Eight different social and environmental activist groups have sent an open letter to the Prime Minister to try and block the bridge to replace the Massey tunnel from federal funding.

Peter McCartney, with the Wilderness Committee, says the bridge doesn’t meet Justin Trudeau’s agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Massey bridge is not green in any sense of the word. By our calculation it will add about seven megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 50 years from all the cars that are added because of this bridge. We shouldn’t make the same mistake that they made in the United States where all of there economic stimulus money went to highways we should be building for the future… If they wanted people to be riding transit they would put rapid buses down highway 99.”

Instead, McCartney says the bridge proposal flies in the face of decades of regional planning in Metro Vancouver that have called for transit oriented development.

“If they wanted people to be riding transit they would put rapid buses down Highway 99. I don’t buy that for a second. All it will do is push traffic to the Oak street bridge.”

Earlier this month, the province put the Massey replacement on its “wish list” of green infrastructure projects to send to Ottawa, after First Ministers reached a tentative climate deal in Vancouver.

The eight groups are now echoing calls from Metro Vancouver and Richmond Council for a federal environmental review of the project.
McCartney says Trudeau should deny the province, and instead put its billions of dollars of promised infrastructure money into Metro transit projects.

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Photo: Rendering of Massey Bridge proposal (BC Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure)