The Editor,
Re. "Enbridge VP makes pitch" (The Tri-City News, Nov. 23).
It was quite a disappointment to see that Tom Fletcher was given the task of interviewing Janet Holder, a vice-president at Enbridge. Given Mr. Fletcher's penchant for, in his BC Views columns, attacking and dismissing scientists and environmentalists who, through scientific fact, would oppose projects such as the Enbridge pipeline, would it not have been a more effective and legitimate interview if a journalist with an objective view had been given the project?
Instead, with Mr. Fletcher conducting the interview, what the reader got was a soft, predictable and quite transparent public relations stunt with questions that could have been just as easily supplied by Enbridge, lobbed to Ms. Holder by a close friend of the project who hides behind so-called journalist credentials. Poor, poor misunderstood Enbridge!
Mr. Fletcher is no friend of the environment or environmental science. In many of his columns, whether it be issues regarding this proposed pipeline or global warming or BC Hydro's smart meters, he shows an uncanny ability to dismiss scientific fact without documented scientific knowledge or expertise. At the same time, however, as proven consistently in his columns, Mr. Fletcher shows himself to be a close friend of big business and their bottom line, and would not miss an opportunity to promote, defend and apologize for either at any cost.
Surely, both the truth and the reader would have been served much more respectfully had this interview been done by a journalist with an arm's length relationship to the issue.
Thomas Howard, Coquitlam
