This I would love to see...
but...
I think this is just so much more hot air floating about...

So true BCR. Just let them try and shut down the pulpmills and Husky , then the BCR industrial site. Ms. Polak says the objectives will be enforced??? Maybe she will get all the local politicians to run outside aand suck up the foul air they spew around in this silly season.

Precisely!! How is she going to enforce them? She has to either control the weather or the sources that are spewing out the pollution.

She will have more success removing the measuring devices.

Speaking of which, she will have to first add a few more.

It is election time - clean the air of the Liberals and the polutants will also leave.

And so will the money from your pocket when the NDP hikes taxes to please unions :)

Never going to happen.
We are supposed to actually believe they will go after corporate polluters?
No way...not THIS government.
Must be an election coming!

It does not matter whether it is BCL or NDP, neither are going to after corporate polluters. NDP didn't when they were in power and neither have BCL. Greens??? Maybe.

It is just not real enough. Going after an individual smoker is one thing. Going after communal chit going up the stacks is another.

I thought that pollution is a problem that concerns ALL of us and that pollution does not respect any partisan party lines!

Alas, woodwoman posted that a change in government would eliminate pollution, which of course makes pollution a political partisan problem.

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Now. Back to the topic. Pollution standards are now being made tougher and that is a good thing. So is enforcement.
Anybody objects to that?

As new technology comes along tougher standards call for improved pollution control equipment. When they become law the bean counters of industry have an incentive to justify to management the expenditure of money on the purchase and installation of such new technology because it is now mandatory.

Additionally, the city has to find some other stuff to put on our roads during the winter and refrain from dumping river loam and top soil mixed with gravel on the streets. That will do wonders to eliminate some of the nasty fine particulates and meet the new tougher standards.

That better less polluting material will undoubtedly cost more money than what is being used now, so our taxes will for sure go up.

That's fine with me if it helps cure some of the city/traffic made pollution issues.

Man arrested for sweeping Sidewalk, to much dust in the Air?

No, you'll be ticketed for breathing it when they tell you not to.

I hear that Outwest...just like all the fireplaces that continue to spew stuff..
Pretty hard to monitor it all, but you would think there would be a polution hot line.....and someone with some intestinal fortitude to get out there and do something....even write a ticket...even if they did that wrong...they would have at least tried something.....

"Pollution standards are now being made tougher and that is a good thing. So is enforcement."

Boy, did someone ever pull the wool over your eyes Diplomat.

The "new era" of understanding of what needs to be done with respect to reduce air pollution started some time ago. I use 10 years as an approximation of that, and I am being generous with that. We could even use the start of PACHA as another milestone.

Whichever of the two you use, the new pellet plant happened since then. It is laying nice and low these days, not letting out the slightest bit of a squeak because they know they got away with something they should not have.

The are, ot the best of my knowledge, the single largest polluter in the BCR industrial area. The do not have best available control technology because they cannot afford it. They will never have best available control technology unless someone subsidizes them. The money is simply not there.

City buses. Try following one around these days for 30 minutes or so. Estimate how much dust (although not as harmful as carbon based particulates) they put into the air as they dirve around the streets that are still not cleaned at the curbs. The dust often enough hangs around for 30 to 60 seconds after the bus has passed. That's the visible part.

Who's at fault? The City of Prince George! Why? For the same reason that the pellet plant has not put in BACT ...... it costs too much.

As long as making a major impact with respect to air pollution "costs too much", this will go on.

These are the same people that talk about sustainability. We are supposed to buy expensive light bulbs, expensive furnaces, upgrade our 30 year old windows, etc. because of the payback. Yet, we do not factor in health costs and living without wheezing in our old age when dealing with air pollution.

What is wrong with this picture???????

Well, can't argue with anything you are stating!

"Prince George- Minister of Healthy Living and Sport, Mary Polak says the new air quality objectives will be enforced in the province."

Of course, if the new laws (requirements) are going to be enforced with the same dedication as the helmet law for bicycle riders (few wear them, nobody is ticketed) then everybody is going to thumb their noses at the law! Including the City.

Still, we have to wait and see if the new stricter environmental rules will be enforced or not.

Ideally, they will be.

WE NEED CLEAN AIR, but WE ALSO NEED JOBS.

Ideally, if you encounter air that does not meet the quality standards, you would call a hotline and report it. At that point in time, a containment officer would respond with breathing apparatus and bag up the non-compliant air, in order to take it out of town and dump it.

Come on people, get your heads out of the fine particulate clouds. All anybody can do at this late date is to try not to make it any worse.

If you all quit drinking beer and eating spicy foods, the air quality would improve substantially.

"Come on people, get your heads out of the fine particulate clouds. All anybody can do at this late date is to try not to make it any worse"

I refuse to believe that. There ARE things that industry, the City and average people can do to make a meaningful contribution to rectifying the problem. A great starting point would be an HONEST effort to try . . .

"WE NEED CLEAN AIR, but WE ALSO NEED JOBS.

And the obvious thing is??????

Just as most other improvements in lifestyles, those improvements have, at least initially, been job intensive.

So, how can ensuring clean air be a job intensive exercise?

1. quality control - technical and enforcement jobs

2. control technology - building mechanical and electronic systems compontents (and therein lies the rub - that electro/mechanical machinery is typically not developed in Canada nor manufactured here. This is where Canada is continuing to NOT make many inroads. There are a few good examples, but most are bad)

So, doesn't this make the products more expensive? Yup. And if we do not do that then the difference between what we accuse China of doing and what we do is what exactly?

Not much, is it? So we are talking out of both sides of our mouths, aren't we?

Of course, we can wait till the rest of the world will require us to ensure that we are producing this stuff to some standard of quality which includes health impacts on the local population. That is what has happened in the pulp and paper as well as lumber industry. If one does not have a "green stamp", then the product will not be bought.

So, can we now see one of the other probable reasons why industry doe not want the finger pointed atr them? The minute that it is, and the information gets out, their clients may put more pressure on them than the locals and the governments.

As long as the thing looks ambivalent, they are safe. So, that is why the industry is trying to ensure confusion and that may be the reason why the industry wants closed door sessions.

"All anybody can do at this late date is to try not to make it any worse."

It's a good thing engineers did not have that defeatist attitude when they set out to clean up exhaust emissions from cars and trucks.

A ten year old vehicle emits several times more emissions than a 2009.

"WE NEED CLEAN AIR, but WE ALSO NEED JOBS."

Keeping that in mind may the earnest cleanup begin.

Things have improved greatly in my 33 Years here, it used to be so bad some days you hardly could look across the street and the smell was terrible too. I think our Protests made them clean up , not perfect yet. So lets not worry about a few Wood Stoves and Fireplaces, in time they will be replaced. Big Flakes of Snow are falling and it is cold, I may light a fire in my Wood Stove! Happy Easter

With that train of thought

We need clean streets, but we also need jobs. hmmmmmm .... streetsweepers wanted?

We need rotten and fallen down fences backing onto public streets fixed, but we also need jobs. hmmmmmm ... labourers handy with saws and hammers wanted?

We need "no man's land" between those fences and sidewalks cleaned up and mowed once a month, but we also need jobs. hmmmmmmm .... how did that work again?

We need (you fill in the blank), but we also need jobs ..... hmmmmm .... doe we get it yet?

Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance .... evetnually, if not already, primary and secondary jobs will be almost automated, the same as farming, and maintenance will be the dominant job category. In fact, in most areas, it already is.

The neat thing about maintenance? A very high precentage of the jobs are local -city, province, country.

So, back to clean air .... maintenance ... we maintain the air clean just as we maintain our cars running.

I know, a bit of a stretch for people used to a throw away society. Also a bit of a stretch for some people to realize that the economy these days is dominated by the service industry which relies on maintenance as the product that it is offering.

If it were not for the drive by some poeple to maintain things, our economy would be in the dump.

Are they driving around in carbon belching SUVs to do their enforcing?

Talk, talk, talk. I want to SEE it.

I want to go downtown on any day of the year with friends from outside Prince George and hear them rave about how nice the air is there, compared to other cities.

Prove me wrong, dead wrong. I can take it.

Don't TELL me, SHOW me.

I was talking about JOBS you can pay your rent with. The low end JOBS Gus is talking about, our goverment is bringing people in from other countries to fill these jobs and paying businesses to hire them, look around this not hot air.

Wondering if this will also include the pulpmills?