Editor:
John Hansen’s letter of July 19 questioning Sechelt’s support for West Coast Environmental Law’s province-wide campaign to launch a class action to Sue Big Oil raises some legitimate concerns but there are straight forward answers to his questions.
With the initial Sechelt contribution to the campaign at about $12,000, Hansen wonders how much legal time that buys, but he misses the central strategy of the class action, which is to amass a large number of municipal governments from all across B.C. to pool their financial resources to achieve significant cost efficiencies. If governments representing say 1.5 million people join together in the action, $1.5 million dollars buys a lot of legal time.
West Coast Environmental Law is the initial organizer of the class action but it is the participating municipalities that will make the decision as to which legal firm conducts the class action. There will be no NGOs involved.
Once the class action is certified, there will be additional costs, but they will be shared by all participating municipalities. Once certified, it is expected that municipalities who had not previously joined the class action will also join, thereby spreading the financial costs across an even larger population base.
There is no mystery as to the intended “end game” of the class action suit: it is to legally force substantial financial compensation to be paid by Big Oil to the participating municipal governments in order to relieve their municipal taxpayers from having to pay the entire costs of mitigating petroleum-fueled climate change alone!
For over four decades Big Oil has been raking in trillions of dollars in profit while they knew the climate damage their products were causing. It’s time for Big Oil to pay their fair share!
Jef Keighley, Garden Bay
