In his July 2 letter to your paper, David McCutcheon conflates two very distinct organizations – Save Our Saugeen Shores and the Southampton Residents Association – and somehow imagines the ordinary community people belonging to them are pursuing some secret, sinister interest when they oppose making this town a host for all Canada’s high-level radioactive waste.

What’s so sinister about trying to preserve this community as a delightful place to live, work and visit? Isn’t that what a tourism destination is supposed to be?

Mr. McCutcheon sees us ratepayers as “jurors” in a “democratic justice system” that will decide the nuclear waste issue. But it looks more like a kangaroo court when all the information comes from one powerful source with a clear interest in the final outcome. Would you trust the tobacco industry on the advisability of smoking, however many studies it cited?

And who really is the crooked butcher with his thumb on the information scale? We have two small grass-roots organizations facing off against a municipal government, two local weekly papers and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (with an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars), which is in turn a creation of a nuclear industry (with annual revenues in the billions of dollars). Who do you think has the heavier thumb?

Mr. McCutcheon seems to confuse normal democratic dissent with “vigilante-like activities”, hijacking the sacred DGR process, poisoning the community, and perhaps sins against everything good and decent. I begin to wonder whether David McCutcheon is a real person or some kind of Improvised Bombastic Device (IBD).

Whatever he is, he forgets that in a democratic society, citizens are more than bobblehead dolls whose only duty is to nod.

John Sifton

 

25 Olive Street

Port Elgin, Ontario

           and

629 Mansfield Avenue

Ottawa, Ontario