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M6 Terrace Review — Wednesday, January 23, 1991

Ships in the night

HE IDEA OF BUILDING A MAJOR DEEP SEA PORT

7 ; expansion at Kitimat, along with all the roads,

railheads, dredging, filling and port paraphernalia, is
a puzzling suggestion. oT

Not having access (o the curiously well-hidden Sandwell
feasibility studies for this inspiration, we can be forgiven for _
questioning the wisdom of spending what will inevitably be
tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in public money to
duplicate something that already exists — and is not causing a
great deal of market excitement by being there — 150 short
kilomeires to the west in Prince Rupert.

The idea, apparently a bolt out of the blue that struck our
MLA Dave Parker, was announced in June of last year by a
committee of local officials that sprang, like Athena out of the
forehead of Zeus, fully armed and ready to dock, At the same
press conference Kitimat mayor Rick Wozney passed out
another announcement just as everyone was getting up to
leave, a bulletin that someone had decided Kitimat would be a
good place for a copper smelter. That was around the same
time the provincial government told Prince Rupert a group of
mentally deranged Chinese billionaires were giving thought to
building a steel mill in their city, a place thousands of miles
from the nearest source of iron ore where they would have to
quarry downwards through hundreds of feet of solid granite to
establish a blast furnace. The summer of 1990 was a season of
fantasies. The government kicked in $25,000 for the steel mill
"nre-feasibility” study, $50,000 for the same sort of study
involving the copper smelter, and $400,000 on the port
development research. .

PRM is selling the copper smelter, at least the potential
viability of it, well, and the port concept is still alive, but we
have to wonder what it’s living on. It is the same sort of bulk
commodity port that Prince Rupert has at Fairview, and that
terminal is currently working at 40 percent of its design =
capacity. The seafaring city has built up a social matrix of
longshoremen, stevedores.and other dock-hand sorts over. its

history, most.of whom are experiencing a hungry winter.

- Shipments of lumber are in decline, and they’re going to

continue that way no matter what happens to the markets.

- There is no indication that any major base metal mines are
going to develop in the foreseeable future within the northwest
port trading area except Mount Milligan. That mine will ship
through Prince George, being handily proximate to the recently
revived Dease Lake extension of the B.C. Rail line, a revival
that Parker himself had a hand in when the Sustut-Takla was
awarded to Prince George. From there its a toss-up whether the

material is shipped through Vancouver or the north coast.
Parker himself said last week he expects the Kitimat port, if
it comes into existence, to siphon off about 20 percent of
Fairview’s current traffic in forest products and bulk mineral
concentrates. Unless there are some extraordinary surprises in
the port feasibility study, we can expect two major ports in an
isolated area, located within hailing distance of one another,

operating on a total business foundation that can’t keep one of ©

them occupied half the time.

The committee is also playing a somewhat rigged game of
poker with the CNR, in which the railway is holding all the
aces. There is no incentive for them to improve the Kitimat
dine, particularly in view of the money they’ve already spent

upgrading the line to Rupert to handle fast-moving heavy
commodity traffic —- going to Prince Rupert.
The only benefits that emerge out of examining this
confusing scenario are that it would help push the copper
smelter into existerice and it would put the Terrace airport, a

part of the corridor plan, under local control, If that’s the case, ’.

let’s just build PRM a dock, ask the feds for the airport, and
save the taxpayers of this province, including the ones that live
in Terrace, Kitimat and the rest of the region, several million
dollars. The building of the whole concept as being promoted
by Parker and the port committee would create many
temporary jobs, but when it was all over it appears doubtful
that even Kitimat would get much out of it relative to the cost,
and Prince Rupert would definitely be damaged.

In terms of the region — and that’s the way we should be
thinking — what we know of the port development concept

makes little sense. The northwest has to function as a region if -

it is to have any economic and political clout. Its component —
communities are too small to prosper in isolation, never mind -
when they are set against one another.

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- VICTORIA — The commence- -

ment of war in the Persian
Gulf must pre-empt discussion

in this corner this week of what

seems at this moment to be
wholly petty and inconsequen-
tial provincial politics.

Surely no one could concen-
trate just now on anything
other than what global politics
has wrought in that corner of
this planet of ours.

And surely no journalist, no
person, could do anything but
marvel at the exceptional vision
of war on televisionf — up
close and personal, thanks
primarily to the coverage pro-
vided by international TV net-
work CNN.

The amazing courage and
determination of CNN war cor-
respondents John Holliman,
Peter Arnet and Bernard Slade,
broadcasting from a ninth-floor
hotel room in blacked-out

Baghdad last Wednesday night/

Thursday morning, as the
bombs fell about them, was un-
paralleled in modern times.

They regularly referred to the
‘“‘miracle’’ of the fact that the
transmission line stayed open
so long (16 hours until 8 a.m.
PST), and who could argue
with that description? |

Around the world, we were
glued to our TV sets ‘“‘watch-
ing’? what usually would be
considered poor TV — static
photos of maps and the
reporters, over top of their
basic radio reports of the war’s
first assault.

Even when the network
broke to carry live trans-
missions with moving people,
from Washington or London
or Amman, Jordan, or
Jerusalern, we found ourselves

The view from
Victoria —

by John Pifer

tillery) reached out*in vain to-
ward the jets carrying them.

Twenty-four hours later,
CNN correspondent Larry
Register in Jerusalem brought.
the world the first reports and
pictures of the Arabs’ missile
attack on Israel, and we were
again plunged into an emo-
tional cauldron of fear and ap-
prehension.

willing-CNN- to ‘get back to
John, Peter and Bernie, so we
could learn how they were far-
ing.

Those three men gave view-
ers a true sense of the fear, the
excitement, and the confusion
which surged through the Iraqi
capital as the night skies lit
from hundred of bombs zero-
ing in on their (hopefully)
military targets, and as the

Triple-As (anti-aircraft ar- _--— continued on page A7

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