-Will Thomas photo
Letter To Rogers Cable From A Hornby Island Resident
Brian Gregg
SitePath Consulting
[for Rogers Cable]
Jan. 13, 2023
Dear Mr. Gregg:
As a 23-year resident of Hornby Island, I am writing once again to strongly object to your current client’s plan to impose of a forest-topping RF/microwave/millimeter transmission tower on an island community who rejected a similar proposal put forward by your lobbying firm five years ago. What’s changed since then is the buried fibre optic network we voted for instead. That project will break ground here shortly.
In disturbing contrast, the nearly 300-foot-high industrial structure proposed by Rogers would permanently blight the rural values that brought us to settle here, and which continue to delight and refresh countless wild and human lives.
In the Islands Trust “MODEL STRATEGY FOR ANTENNA SYSTEMS” (passed on May 3, 2018), Section C: “Discouraged Locations” stipulates that cell tower sites which “adversely impact view corridors” or “affect the scenic qualities of a corridor” are forbidden. These scenic views encompass our entire island, which is largely dependent on revenues from tourists seeking Hornby’s natural attractions.
Unfortunately, corporate predators are also drawn here. Though for more cynically venal motives. Yesterday’s resistance meeting took particular offence at Rogers’ attempts to usurp a site intended for desperately needed affordable housing. Kindly explain to those awaiting accommodation why Rogers wants to deny them a place to live.
We do not appreciate any corporation seeking to cash in on our community at our lingering expense. Our future will not be decided in distant boardrooms by profit-blinded executives dismissive of the harm inflicted by their policies and technologies on those they will never meet.
Hornby Island is not a city. We refuse to be treated like a concrete metropolis by technocrats totally detached from our daily experience, which does not revolve around handheld screens. Current cell coverage from Texada and Qualicum towers is more than adequate. And our emergency services have been coordinated via a fire department radio mast for years.
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Our Model Strategy further stipulates that for a tower exceeding 15 meters in height, a “public information meeting” is required.
Instead, ongoing efforts by Rogers and SitePath to undermine our community process confirm that neither entity can be trusted. Continue insulting this community by ignoring our regulations and refusing to meet with us, and even residents in favour of that Trojan tower will turn hard against Rogers.
I suggest that attempting to circumvent our community’s priorities and protocols is ill-advised. As Trust Regional Planning Manager, Kauer noted for the record on September 9, 2022: “The Model Strategy federally compels companies to engage in extensive public consultation before installation of cell towers.”
Underline, federal.
On an island with streaming-internet challenges and lack of personal computers, Rogers’ “gift” of a single Zoom linkup so exclusionary our own local trust representative was unable to log on — and whiney emails casting yourself as the shocked victim of comments your strategy incited here last time around — hardly qualify as “extensive public consultation.” Or bizarrely hyped fears for your life.
That's not how we roll.
Talk about bad faith! Regarding our site model’s required “visual renderings of the proposed antenna system,” the only illustration I’ve seen relating to the Rogers proposal is a satellite photo overlaid by the standard tower height formula for calculating its radius of wireless radiation. The resulting 1,500 foot danger zone for prolonged, low-level EMF and microwave exposure covers our recycling centre, ballpark, gravel yard, new firehall, community hall, clinic, dental bus, elementary school, credit union and library.
No thanks.
Chronic illness and general malaise, forced dislocation of wildlife and human residents, disgusted tourists, EMF-withered flora, and a forest fire sparked on a tinder-dry, steep-sloping summer mountainside by an adjacent blazing Rogers cell tower (exemplified in many clips online) — are potentially too catastrophic for us to risk.
Why should we when the serenity and security of our persons is protected by our Charter Rights and Canada’s Criminal Code? (See the section prohibiting “coercion” and “assault”.)
Thing is, Swiss Re’s “Emerging Risk” profile lists electromagnetic fields as the top casualty risk due to “unforeseen consequences” beyond 10 years. Shorter term, the 5G transmitters sprouting from Rogers’ power lines and 4G towers are considered high risk within 3 years.
Given that re-insurers like Swiss Re are refusing to indemnify other insurers for losses incurred by involuntary wireless radiation exposures, please detail Rogers’ insurance provisions for any lawsuits brought by island residents suffering physical, mental, emotional or financial distress from Rogers' threatened invasion, and/or their tower’s toxic emissions.
This list of compensations must cover damage to natural and human habitats (including fires sparked in our thickly treed neighbourhoods by malfunctioning small cells), the incalculable costs of all displaced birds, bees and other wild lives, as well as any uprooted longtime Hornby residents.
These concerns are not multiple-choice.
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Don’t even start on ISED’s corporate-facilitating procedural faults — sorry, defaults — intended to override our community plan and land use regulations. Quickly repeat 2,000-times:
Not.
Here.
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Similarly spare us any further “Safety Code 6” incantations. The corporate corruption of Health Canada is too well documented, and the safety code scam too widely exposed to get away with “we’re legal” bafflegab. Ignoring non-thermal effects is analogous to past “official” assertions that smoking is perfectly safe. As long as you don’t burn down the house.
Meanwhile, as companies like Rogers blanket Canadian cities with debilitating electrosmog, the nerve, tissue and DNA damage detailed in more than 3,000 health studies is completely ignored by Health Canada’s bogus 103-year-old guidelines. If Air Canada passengers were told their aerial journey was “protected” by “safety regulations” dating back to the Wright Brothers, nobody would board that jet.
But when Safety Code 6 was finally rubber-stamped “revised” in 2015, corporate lobbyists painstakingly disregarded the non-thermal effects of EMFs — voluminously documented since 1947.
Curiously, however, the industry-dictated code telcos love to cite warns that “electric and magnetic field exposures can induce internal electric fields (voltage gradients) within biological tissue.”
This is a no-no, Health Canada says, because studies have shown that wireless-induced internal electric fields “can result in spontaneous depolarization of the membrane and the generation of spurious action potentials” — at power densities these same studies show to be far below Canadian guidelines.
Indeed, overriding the human body’s subtle electro-chemical processes with jackhammering wireless signals is such a problem, the Code includes pages of diagrams and algebraic formulae depicting all the “averaging” and “filtering” needed to fit this “spurious” electrical interference within Health Canada’s own spurious guidelines.
As an award-winning investigative journalist, I’ve been reporting on EMFs since my book, Scorched Earth was published by New Society Publishers in 1991. So I understand that the code’s admitted “depolarization” of wireless-exposed cell membranes refers to artificially induced rapid reversals of the natural magnetic field that regulate trillions of individual cells.
I've yet to meet an “electrical engineer” who does.
Every gigahertz hurts. Continuously bend DNA’s double helix back-and-forth billions of times every second — and it’s bound to snap. As Lai and others have shown, the human body cannot repair the double-strand breaks that cause the most electromagnetic mayhem.
But what do we hear?
“Based on current scientific data, we have concluded that you will not experience adverse health effects from exposure to radiofrequency EMFs at the levels permitted by Safety Code 6,” Health Canada insists. “This includes exposure from equipment that uses 5G technology.”
Seeking legal cover by referencing blatant fraud is probably not a good idea. Especially when both statements are outrageous lies. The first assertion is contradicted by those stacks of previously mentioned studies. Citing “current scientific data” relating to 5G is even more egregious, since — according to recent US Senate testimony by a telco official — no studies have been done on 5G safety.
Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
If 4G and 5G frequencies are so safe, why do telcos like Rogers refuse to hear our health concerns?
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What’s the rush? Is Rogers worried that city councils in Belgium, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Wales, Britain, New Zealand, Slovenia, Switzerland, the USA and Canada are placing moratoriums and outright bans on the 5G transmitters that invariably piggybacks on fibre installations like dogs in heat?
In reining in this powerful, untested tech, elected officials cite the Precautionary Principle. This saner “default” requires purveyors of potentially harmful technology to demonstrate its safety before rolling it out.
So