Re: “Spirit of goodwill needed on Peninsula” and “Questionable facts,” PNR Jan. 16.
Barbara Nedzelski is right. We need more goodwill and less angry, scornful rhetoric as in John Upward and Nancy Eaton’s letter, “the coming generation will be shaking up the status quo,” and by the majority at North Saanich council meetings. Barbara calls for careful planning which is what we do not have in North Saanich, as witness the current high density housing debacle.
Her call for more families to move to here highlights the planning issue and the risks involved. When a great number of people move a rural idyll, they may actually destroy the paradise they seek. That’s why small island nations with benign climates and lifestyles, such as Bermuda and the U.K. Channel Islands severely restrict the number of incomers.
More people in North Saanich will mean planning for more employment, more electrical consumption, more roads, parking, police, doctors, emergency services, hospitals, public transport, drainage, water supply, sewers, and so on. None of this gets thought through and already the population forecasts for the CRD are alarming. I don’t think I’d want to be here in 50 years’ time.
The poet Philip Larkin wrote:
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
in galleries; but all that remains
for us will be concrete and tyres.
That could be the Peninsula; so if the status quo means preserving something that is livable and sustainable, then we are for the status quo.
David and Jane Olsen
North Saanich