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Where is MLA Bennett on Chinese Communist state coal mines in B.C.?
Letter to the Editor
In 2006 Bill Bennett, as Minister of State for Mines, welcomed the arrival of Canadian Dehau in B.C. with a warm letter to Dehau chaiman, Liu Naishun on its Gething project near Hudson Hope. HD Mining is described on Dehau’s website (www.dehau.ca) as a co-partnership company.
Since 2006, Mr. Bennett has been the head of three other ministries and currently holds a fourth as Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development.
Dehau and HD are private B.C. companies. They are owned, financed and controlled by the Chinese Communist state. These are not ordinary, private investors. Despite all the glowing media from China about the financial rise of middle and upper classes, the Communist state is a corrupt, oppressive totalitarian dictatorship. It runs extensive gulags and black (i.e., unofficial) prisons. Dissent is crushed and a letter like this would send the writer to the gulag for 10 or more years. China is investing around the world in resources. Angola, Kenya, South Sudan, Brazil and Iraq are a few examples.
It seems since 2006, B.C. has also become a Third World country that needs Chinese state investment. Private investment is one thing. Allowing the Chinese totalitarian state into our province is quite another.
The Coal Act states rights for an annual licence to explore for coal or a lease of up to 30 years to mine coal must be granted by the Cabinet minister responsible for that act.
Dehau and HD own six coal mining areas in north eastern B.C. Dehau reports it bought the coal licences of its Bullmoose project from Kennecott, a U.S. mining company. There is no public report of how the rights to mine coal in their remaining five areas were acquired. Were they all granted by the Liberal government under the Coal Act? The ironically named Freedom of Information Act does not allow us access to cabinet and ministerial decisions.
Will Mr. Bennett, who has sat in Cabinet on and off since 2006, tell us how the rights to these five areas were granted? Does he still support access to B.C. coal by the Chinese dictatorship?
Gary MacDonald,
Cranbrook
