Dear editor,
This evening I went to buy a few things at the local Safeway store in Courtenay and, as I always do when I pick up milk, I compared the price of the store’s brand (four litres of two per cent for $4.69) with the brand produced here on Vancouver Island (Island Farms, four litres of two per cent at $5.67).
I am a big believer in reducing my carbon footprint by purchasing things that are locally produced so that there will be less fuel burned to ship the product from where it is produced to where I can get it into my basket.
We don’t produce a lot of things here on the Island but when I find them available at a comparable price then I will definitely choose the local product over something shipped from a long distance.
So my big question is — why the devil is there such a huge cost difference on this one product?
There is absolutely no way that I am going to spend an extra dollar unless I have a clear explanation for why that is being charged. I have heard that there is a milk product price regulations committee of some sort. Is that so?
Can you have one of your investigative reporters check this out and let everybody know. If there is and they are making some crazy regulation to inflate the price of local products so that they cannot compete then we need to know that so that we can get them replaced with folks with a bit of intelligence.
While your keen investigative reporter is at it, please have him (or her) check into why we over here in forgotten land are still paying over $14 per gigajoule for natural gas while over on the mainland it is about one quarter of that.
I read some time ago that the folks down in Victoria, the ones who used to be in the legislature before the governing party decided not to do any more work before the election, were planning to standardize the cost of natural gas in B.C.
Since there is no longer an opportunity for our loyal opposition to ask questions in the legislature, it appears that the only way to shake things up is for letters to be sent to the editors and for the news media to carry the questions and stir some energy under the MLA folks who should be doing something for all the salary they are getting from our tax dollars.
Why do we pay them, by the way, if they are not sitting in the legislature?
Gosh I will be glad when we can remove the people that were elected a few years ago.
David Netterville,
Area C