A major Seattle newspaper is calling for a tourism boycott in Victoria, B.C. until the capital city stops pumping untreated sewage into the ocean.
According to a recent editorial in The Seattle Times, Victoria needs to overcome its “constipated political process” and install a long-overdue treatment facility to deal with the 79 million litres of raw sewage the city and its suburbs produce daily.
“The San Juan Islands, after all, are too close for comfort to those outfall pipes that treat the Puget Sound like a toilet bowl,” it reads.
The paper’s editorial board recommends a boycott similar to the one organized in 1993 if the B.C. government doesn’t make good on a promise it made nearly a decade ago to clean up the waterways.
Seattle Times columnist Jonathan Martin said the stomach-turning sewage controversy – which even inspired its own mascot, Mr. Floatie – resonates with people south of the border.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of interest in an immediate tourism boycott. What there is is some frustration,” Martin told CTV News.
B.C.’s Ministry of Environment said there’s no question Victoria needs to treat its sewage, but solving the problem isn’t the province’s responsibility.
“We have said all along this is a local government issue and we expect the parties involved to work together,” the ministry said in an email.
The province said it has no plans to intervene in the issue.
Despite Victoria’s previous failures to implement a sewage treatment plan, Mayor Lisa Helps, who was elected just last year, said progress is being made on the decades-old problem.
Helps has vowed to have a new plan in place by March 2016.
“This is the 21st century, there’s no excuse,” she said. “I really do look forward to hosting a retirement party for Mr. Floatie.”
With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Bhinder Sajan
