster toy trucks are emitting 30 feet from his bed.
As well, now there is talk of scrapping AirCare. At the rate our car-mad culture is growing, it looks like not too many people care about air quality.
Our Conservative government is grovelling to big oil, backing off environmental commitments and recently pushed through such a mass of regulatory changes that none of us looked, or understood half of it, if we did.
Water now retails for more than gasoline by the litre and comes in a plastic bottle.
Our bosses are gutting my children's future, and no one seems to really care about our environment as long as they have a nice home, a collection of automobiles and a leaf blower.
Despite all this, stopping us from using legal, heavily taxed and regulated tobacco is the big concern? If I smoked for a week, I couldn't raise a cloud that would match that of the average truck driving one block.
Why pick on a neighbour, a friend, a relative or a stranger with an addiction? Why don't these non-smoking advocates fight the real fight with the big polluters?
Of course, the smoker is the easier target, aren't they? After all, unlike the big polluters, we are out and exposed in the open, on the edge of the sidewalk, shunned and ashamed, where you can all look down on us, right where you've forced us.
Dave Nicholson, New Westminster
